Vijay Iyer - Tragicomic

Vijay Iyer’s Tragicomic opens with an invocation entitled The Weight of Things, an evocative title and opening to the album to my mind and ears. There’s a series of titles about things amongst musicians I admire:  Evidence of Things Unseen by Don Pullen, The Flow of Things by Roscoe Mitchell, Things to Come From Those Now Gone by Muhal Richard Abrams, to name a few. Maybe I’m reading too much into these things, but I see a connected interest in the ineffable amongst all these artists, and a similar view of expressing these things through music.

Now that I’ve already gone and described the opening track as evocative, I’ll go ahead and apply the label to the whole album. Isn’t all good music evocative in some sense? Perhaps, but this music falls into a category of evocation that I deem particularly noteworthy.  Tragicomic finds Vijay Iyer splitting time between his established quartet and a more stripped down setting of the trio, and there is even one track treating the listener to a solo piano excursion that is so enjoyable that I hope Vijay will consider recording an album of solo piano at some point. 

I did something with Tragicomic that I like to do if I’m afforded the luxury of time - listen to the artist’s recordings leading up to the newest (this is just his music under his own name as a leader, not including collaborative efforts such as Fieldwork). Following the progression of Mr. Iyer’s work throughout his career, I am definitely hearing a honing of process and compositional voice. It’s difficult to describe, but amounts to an identifying of some kind of essential string of musical voice that you can easily hear throughout that becomes more prominent in improvisations and composition as time goes on.

There is an aesthetic in Vijay Iyer’s music that I’d described as eclectic unity, the incorporation of seemingly disparate elements rhythmically, melodically or harmonically that make sense in the context of the whole. We hear hints of reggae in Comin’ Up both in feel and in a subtle delay (a production technique that recurs a few times on the album with great success to my ears) on the snare drum at a dub like break, a confident sense of swing in his solo piano excursion, and a whole lot more that isn’t easily labeled. 

An accepted fact to my ears when listening to and parsing Vijay Iyer’s music is that rhythm is always a centrally propulsive element in the music.  Propulsive not always in the sense of frenetic or pushed, but more in a sense of centrality in its role in the music as a whole. Even in Mehndi, the brooding meditative piece that places the listener awash in the ceremonial dye of its namesake, the rhythmic feel and pulse is very precise and most of all purposeful. In this realm of rhythmic prowess, no genre is off limits, and new genres are formed through rhythmic alchemy.

Tragicomic is a great album. Vijay Iyer has continued to hone his musical vision and it is fully formed on this release. To speculate a bit, I hear a point of inflection with this album that I think is going to lead to new and different things in future releases with this or other bands. The concept and vision is there and now the question is what will he do with it next?