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Vijay Iyer Trio’s long-anticipated new album Uneasy is out now on ECM Records. This is Vijay’s first trio album since 2015, and features drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh. The album has been met with a feature that just ran in the New York Times, and today, ECM and Vijay have shared a full-length video of the Trio’s performance of “Combat Breathing.” Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lzgOHbdGWs
Vijay and Uneasy have also recently been spotlighted in pieces with The Believer, Boston Globe, GRAMMY.com, NPR Music and more.
On Uneasy, Vijay draws on the history of the music while continuing to push it forward. In the course of this endeavor, the political and social turbulences dominating today’s American landscape are reflected in musical contemplation and tense space. In his liner notes, Vijay elaborates on how today “the word ‘uneasy’ feels like a brutal understatement, too mild for cataclysmic times. But maybe, since the word contains its own opposite, it reminds us that the most soothing, healing music is often born of and situated within profound unrest; and conversely, the most turbulent music may contain stillness, coolness, even wisdom.”
The aforementioned “Combat Breathing” was initially written to accompany a political action at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the wake of the first Black Lives Matter protests in 2014. The song, built around an eleven-beat cycle, reveals a recurringly descending cadence that offers each member of the trio plenty of space to unfold in and experiment with. Leading up to the album release Vijay also shared original works “Children of Flint,” dedicated to the children of Flint, Michigan, and “Entrustment,” written after Vijay visited Dunhuang, the assemblage of Buddhist caves in the Gobi Desert.
Uneasy portrays this cast’s first studio session, with Tyshawn and Vijay’s partnership even going back to 2002, when they recorded Vijay’s quartet album Blood Sutra. They’ve worked together frequently since, including on two of Vijay’s ECM releases: the live film score from 2014, Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, and the landmark 2017 sextet album Far From Over. Linda May Han Oh is a more recent collaborator of Vijay’s. A consistent guest faculty member of the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in Alberta, Canada, the bassist’s professional relationship with Vijay and Tyshawn - the workshop’s co-artistic directors - has been developing over the years into a significant creative collaboration.
Uneasy, recorded at the Oktaven Audio Studio in Mount Vernon, New York, was produced by Vijay Iyer and Manfred Eicher.
More information here: https://shorefire.com/roster/vijay-iyer
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