Pianist & composer Vijay Iyer came to town last week, specifically to SF Jazz, currently celebrating its 10th anniversary. He gave a solo piano concert on Thursday & performed with his Trio (Linda May Han Oh on double bass & Tyshawn Sorey on drums) on Friday, Saturday, & Sunday. I was at the Thursday & Friday concerts, & would happily have gone to Saturday & Sunday as well if life had allowed.
Iyer came out, elegantly attired in a black suit & open-collared black shirt, & didn't speak much either evening, preferring, as he noted, to let the music do the talking. For the solo performance it wasn't until about halfway through that he said anything, in a somewhat hesitant, slightly gravelly voice. (Both performances I heard were over 90 minutes, maybe even closer to the 2-hour mark, with no intermission.) I am fine with the lack of stage patter, as I always feel if you're a musician, the music is, as Iyer noted, your way of communicating, & listeners can take from it what they take. (My heart always sinks at the Symphony when conductors put down the baton & pick up the microphone.) He did, of course, on Friday introduce the other members of the Trio. He noted there was "merch in the lobby"; before the concert I bought all four CDs that were offered, & some of those around me, obviously hipper than I, had bought the vinyl being offered (he did note that Universal Music had lost about a 100 of his vinyl recordings, but some of them made it through). He also noted that the Trio (&, separately, both Han Oh & Sorey) had recordings coming out in the next few months; the Trio's is titled Compassion, which, as he noted, is something our society is sorely in need of, which led him to interject "Trans rights are human rights" & in the face of the frightening & cynical attempts by the Republican Party to demonize trans people, it was nice to hear that simple acknowledgement. Most of the tunes went unnamed & there was no play list that I saw, but one number he did name was Children of Flint; social awareness & consciousness are woven into this artist's work.
Iyer did also mention how glad he was that SF Jazz was around, & provided a space for "this music", & then added, "When I say 'this music' I don't know what I'm talking about . . . " he stopped there, but of course jazz has always had a fluid & undefinable element to it, & that's its essence; as with the river that is never the same twice, even another performance of the same tunes by the same artists will have a different sound & effect on different nights (another reason I was sorry I didn't get to hear the Trio more than once on this visit). Of course for most audience members the one performance they go to "becomes" the music, & the artist, in the sense of defining them, in a way that, at least temporarily, pauses the fluid, transitory nature of the art, & this is even truer of recordings, which, through repeated listening, can become engraved on our minds as something definitive.
The numbers often opened with a single, poetic piano line, which then developed into something alternately meditative, driven, coruscating . . . the sets, solo & Trio, never lagged; there was an astute sense of pacing, as the quieter, more reflective passages gave way to rowdier moments, often punctuated, in the Trio, by a sharp, even startling, drum thwack, as the bass danced up & down. . . . there were occasional projections during the music, random colored blobs & the occasional geometric shape wafting over stage & audience; I think this was not something that Iyer brought with him, as he looked at one & said, "What planet is that?" & someone shouted, whether authoritatively or speculatively I do not know, "It's a map of the brain", though perhaps Iyer's remark was metaphorical. . . . anyway: a wonderful two nights at the Jazz Center, & I will be on the lookout for Compassion, as well as compassion. . . .
