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Vijay Iyer Trio: Break Stuff

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: ECM Records
Released: 2015.02.10
Time:
 70:36
Category: Jazz, Progressive Jazz
Producer(s): Manfred Eicher
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.vijay-iyer.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2015
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Starlings (V.Iyer) - 3:53
[2] Chorale (V.Iyer) - 4:34
[3] Diptych (V.Iyer) - 6:48
[4] Hood (V.Iyer) - 6:10
[5] Work (T.Monk) - 6:15
[6] Taking Flight (V.Iyer) - 7:15
[7] Blood Count (B.Strayhorn) - 4:36
[8] Break Stuff (V.Iyer) - 5:27
[9] Mystery Woman (V.Iyer) - 6:21 *
[10] Geese (V.Iyer) - 6:39
[11] Countdown (J.Coltrane) - 5:57
[12] Wrens (V.Iyer) - 6:48

* - The track Mystery Woman is based on a rhythmic idea created by Rajna Swaminathan.

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Vijay Iyer - Piano, Liner Notes
Stephan Crump - Double Bass
Marcus Gilmore - Drums

Manfred Eicher - Producer
James A. Farber - Engineer
Akihiro Nishimura - Assistant Engineer
Juan Hitters - Cover Photos
Bart Babinski - Liner Photos
Sascha Kleis - Design

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


This album is dedicated to David Wessel, Amiri Baraka, and Y. Gopinathan.

Recorded in June 2014 at the Avatar Studios, New York.



A break in music is still music: a span of time in which to act. It’s the basis for breakdowns, breakbeats, and break dancing. On paper a break seems like next to nothing, but in practice it can be the moment when everything comes to life.

This trio has worked together for eleven years, and we’ve gathered the material on this album over the last three. As American musicians, we tend to make music out of breaks: building inside them, moving through them, looping them, embellishing, flexing and warping them. The expansive, ritualistic possibilities of the break are central to African diasporic music, which informs everything we do.

Many of these pieces resulted from a subtractive process, starting from the rhythm section breakdowns of larger ensemble works of mine. In this way, Open City, a recent project with novelist Teju Cole and nineteen other performers, gave rise to “Chorale” and the bird-themed sections; similarly, “Hood” started as the rhythm backbone of a sextet piece. In performance, these skeletal works revealed sonic, textural, and contrapuntal details that were new to us. It was just as Henry Threadgill once told us, regarding musical performance: “What you find there, you won’t find anywhere else.”

That’s how the feeling of this music arose – out of necessity, in process, and fully embodied, yet beyond any single intention; most of it “jes’ grew,” to invoke Ishmael Reed’s phrase. In other words, it’s the stuff that happened in the breaks.

Thank you to Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, and John Coltrane, who, each in his own way, broke new ground. And thank you for listening.

