Vijay Iyer | music clip of the day

Tag: Vijay Iyer

Wednesday, 6/30/10

The other night, after falling asleep, my older son Alex (now 22) had an unexpected visitor—this guy showed up and began to play.

Vijay Iyer Trio (VI, piano; Marcus Gilmore, drums; Stephan Crump, bass)

“Galang,” recording session (Historicity), New York (Systems Two Studios), 2009

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“Questions of Agency,” live, New York (The Stone), 2007

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Playing and Talking about Historicity, 2009

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lagniappe

Presto! Here is the great new jazz piano trio.

—Ben Ratliff, New York Times (9/9/09)

Trying to capture jazz in standard notation can be like trying to translate poetry into another language—what you wind up with is everything but the poetry. So composer/trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith (who, like many of his peers, eschews “jazz” as a label for his music) invented his own system of graphic notation.

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Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet) with his Golden Quartet (Vijay Iyer [piano], John Lindberg [bass], Ronald Shannon Jackson [drums]); Eclipse, 2005

Part 1

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Part 2

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Part 3

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Part 4

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Part 5

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Part 6

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Part 7

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Part 8

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lagniappe

art beat

Earlier this month, when I mentioned the exhibit of William Eggleston’s photographs that’s currently at the Art Institute—posting an album cover that you’ll find in a display case there—I didn’t expect that Big Star would appear here again before the month’s end. But then I didn’t expect that Alex Chilton would pass away, either. Alex had more than simply an artistic interest in Eggleston and his work. He’d known the photographer, who was a good friend of his parents, since he was a little boy. Here, again, is the image Alex chose for that album cover, followed by a couple more from this exhibit.