Uneasy Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey

• 1Children Of Flint06:26
• 2Combat Breathing07:50
• 3Night And Day09:33
• 4Touba07:17
• 5Drummer’s Song06:47
• 6Augury03:29
• 7Configurations09:27
• 8Uneasy09:11
• 9Retrofit06:40
• 10Entrustment05:06
• Total Runtime01:11:46

Info for Uneasy

Vijay Iyer presents a powerful new trio, in which he is joined by two key figures in creative music, Tyshawn Sorey and Linda May Han Oh. “We have an energy together that is very distinct. It has a different kind of propulsion, a different impulse and a different spectrum of colours”. Repertoire on UnEasy, recorded at Oktaven Audio Studio in Mount Vernon, New York in December 2019, includes Iyer originals written over a span of 20 years, plus Gerri Allen’s “Drummer’s Song” and a radical recasting of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.”

Uneasy, with Tyshawn Sorey and Linda May Han Oh, is Vijay Iyer’s second trio album on ECM and his seventh appearance as a leader on the label. Navigating from one shape-shifting idea to another, he continues to push boundaries from one album to the next. His unique musical approach has gained him many accolades and much praise from the international press, The New York Times summarizing his persona as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway”. On Uneasy, he draws on the history of the music while continuing to push it forward. In the course of this endeavour, 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.”

Uneasy portrays this cast’s first studio session after having played together throughout 2019 – Tyshawn and Vijay’s partnership even going back to 2003, when they both appeared on Vijay’s quartet album “Blood Sutra”, featuring saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and bassist Stephan Crump. They’ve worked together frequently since, including on Vijay’s 2017 ECM release Far From Over. Linda May Han Oh is a new collaborator of Vijay’s, although their professional relationship has been developing for several years. A consistent guest faculty member of the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in Alberta, Canada, the bassist has become well acquainted with Vijay and Tyshawn, the workshop’s co-artistic directors.

Linda and Tyshawn have both recorded with ECM before – Sorey playing on Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells For The South Side and Oh adding her unique voice as bass to German pianist Florian Weber’s ECM debut Lucent Waters. Her nimble language and Tyshawn’s robust but deeply musical swing add the complementing pieces that set Uneasy apart from Vijay’s past work and build a striking contrast to his last trio outing Break Stuff. “We have an energy together that is very distinct. It has a different kind of propulsion, a different impulse and a different spectrum of colours”, raves Vijay in regard to his trio partners.

Lending the album its title, UnEasy was originally the name of a dance project, coordinated between Vijay and choreographer Karole Armitage’s dance company in 2011. Uneasy builds on the paradox the title implies and takes up the underlying atmosphere of threat it alludes to – a decade after and ten years deeper into a world and time of unrest.

On Uneasy, eight Vijay originals, composed over a span of twenty years, are joined by a rendition of Cole Porter’s “Night And Day” as well as Geri Allen’s “Drummer Song”. The latter represents the second Geri Allen composition on a Vijay record after his co-led date with Craig Taborn, The Transitory Poems, which ends on Allen’s “When Kabuya Dances”. Among other occasions, Vijay played a rendition of “Drummer’s Song” in light of the Geri Allen tribute concert at the New York City Winter Jazzfest in 2018 – Downbeat magazine calling his performance “one of the evening’s early highlights” and “compelling with its hypnotic melody and insistent polyrhythms”. On the version found here, Vijay captures the composition-defining ostinato on piano before it’s broken up into fragments and consecutively divided among the trio – Vijay knew Geri Allen well and comments on her tricky composition: “I remember intensively practicing “Drummer’s Song” when I first learned the way that Geri had played it in the trio format. It’s hard to pull off and you have to be very balanced. Geri would do it seamlessly, without drawing attention to it, but I had to realize how much harder it is than it sounds”. Vijay stresses the importance Allen had in his life: “She was a huge influence on me as a musician and a very kind, generous mentor and colleague alike. I want to uphold her legacy as much as I can and contribute to her memory”

The album is introduced by “Children of Flint”, a harmonically angular structure with an urgent rhythmical drive counted in five. Written by Vijay in 2019, the song is dedicated to children hailing from Flint, a town located near Detroit in Michigan. Vijay emphasizes the importance of the composition’s tragic background: “Through gross negligence and systematic racism, the entire town’s drinking water supply was poisoned with lead. Thousands of children in that town, who are mostly African American, have been exposed to unsafe levels of lead, leading to widespread health issues, chronic illnesses and learning disabilities. This piece is dedicated to those children.