Vijay Iyer - Liner Notes



Though Break Stuff is Vijay Iyer's third appearance on ECM in less than year, it is the debut offering from the longstanding trio on the label. The pianist and composer has been working with bassist Stephen Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore for more than a decade. They've issued two previous recordings together. Iyer usually works conceptually, and Break Stuff is no exception. In the press release he states that "a break in music is still music: a span of time in which to act." We hear this all the time in modern music, whether it be the sounds that emerge from composer Morton Feldman's extended silences, breakbeats by funky drummers or hip-hop samples of them, or instrumental breakdowns in heavy metal and bluegrass - they follow a moment where everything previous seems to stop. The Iyer Trio illustrate their concept in a 71-minute program that works from a suite of the same title: three works named for birds were adapted from his multi-media collaboration with author Teju Cole on Open City (illustrating in performance the novel of the same name), three standards, and works that deliver directly on the premise, including the stellar "Hood," which was inspired by Detroit techno DJ Robert Hood. The head patterns are all single-note and chord pulses, fractioned by Gilmore's precise skittering beats, breaks, and martial fills, and accented, stretched, and fragmented again by Crump. Despite its staggered parts and shifting dynamics, it is quite organic. The reading of Thelonious Monk's "Work" commences straightforwardly, following head-solo-head formula, but moves toward the margins in both the pianist's and bassists's solos. The trio's interplay offers a very pointillistic illustration of the composer's coloristic and rhythmic invention. John Coltrane's "Countdown" is taken further afield. While it retains the composer's sense of energy and flow, the pianist breaks down and reassembles its melody and sections with funky snare drops, stop-and-start legato runs, and an exceptionally syncopated bassline. The tune remains utterly recognizable despite their liberties. While opener "Starlings" is the most consciously lyric of the bird pieces, and the band begins to open up into a decidedly internal sense of swing, "Geese," with its arco basslines, intermittently placed choirs, and brushed snares is almost wholly abstract until its lyric side comes into view little more than half-way through. Billy Strayhorn's "Blood Count" is performed as a piano solo and played with a lyricism, spaciousness, and taste that would make the composer smile. The title track opens briskly with fleet statements, yet gradually reveals an inherent lyricism via Crump's solo. Break Stuff is modern jazz on the bleeding edge, a music that not only asks musical questions but answers them, and it does so accessibly and immediately, no matter the form or concept it chooses to express. This trio aims at an interior center, finds it, and pushes out, projecting Iyer & Co.'s discoveries.

Thom Jurek - All Music Guide



When it comes to jazz/improvised music, there are those who, like pianist Keith Jarrett, prefer to approach it with a blank slate, clearing their minds of everything in order to find a way to pull form from the ether. Then there are those who spend considerable time formulating their approach, and coming up with a philosophy, an aesthetic, to apply to the music they make. While he's far from the only musician to take the latter approach, few are as articulate as pianist Vijay Iyer in explaining the underlying concept(s) that drives an album...or an overall methodology.

In less than a year since moving from one German label (ACT) to another (ECM), Iyer has managed to put out no less than three releases. Mutations, released in March 2014, was a bold first statement from the lauded label that, combining piano and electronics with a string quartet, suggested considerably greater freedom for a pianist who, in addition to becoming a Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard last year, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 and, since emerging twenty years ago this year with his leader debut, Memorophilia (Asian Improv), has received numerous—almost countless—other awards and critical accolades. Released just eight months later in November 2014, Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holiday was an even more ambitious collaboration with filmmaker Prashant Bhargava in commemoration of the centenary of classical composer Igor Stravinsky's influential and groundbreaking "The Rite of Spring."

Break Stuff, in its return to the pianist's eleven year-old trio with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore, might seem like a less ambitious recording on the surface, but to think so would be a mistake. Iyer, it seems, does nothing without a purpose, and if the palette available to him here is somewhat reduced, that should in no way be taken as a sign that Break Stuff is either an easier...or less considered...listen. What Iyer sacrifices in sonic options he more than makes up for in the chemistry that this longstanding trio has developed over the course of its now three albums (five, if you include two additional recordings made with the addition of saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa).

As distanced as Iyer's music has increasingly become, three of Break Stuff's dozen tracks still make clear his ever-present allegiance to the jazz tradition, even if his interpretations reflect a voice that only occasionally wears its influences on its sleeve. "Work," by Iyer's "number one hero of all time," Thelonious Monk, is perhaps the most faithful; delivered in conventional head-solo-head fashion, it's a rare moment where the trio actually swings in a traditional manner—though there's little doubting that this trio swings, in its own way, throughout this 71-minute program. What the inclusion of "Work" accomplishes, however—beyond impressive soloing from both Iyer and Crump, with Gilmore's brush work opening up to even more simpatico stick work—is to clarify just how Monk's idiosyncrasies imbue Iyer's entire approach, even though the pianist has traveled a long way from imitation or even stricter reverence.

An even quirkier look at John Coltrane's "Countdown" demonstrates how Iyer's trio is capable of deconstructing the most familiar material into something deeply personal. Despite time—based largely on West African music in general and Gilmore touchstone Brice Wassy in particular—remaining largely fluid, with the composer's changes only overtly revealed about halfway through its six-minute duration, Iyer delivers some of his most virtuosic playing of the set...and Gilmore's most incendiary.

