Break Stuff Vijay Iyer Trio

• 1 Starlings 03:52
• 2 Chorale 04:34
• 3 Diptych 06:48
• 4 Hood 06:10
• 5 Work 06:15
• 6 Taking Flight 07:15
• 7 Blood Count 04:36
• 8 Break Stuff 05:27
• 9 Mystery Woman 06:21
• 10 Geese 06:39
• 11 Countdown 05:57
• 12 Wrens 06:48
• Total Runtime 01:10:42

Info for Break Stuff

Break Stuff features Vijay Iyer's long-running and widely-acclaimed trio with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore, a band in existence for eleven years now. 'We keep learning from each other and from experiences and try to set challenges for ourselves so that growth is part of the equation.' It's a group whose musical language is informed by more than the jazz piano trio tradition.

While Iyer acknowledges the influence of, for instance, Ahmad Jamal, Andrew Hill and Duke Ellington's Money Jungle album (with Charles Mingus and Max Roach) upon his own trio aesthetics, he points out that his group has also been inspired by 'James Brown's rhythm section, Hendrix's Band of Gypsys, Miles Davis's rhythm section, Charlie Parker's rhythm section, soul music from the 1970s, electronic music and hip-hop from very recent times...'

The list goes on. The piece 'Hood' on the new recording is a tribute to Detroit minimal techno producer and DJ Robert Hood. 'He did all this really interesting music with numerical patterning - different rhythms unfolding through each other, but still in a very clear dance music framework, very textural and sound-oriented. You hear the evolution of timbre. It became a point of reference for us, to see if we could capture some of that spirit in a purely acoustic framework.'

Vijay Iyer, piano
Stephan Crump, double bass
Marcus Gilmore, drums

Recorded June 2014 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineered by James A. Farber
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Vijay Iyer
Grammy-nominated composer-pianist Vijay Iyer was described by Pitchfork as 'one of the most interesting and vital young pianists in jazz today,' by The New Yorker as one of 'today's most important pianists... extravagantly gifted... brilliantly eclectic,' and by the Los Angeles Weekly as “a boundless and deeply important young star.” He was voted the 2010 Musician of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association, and named one of the “50 Most Influential Global Indians” by GQ India. Iyer has released sixteen albums as a leader, most recently Accelerando (2012), an intense, visceral follow-up to the multiple-award-winning Historicity (2009), both featuring the Vijay Iyer Trio (Iyer, piano; Marcus Gilmore, drums; Stephan Crump, bass). Historicity was a 2010 Grammy Nominee for Best Instrumental Jazz Album, and was named #1 Jazz Album of the Year in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Metro Times, National Public Radio, PopMatters.com, the Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll, and the Downbeat International Critics Poll. The trio won the 2010 Echo Award (the 'German Grammy') for best international ensemble and the Downbeat Critics Poll for rising star small ensemble of the year. Iyer’s many other honors include the Alpert Award in the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Greenfield Prize and numerous composer commissions.

Iyer’s many collaborators include his generation’s fellow forward-thinkers Rudresh Mahanthappa, Rez Abbasi, Craig Taborn, Ambrose Akinmusire, Liberty Ellman, Steve Lehman and Tyshawn Sorey; elder avant-garde pioneers such as Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Butch Morris, George Lewis, and Amina Claudine Myers; new-music experimenters Miya Masaoka, Pamela Z, and John Zorn; hip-hop innovators Dead Prez, Das Racist, DJ Spooky, and High Priest of Antipop Consortium; South Asian percussionist-producers Karsh Kale, Suphala, and Talvin Singh; filmmakers Haile Gerima and Bill Morrison; choreographer Karole Armitage; and poets Mike Ladd, Amiri Baraka, Charles Simic, and Robert Pinsky. His concert works have been performed by the Ethel, JACK, and Brentano String Quartets, the Silk Road Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, Hermès Ensemble, and Imani Winds. A polymath whose career has spanned the sciences, the humanities and the arts, Iyer received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in the cognitive science of music from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published articles in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Wire, Music Perception, JazzTimes, and The Best Writing on Mathematics: 2010. He was recently appointed Director of the Banff Centre's International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, a program founded in 1974 by Oscar Peterson.

Booklet for Break Stuff