ArtsThursdays: The Vijay Iyer Trio

THE VIJAY IYER TRIO:
VIJAY IYER, piano
LINDA MAY HAN OH, double bass
TYSHAWN SOREY, drums

Composer-pianist VIJAY IYER (Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts, Department of Music & Department of African and African American Studies) has carved out a unique path as an influential, shape-shifting presence in 21st-century music. His deeply interactive, powerfully expressive musical language is indebted to the composer-pianist lineage from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk to Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen, the creative music movement of the 60s and 70s, and rhythmic traditions of South Asia and West Africa. As MinnPost recently observed, “twining composition and improvisation is rightfully his most celebrated métier.” He has released twenty-six widely praised albums; received three Grammy nominations, numerous national and international prizes, and a MacArthur Fellowship; composed for orchestras, soloists, and chamber ensembles; and collaborated with poets, filmmakers, choreographers, and music-makers from across the planet.

Iyer’s music finds perhaps its purest expression in his most celebrated group, the Vijay Iyer Trio, praised by NPR as “truly astonishing” and by The New York Times as “one of the best bands in jazz.” Iyer’s trio conception, developed over the last 30 years, finds inspiration in the trio music of Ahmad Jamal; the Ellington/Mingus/Roach summit Money Jungle; Andrew Hill’s Smokestack; McCoy Tyner’s 1970s ensembles; the rhythm-section alchemies of James Brown, Fela Kuti, and the Meters; South Asian dance rhythms; and the expressive nuance of chamber music.

In 2021, an all-star incarnation of Iyer’s trio, now with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, released Uneasy (ECM), which was named one of the best jazz albums of 2021 by Pitchfork, The New Yorker, NPR, the Boston Globe, and numerous other publications. Their follow-up, the widely acclaimed 2024 recording, Compassion (ECM), was praised by All Music Guide for its “fresh, intensely interactive, seemingly time-elasticizing approach to the jazz piano trio that is at once bracingly kinetic, intimate, and lyrical.”

This trio’s music combines Iyer’s attraction to dark colors, elliptical shapes, and plunging momentum with a pronounced sense of shared purpose, equality, and attunement among the musicians. The material includes Iyer’s compositions alongside occasional familiar and obscure covers. Their concerts feature breathtaking, spontaneous variations on their repertoire, full of uncanny synchronies, unpredictable formal shifts, and exuberant playing.

Praise for the Vijay Iyer Trio:

“It’s as if this band wants to both seduce you and discomfit you, stripping you of
everything but the ability to think and see for yourself” - The New York Times

“It’s a sound that isn’t trying to impress you so much as involve you…a highlight on the
acclaimed pianist’s path in and out of jazz.” - Washington Post

“revels in dynamics that are calibrated with great care and, at times, achieve startling force”
-Wall Street Journal

“irresistibly listenable… exhales a particular aesthetic history even as it pulls on the pain
and anxiety of our present” - Pitchfork

“stellar compositions, performances, and energy… immediately enjoyable music”
– Pop Matters

“exquisite… quietly ups the ante on 21st-century modern jazz piano trio excursions.”
- DownBeat

ArtsThursdays is a university-wide initiative sponsored by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).

Photo Credit: Ogata

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Paine Hall, 3 Oxford Street, Cambridge, United States