Iyer goes solo for a briefer look at Billy Strayhorn's "Blood Count," demonstrating that as knotty as he can sometimes be, a gentler, more beauty-laden approach is still well within not just his reach, but his desire as well.

Elsewhere, the music is all composed by Iyer, and comes from a variety of sources, ranging from the Break Stuff suite premiered at the New York Museum of Modern Art to Open City, where Iyer's trio reduces the pianist's larger scale collaboration with Nigerian-born writer Teju Cole. The title track and subsequent "Mystery Woman" may share a similar scalar figure, but they demonstrate just how far Iyer, Crump and Gilmore can stretch commonality: the former, taken at a breakneck speed and leading to a modal solo section that, following Iyer's voicing-rich solo, dissolves into a gentler, more ethereal feature for the ever-lyrical Crump (whose work with his wife, singer Jen Chapin, clearly touches everything he does); the latter, slowed down to evoke an initially more abstract ambiance, builds inexorably into something more powerful and densely constructed...only to return to its initial abstraction, like looking at a time-lapse video of a flower blooming, only to reverse and close in upon itself once again.

Iyer, in his brief liner notes, explains how "a break in music is still music: a span of time in which to act." It's an obvious but rarely considered truth: that the act of not playing can be as considered as that of playing, and that the spaces that exist between the notes are as contextually critical as the notes themselves. That these breaks are also the inspiration for everything from breakdowns and break beats to break dancing are points Iyer also makes, not just in his liners, but in the music itself, with the repetition-heavy but still evolution-defined "Hood" a logical development from what was originally the "rhythmic backbone" for a sextet piece, here exploited by Iyer's trio for all it's worth.

Three bird-themed pieces from Open City—"Starlings," "Geese" and "Wren"—may not have the luxury of the broader expanses provided by its original nineteen performers, but the greater freedom to explore their many breaks by a smaller, more closely connected trio of players makes for some of Break Stuff's most surprising moments, as the trio seems to effortlessly flow from dark-hued mise-en-scènes to passages of more visceral propulsion.

While there's no doubt that much of this group's development has been the consequence of time spent together honing its unique complexion, beyond Break Stuff's more pristine sonics there's little doubt, when compared to its ACT recordings, that this recording has benefited significantly from the "fourth" member of Iyer's trio: label head and producer Manfred Eicher. If the three recordings Iyer has prolifically released in just eleven months are any indication, the pianist's move to ECM—already yielding significant results—has only begun to deliver on even greater promises to come.

John Kelman - February 5, 2015
© 2015 All About Jazz



“Break Stuff” is what happens after formal elements have been addressed. Vijay Iyer calls the break “a span of time in which to act. It’s the basis for breakdowns, breakbeats, and break dancing... it can be the moment when everything comes to life.” A number of the pieces here are breakdowns of other Iyer constructions. Some are from a suite premiered at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, some derive from Open City, a collaboration with novelist Teju Cole and large ensemble. The trio energetically recasts everything it touches. “Hood” is a tribute to Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood. On “Work”, Vijay pays homage to his “number one hero”, Thelonious Monk. “Countdown” reconsiders the classic Coltrane tune inside a rhythmic framework inspired by West African music. “Mystery Woman” is driven by compound pulses which owe a debt to South Indian drumming. Fast moving and quick-witted, the group has developed a strong musical identity of its own, with an emphasis on what Iyer calls “co-constructing”, exploring all the dynamics of playing together. Yet the three players also get abundant solo space and, in a reflective moment at the album’s centre, Iyer plays a moving version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count” alone. Break Stuff, recorded in June 2014 at New York’s Avatar Studio and produced by Manfred Eicher, is the third ECM release from Vijay Iyer. It follows the chamber music recording Mutations and the film-and-music project Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi. The Vijay Iyer Trio is touring in the US and Europe in February and March 2015.