“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 – another odd-measured exercise, this time around counted in eleven – reveals a recurringly descending cadence that offers each member of the trio plenty of space to unfold in and experiment with. An especially quiet passage halfway through the song provides the listener with Linda May Han Oh’s poignant, melodic solo and demonstrates the trio’s dynamic breadth.

Much of Uneasy’s music builds on improvised interplay and spontaneous shifts of focus that Vijay, Tyshawn and Linda explore. “I think we’ve always had a wide range of energies we can explore when we play together. It’s not just about the form or about executing things with an agenda to impress anybody. Sometimes it’s just about tapping into some kind of intuitive space and try to find something beneath the surface that animates or propels”

When Vijay talks about “tapping into ambient energy” and “the forces and motion around us”, he emphatically describes the exploratory spirit and impromptu emphases that happen beyond what can be captured in musical notation. The kind of moments that also happen on “Configurations” – an early piece of Vijay’s that first appeared on his 2001 album Panoptic Modes. “It was an early attempt of mine to work with certain rhythmic ideas from southern India, including the lengthy coda of tempo transformations. Tyshawn and I had started working together not long after that album was recorded, so we dug back into our memory banks to adapt it for this trio.”

“Retrofit” represents another adaptation of a piece originally intended for a different format. Composed in 2019, the pianist wrote the rhythmically dense exercise with his sextet in mind. Elements of the composition, such as constantly shifting drum parts or its rather fragmented, as opposed to linear, surface show parallels to parts of his sextet album Far From Over; the trio arrangement dissects the tracks components anatomically, down to the structures skeletal core, making it a fierce display of each musician’s strong character.

Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” represents the disc’s sole standard and Vijay’s nod to the past and its tradition. Inspired by Joe Henderson’s interpretation, as heard on his 1964 album Inner Urge, Vijay builds on McCoy Tyner’s performance and adapts the track to this trio. “I especially loved the way the late great McCoy Tyner navigated Henderson’s harmonic maze. I’ve studied Tyner’s fluidity, hard groove, and deep sonorities for decades. In the wake of his passing in 2020, I was again revisiting the moments in his playing that were formative for me and was glad to have this recording as a humble testament.”

An improvised solo meditation on piano, “Augury” captures the atmosphere and spirit of a session surrounded by clouds on the verge of an unravelling a storm. “The title refers to an old method of divination. When we recorded at the end of 2019, we were on the crest of a year that turned out to be a global nightmare. Was the threat already apparent, if we searched our intuitions?”

Uneasy picks up where Far From Over left off, reflecting on the inequalities and troublesome socio-political landscape of our times. But where Far From Over stressed that there lay “much more work ahead”, as Vijay puts it, Uneasy amplifies the urgency – or maybe more accurately – the emergency of the turmoil, agitation and disparity that prevails in society around the globe. “My compositions on this album span over the past twenty years and the initial UnEasy project was in the middle of that, ten years ago. It was hinting at something that’s unstable. We already had precarity and unrest. There’s always been something disturbing going on, and now we see it explosively unfolding before our eyes.”

Vijay Iyer, piano
Linda May Han Oh, double bass
Tyshawn Sorey, drums

Vijay Iyer
Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last twenty-five years, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation.

He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German “Echo” awards, and was voted Downbeat Magazine’s Jazz Artist of the Year four times in the last decade. He has been praised by Pitchfork as “one of the best in the world at what he does,” by the Los Angeles Weekly as “a boundless and deeply important young star,” and by Minnesota Public Radio as “an American treasure.”

Iyer’s musical language is grounded in the rhythmic traditions of South Asia and West Africa, the African American creative music movement of the 60s and 70s, and the lineage of composer-pianists from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk to Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen. He has released twenty-four albums of his music, most recently UnEasy (ECM Records, 2021), a trio session with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; The Transitory Poems (ECM, 2019), a live duo recording with pianist Craig Taborn; Far From Over (ECM, 2017) with the award-winning Vijay Iyer Sextet; and A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) a suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.

Iyer is also an active composer for classical ensembles and soloists. His works have been commissioned and premiered by Brentano Quartet, Imani Winds, Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Silk Road Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, and virtuosi Matt Haimowitz, Claire Chase, Shai Wosner, and Jennifer Koh, among others. He recently served as composer-in-residence at London’s Wigmore Hall, music director of the Ojai Music Festival, and artist-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A tireless collaborator, he has written big-band music for Arturo O’Farrill and Darcy James Argue, remixed classic recordings of Talvin Singh and Meredith Monk, joined forces with legendary musicians Henry Threadgill, Reggie Workman, Zakir Hussain, and L. Subramanian, and developed interdisciplinary work with Teju Cole, Carrie Mae Weems, Mike Ladd, Prashant Bhargava, and Karole Armitage.

