Vijay Iyer

Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey – Compassion (2024) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · February 4, 2024 · Comments off

Pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey recorded their debut, Uneasy, shortly before the pandemic hit the United States, receiving critical acclaim upon its release in 2021. Compassion, the acoustic trio’s follow-up, finds the three musicians in top form again. Iyer wrote all of the material except for Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed,” Roscoe Mitchell’s “Nonaah,” and one other track. Sorey is a lauded composer, and Oh’s releases as a leader feature her fine compositions, but the pair’s extraordinary improvisatory and interpretive skills are what’s on display here.

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Trio 3 & Vijay Iyer – Wiring (feat. Oliver Lake, Reggie Workman & Andrew Cyrille) (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 18, 2023 · Comments off

Three ‘heavy weights’ of American jazz Oliver Lake, Reggie Workmann and Andrew Cyrille make up the band Trio 3. For their 6th album on Intakt Records they have added pianist Vijay Iyer to the line-up. The 43 year old musician is after Irène Schweizer, Geri Allen and Jason Moran the fourth guest piano player cooperating with Trio 3.

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Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily – Love In Exile (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 19, 2023 · Comments off

The beguiling improvisations on Love in Exile unfold at their own pace; they are like songs that have been stretched out yet retain an arc. The album’s six tracks range in length from eight to fifteen minutes but seem shorter, and were recorded live in the studio, without any preparation; there was little editing afterwards. The winning results demonstrate that the musicians in this trio—Arooj Aftab on vocals (singing in Urdu), Vijay Iyer on piano and electronics, and Shahzad Ismaily on bass and Moog synthesizer—are strongly connected.

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Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith – A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 26, 2022 · Comments off

a cosmic rhythm with each stroke features pianist Viay Iyer and the musician he has described as his “hero, friend and teacher”, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Vijay has previously played extensively with Wadada in Smith’s Golden Quartet, but the present album is the first documentation of their duo work, produced by Manfred Eicher at New York’s Avatar Studios in October 2015. The centre-piece of the album is the spellbinding title suite, dedicated to Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990), the innovative Indian artist whose improvisatory imagery evokes abstracted rhythms. Trumpet and piano interact here with creative sensitivity to tone, texture and space. Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith will be premiering a cosmic rhythm with each stroke at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in March 2016 in the context of a major exhibition dedicated to Nasreen Mohamedi’s art and writings. The “suite for Nasreen” is framed on the album by Iyer’s composition “Passage” and Smith’s concluding piece “Marian Anderson”, inspired by the great US contralto.

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Vijay Iyer – Uneasy (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 26, 2022 · Comments off

Although it stems from a work that Iyer originally crafted back in 2011, one could hardly imagine a better title for a 2021 album release than Uneasy. As the world wobbles onto its post-pandemic footing and the United States begins to take stock of the social and political toll from years of continued divisiveness, any optimism or forward motion one may feel is almost always tempered by the reality of that which came before. That anger and frustration with the past and the resultant realism about the future is at the core of the pianist’s first trio album for ECM since 2015’s Break Stuff. Like that outing, Uneasy relies on tight, confident interplay between three highly skilled and unique musicians, but this lineup is all new, featuring double-bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey.

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Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn – The Transitory Poems (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 26, 2022 · Comments off

Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, two of creative music’s most iconoclastic players, first learned to meld and mesh their artistic approaches in Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory ensemble (as documented on Mitchell’s 2007 recording Far Side). Since then, Iyer and Taborn have continued to play duo concerts together, beginning in early 2009 at The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and several times since, the world over. The Transitory Poems, recorded live at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest in March 2018, is their first duo album. A marvel of shared invention, it incorporates pieces offered as tributes to their common formative influences including pianists Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams and Geri Allen, and the painter and sculptor Jack Whitten.

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