ECM Records



Pianist Vijay Iyer’s 11-year-old trio is a highly manoeuvrable vehicle for his African, Indian and maths-inspired rhythmic ideas, now at a dizzying pinnacle of contemporary jazz multitasking. Iyer, bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore sound joined at the hip even when sometimes seeming to be investigating completely different tunes, but almost everything here feels just as jazz-rooted as the three classic covers on the tracklist. Break Stuff is a fascinating flurry of short, bustling phrases and pumping chords that opens out into longer lines against a steady drum hit, and the excellent Diptych blends rattling waywardness and angular basslines with contrastingly purposeful and seamless piano improv. Their take on Thelonious Monk’s Work respects the original, and though John Coltrane’s Countdown is more fragmented in Iyer’s treatment, it retains the original’s outline and the headlong energy. This is cutting-edge music, but always accessible.

John Fordham - 29 January 2015
© 2015 Guardian News and Media



The Vijay Iyer Trio has worked together for more than a decade, and Break Stuff reminds us that it remains a backbone of this musician’s art. The last year has been a prolific one for Iyer, a pianist and musical thinker who has been on some roll: a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013, a Harvard professorship in 2014, and last year’s productive signing with ECM, the granddaddy of prestige independent labels in jazz. Break Stuff, featuring just Iyer, bassist Stephan Crump, and drummer Marcus Gilmore, may be the least grand of the composer’s recent projects, but it should be the most telling.

Iyer’s move to ECM was inaugurated by two projects somewhat beyond the pianist’s jazz roots. Mutations, released just under a year ago, bookended a suite for piano, electronics, and string quartet with some solo piano work. There was improvisation there, but the work could fit only uncomfortably into a “jazz” box. Even further afield was November 2014’s Radhe, Radhe: Rites of Holiday, a film soundtrack for a larger ensemble that touched the centennial of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” more directly than it referenced the blues or swing or any other American music. These classical or other directions have always been part of Iyer’s art, but the bulk of his discography before 2014 was situated more directly within the “jazz” tradition.

With Break Stuff, he’s back to the smaller — but still considerable — range of colors available from a traditional jazz piano trio, and the reference points sit more clearly within American music. However, this does not make the range of Break Stuff narrow.

One of the most powerful tracks here is the deceptively simple “Hood”, which uses repeated notes and circling patterns to create swirling rhythmic complexity. Marcus Gilmore takes the spotlight here, in a sense, but that is only the most simple way of hearing “Hood”. Crump nails down a repeated bass pattern that sits in a funky 4/4 space for most of the tune, yes, but from the very start multiple counts are swirling around each other, with the piano chiming and the drums accenting at dizzying cross-purposes. Rather than having a traditional jazz “solo”, “Hood” gives us a breathtaking drama of time, syncopation, dialogue, and momentum in which the three members of the trio produce snarling criss-cross tension that has at least five different components at any one time. When Iyer produces a spiderweb pattern at the end and the tune comes to a perfect ending, it’s tough not to let out a long, Sheeee-it.

From “Hood”’s minimalist cycling and hip-hop break-beat patterns, it’s a pleasure to hear a semi-traditional version of Thelonious Monk’s “Work” that demonstrates how more “modern” rhythmic dialogue has plain roots in jazz from 70 years ago. The trio swings “Work” within the tradition, but the freedom of rhythmic conversation within this version is just as complex and contrapuntal as that of the newer tune. It’s no wonder that Iyer calls Monk his “number one hero of all time.”

Rhythm is the number one concern, with a bullet, throughout Break Stuff. The title track uses a simple and appealing harmonic motion that brings to mind a tune by another Iyer hero: “Maiden Voyage” by Herbie Hancock. But the action is in the pulse again, and joyously so. The band kicks off an idiosyncratic funk feel (a soft accent “on the one” and a sharp hit on three) which allows the whole trio to kick up its heels during a sparkling piano solo. When Crump solos, Gilmore moves over to a ballad tempo dappled with Tony Williams-esque cymbal work that makes you think of “Maiden Voyage” all over again. In both incarnations, the song creates little spots of silence — “breaks” — that define the art of this band.

