Evento
QUINTA 11 NOVEMBRO, 19H30
The Vijay Iyer Trio
Vijay Iyer piano
Linda May Han Oh contrabaixo
Tyshawn Sorey bateria
Guimarães Jazz 2021’s inaugural concert is a
paradigmatic example of how the multicultural expression, based on the
intersection of many different cultural and musical legacies, has become, for
many orders of reasons that go far beyond it’s purely artistic dimension, the
main trend in contemporary culture. In the specific case of jazz, we may say
that it was, in many senses, one of the modern precursors of a new musical
landscape inhabited by mixed-race forms and complex nucleus of memory
universalized by the formal frame of this musical genre, which itself was built
upon the assimilation and fusion of foreign sounds. In Vijay Iyer’s new trio,
formed also by Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, two excellent musicians from
the New York jazz scene, the cultural elements intersect in order to create to
a polyrhythmic and polyharmonic music that aims to synthetize the forces of
order in chaos involved in the tumultuous process of giving birth to a new
hybrid world.
North-American pianist of
Indian descent Vijay Iyer (b. 1971, USA) is an example of the demands faced by
any musician in the twenty-first century. Although he had classical training in
violin when he was a child, Iyer is essentially a self-taught musician with an
academic curriculum including studies in math, physics, musical cognition and,
finally, composition and improvisation. Once he made the decision of being a
professional musician, he has been building up a remarkable body of work as
composer, improviser and collaborator of important jazz musicians such as
Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman and, more recently, Wadada Leo Smith. Vijay
Iyer’s career is marked by two central artistic partnerships: with saxophonist
Rudresh Mahanthappa and, outside of jazz’s boundaries, with hip-hop producer
and poet Mike Ladd. More recently, Iyer has composed music for films, concerts
and dance and has been working extensively in several bands, namely in trio, in
duo with Wadada Leo Smith and in sextet. An eclectic and brainy musician, Vijay
Iyer already possesses a body of work that, in its several artistic dimensions
and intentions, can be considered one of the most relevant in modern jazz.
Vijay Iyer’s most recent
project is precisely this new trio in which the pianist is accompanied by
Malayan bassist Linda May Han Oh and by North-American drummer Tyshawn Sorey,
who recorded the album “Uneasy”, released in 2021 by reputed jazz label ECM. In
his second work in the format of a trio, Iyer gathers several originals
composed during the course of twenty years, plus two reinterpretations of Cole
Porter and Geri Allen’s compositions, and transfigures them through the sound
created by two musicians who, besides orbiting very similar musical universes,
share a common purpose of dissolving the formal frontiers in music and to
explore wide spectra of meanings. As the album title indicates, this trio’s
music sound disquiet and turbulent as the times haunting it, shaded by an
atmosphere of implicit threat, but, nonetheless, its malign energies are
electrified by the regenerative possibility contained it the act of creation of
the new.