Adventures Through Time and Space
VIJAY IYER/LINDA MAY HAN OH/TYSHAWN SOREY
Uneasy
ECM
A stark, black-and-white, distant photo of the Statue of Liberty; composition titles that reflect crises of infrastructure and systemic racism; an underlying tension in the music throughout; all these elements suggest that Uneasy, the new trio album by pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, could be the definitive political work of this year. But describing this record—the first from this group and the first trio work from Iyer since 2015’s Break Stuff—as merely political would be painfully reductive. Even though tracks like the Black Lives Matter-inspired “Combat Breathing,” which Iyer first performed in 2014, or the whiplashing micro-suite “Uneasy” do embody the turbulence of the last decade, the trio is pursuing something greater here.
That pursuit is of the near-boundless potential of new collaboration, in lockstep with the Nobel-worthy chemistry that Iyer, Oh, and Sorey demonstrate. Take “Combat Breathing” again. The piece begins with staccato riffing by Iyer, then crescendos and climbs like some great tower of antiquity, his hands sweeping great lengths of ivory at its peak. As Iyer’s playing descends, he finds a comfortable groove with Oh while Sorey urges them on from the kit; the two mirror each other’s riffs until she begins to vary the melody. The way Oh’s solo then evolves out of this moment, with the group’s dynamic shifts allowing it to blossom, feels organic and conversational. It evokes the highest ideals of creative music: not just taking turns but using one’s own to spur another’s.
Eight of the album’s 10 tracks are Iyer originals; the others are incredible reworkings of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” based off of McCoy Tyner’s work on Joe Henderson’s Inner Urge version (recorded in 1964), and Geri Allen’s “Drummer’s Song.” Iyer, Oh, and Sorey take Allen’s original off-orbit three-minute calypso and extend it into a seven-minute vehicle for unified group expression. Here, as elsewhere, the trio continually morphs as it explores. As past and future intersect, the possibilities of the present become limitless.
JACKSON SINNENBERG
SONS OF KEMET
Black to the Future
Impulse!
You likely listen to a lot of good new music over the course of a year, but how much of it would you characterize as truly exciting, so genuinely innovative that you can honestly say you’ve heard nothing like it? England’s Sons of Kemet, now celebrating a decade together, fit that bill, and Black to the Future is their most noteworthy work to date. At their core a quartet led by tenor saxophonist/woodwinds player Shabaka Hutchings, and presently filled out by tuba player Theon Cross and a pair of drummers, Tom Skinner and Edward Wakili-Hick (replacing Seb Rochford), Sons of Kemet take an open-ended approach to creativity. Churning African- and Caribbean-inspired rhythms cross-pollinate with a jazz-rooted yearning to investigate; a tinge of psychedelic wanderlust pushes the music into unanticipated places; hip-hop informs the guest vocals that bring an added measure of intensity to it all.
Black to the Future, the band’s fourth full-length album, expands on sonic concepts that first surfaced on 2018’s extraordinary Your Queen Is a Reptile. There’s more urgency to these 11 tracks, a tense sense of an impending but undefined something—and this was recorded before some of the soul-crushing events of 2020. “Hustle” features music and arrangements by Hutchings, with lyrics from Kojey Radical and Lianne La Havas, who also provide the vocals. “Born from the mud with the hustle inside me,” they repeat what seems like countless times over a thumping beat that recalls the more fiery, experimental side of early dancehall and dub.
The feverish instrumental pieces are just as captivating: The springy interplay between Hutchings and Cross on tracks like