So powerful and interesting are the rhythmic investigations of this band that I keep having this jazz fan’s fantasy: just as adventurous young folks who loved the exploratory rock of the 1960s (the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground) eventually found their way to the John Coltrane Quartet, so might today’s hip-hop fans eventually discover this band — as well as Matthew Shipp, Mary Halvorson, and others. Superficial differences aside, this music has the pulsing life of modern pop.

Not that intriguing harmony doesn’t have its say as well. Coltrane’s “Countdown” is another jazz standard that appears, with its quick-passing chordal movement masked at first, as the trio improvises expansively. When the classic harmonic motion becomes recognizable with its implied melody, the band has moved into a tricky Latin-ish rhythm as well. The solo piano take on Strayhorn’s “Blood Count” is, naturally, a harmonic showpiece. Iyer works the song’s dynamics from soft to loud, and he moves at deliberate and sometimes variable tempo, finding emotion in every corner of the tune.

Vijay Iyer’s move to ECM has been praised plenty, in significant part because it seemed to make possible the expansive range of Mutations and Radhe Radhe, projects that clearly fit the ECM jazz-yes-but-new-music-too vibe. I’m not sure that the trio is as well-served by the sonic change to a Manfred Eicher-produced sound. To my ear, the band comes off as less fat and full, less funky — a little more dry and clean. When a tune like “Geese” begins on a Crump arco solo, he sounds distant to me, as if he were recorded from around the next alp (and Crump is a player whose sound is normally as fat as a Meghan Trainor hit). When the same tune snaps into a legitimately funky groove, it doesn’t pop the way the same trio’s version of “Galang” did when many first discovered these guys in 2009.

I think this is the reason I feel that I had to listen to Break Stuff a few times before it really grabbed me. Sure, there’s no Michael Jackson transformation here, and maybe that’s part of it, too. But I think some of the band’s punch has been sanded down on this recording. The atmosphere on a tune like closer “Wrens” is gorgeous, but the trade-off is a net minus. To my ears, all that incredible rhythmic interplay sounded more plain, more insistent on the trio’s last two outings.

This quibble has nothing to do with the playing and composing that make Break Stuff such a triumph and such a joy. This trio remains one of the ongoing jazz ensembles that seems to discover new things at every turn, that seems simultaneously on the cutting edge and embedded deep in the music’s history. Vijay Iyer, Stephan Crump, and Marcus Gilmore continue to make the argument that we are in a golden age for daring jazz that is also accessible to any open ear, young, old, or otherwise.

Rating [8/19]

Will Layman - 26 February 2015
© 1999-2015 Popmatters.Com



Break Stuff is what happens after formal elements have been addressed. Vijay Iyer calls the break a span of time in which to act. Its the basis for breakdowns, breakbeats, and break dancing... it can be the moment when everything comes to life. A number of the pieces here are breakdowns of other Iyer constructions. Some are from a suite premiered at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art, some derive from Open City, a collaboration with novelist Teju Cole and large ensemble. The trio energetically recasts everything it touches. Hood is a tribute to Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood. On Work, Vijay pays homage to his number one hero, Thelonious Monk. Countdown reconsiders the classic Coltrane tune inside a rhythmic framework inspired by West African music. Mystery Woman is driven by compound pulses which owe a debt to South Indian drumming. Fast moving and quick-witted, the group has developed a strong musical identity of its own, with an emphasis on what Iyer calls co-constructing, exploring all the dynamics of playing together. Yet the three players also get abundant solo space and, in a reflective moment at the albums center, Iyer plays a moving version of Billy Strayhorns Blood Count alone. Break Stuff, recorded in June 2014 at New Yorks Avatar Studio and produced by Manfred Eicher, is the third ECM release from Vijay Iyer. It follows the chamber music recording Mutations and the film-and-music project RADHE RADHE: Rites of Holi. Vijay Iyer will tour extensively throughout 2015 both with the Trio and in other configurations.

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