Vijay Iyer - Historicity (2009)

Indian-American Vijay Iyer was a Yale student before M-Base sax pioneer Steve
Coleman hired him as a self-taught piano sideman, and a fascination with the
spiritual/emotional implications of those rigorously rational disciplines and the
patterns they identify drives his work.

But Iyer is the antithesis of a contained and cerebral artist. Historicity, for the traditional jazz format of an acoustic piano trio, features fewer explicit contrasts of tonality and extremities of drama than Iyer's more familiar duets with saxist Rudresh Mahanthappa, but it offers a different agenda – the music that has absorbed the 37-year-old over the years of his evolution. The freely streaming title track unleashes Iyer's total-piano approach over Stephen Crump's free contrapuntal bass and Marcus Gilmore's drums; West Side Story's Somewhere wilfully stretches and compresses the melody; Stevie Wonder's Big Brother cruises over an insistent vamp; and MIA's staccato hip-hop hit Galang draws on the trio's cross-idiom fluency to mimic the electronics and percussion of the original.

Tracks:
01. Historicity - 07:48 (Vijay Iyer)
02. Somewhere - 06:57 (Leonard Bernstein / Stephen Sondheim )
03. Galang (Trio Riot Version) - 02:39 (Arulpragasam / Orton / Frischmann / Mackey)
04. Helix - 04:00 (Vijay Iyer)
05. Smoke Stack - 08:07 (Andrew Hill)
06. Big Brother - 04:48 (Stevie Wonder)
07. Dogon A.D. - 09:18 (Julius Hemphill)
08. Mystic Brew - 04:55 (Ronnie Foster)
09. Trident: 2010 - 09:05 (Vijay Iyer)
10. Segment For Sentiment #2 - 04:03 (Vijay Iyer)

Line Up:
Vijay Iyer - piano
Stephan Crump - bass
Marcus Gilmore - drums