A longtime New Yorker, Iyer lives in central Harlem with his wife and daughter. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a Steinway artist.

Linda May Han Oh
Based in New York City, Linda May Han Oh is a bassist/composer who has performed and recorded with artists such as Pat Metheny, Kenny Barron, Joe Lovano, Dave Douglas, Terri Lyne Carrington, Steve Wilson, Geri Allen and Vijay Iyer.

Originally born in Malaysia and raised in Perth, Western Australia, she has received many awards such as 2nd place at the BASS2010 Competition, a semi-finalist at the BMW Bass competition and an honorary mention at the 2009 Thelonious Monk Bass Competition.

Linda also received the 2010 Bell Award for Young Australian Artist of the Year and was the 2012 Downbeat Critic's Poll "Rising Star" on bass. She was voted the 2018, 2019 and 2020 Bassist of the Year by the Jazz Journalist’s Association, as well as 2019 Up-and-coming Artist of the Year. Linda recently received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, as well as the Chamber Music America New Jazz Works Grant for 2019. She also was voted 2019 Bassist of the Year in Hothouse Magazine and was 2020 recipient of the Margaret Whitton Award.

She has had five releases as a leader which have received critical acclaim. Her most recent release “Aventurine” is a double quartet album, featuring string quartet and vocal group Invenio, winning the Best New Jazz Work for the Australian APRA Art Awards.

Linda has written for large and small ensembles as well as for film, participating in the BMI Film Composers Workshop, Sundance Labs at Skywalker Ranch and Sabrina McCormick's short films, "A Good Egg" and “FracKtured.” Linda also composed and produced music for a collaborative film project with non-profit, “Hoperaisers” based in Korogocho, Kenya.

Linda is based in New York City and is currently Associate Professor at the Berklee College of Music and is also part of the Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice. As an active educator she has also created a series of lessons for the BassGuru app for iPad and iPhone.

She was recently featured as the bassist in the Dorothea Williams Quartet in the Pixar movie "Soul" under the musical direction of Jon Batiste (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) alongside the great drummer Roy Haynes.

Tyshawn Sorey
Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey (b. 1980) is celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery and memorization of highly complex scores, and an extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work. He has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, as well as artists such as John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, George Lewis, Claire Chase, Steve Lehman, Jason Moran, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, and Myra Melford, among many others.

The New York Times has praised Sorey for his instrumental facility and aplomb, “he plays not only with gale-force physicality, but also a sense of scale and equipoise”; The Wall Street Journal notes Sorey is, “a composer of radical and seemingly boundless ideas.” The New Yorker recently noted that Sorey is “among the most formidable denizens of the in-between zone…An extraordinary talent who can see across the entire musical landscape.”

Sorey has composed works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the International Contemporary Ensemble, soprano Julia Bullock, PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, the McGill-McHale Trio, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Alarm Will Sound, the Louisville Orchestra, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee with Opera Philadelphia in partnership with Carnegie Hall, as well as for countless collaborative performers. His music has been performed in notable venues such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Village Vanguard, the Ojai Music Festival, the Newport Jazz Festival, the Kimmel Center, and the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. Sorey has received support for his creative projects from The Jerome Foundation, The Shifting Foundation, Van Lier Fellowship, and was named a 2017 MacArthur fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow.

Sorey has released twelve critically acclaimed recordings that feature his work as a composer, co-composer, improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and conceptualist. His latest release, Pillars (Firehouse 12 Records, 2018), has been praised by Rolling Stone as “an immersive soundworld… sprawling, mysterious… thrilling” and has been named as one of BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction 2018 albums of the year.

In 2012, he was selected as one of nine composers for the Other Minds Festival, where he exchanged ideas with such like-minded peers as Ikue Mori, Ken Ueno, and Harold Budd. In 2013, Jazz Danmark invited him to serve as the Danish International Visiting Artist. He was also a 2015 recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Award. Sorey has taught and lectured on composition and improvisation at Columbia University, The New England Conservatory, The Banff Centre, University of Michigan, International Realtime Music Symposium, Harvard University, Hochschule für Musik Köln, Berklee College of Music, University of Chicago, and The Danish Rhythmic Conservatory. Sorey will join the composition faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2020.

Booklet for Uneasy