On the title track to his latest album, Accelerando, jazz pianist Vijay Iyer conducts an intensely wrought exercise in dynamics, sputtering jagged edges of notes from his piano which seem to both push forward rhythmically and simultaneously retard the pace. The piece is less than three minutes long, but it’s so perfectly poised between motion (per the title, the tempo continually accelerates) and stasis and so brimful of productive tension that it registers as a real high-wire act, one Iyer and his rhythm section (longtime bassist Stephen Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore) sustain wonderfully, exhaustingly. Though “Accelerando” is finally one of the album’s minor tracks, it stands as a highly concentrated illustration of one of the record’s chief achievements: It tracks the mastery that the trio has achieved over tricky iterations of tempo and rhythm and the tensions they manage to buildup without ever losing control. A more extended example of the group’s dynamic comes on the album’s second track, “Optimism,” a seven-and-a-half minute pocket epic in which the trio takes Iyer’s irrepressible composition, revs it up, slows it down, takes it to an almost impossible level of intensity and then brings it to a final simmer. In its masterful buildup and breakdown, it recalls one of the key recordings in the Iyer canon, “Because of Guns/Hey Joe Redux,” from his 2003 masterpiece Blood Sutra.

At that time, Iyer, still working primarily in a quartet setting with alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, was just beginning to experiment with the reinterpretation of pop songs. With 2009’s skillful if overly showy Historicity, the first record in his current trio format, Iyer introduced a range of pop songs to his repertoire, setting M.I.A. and Michael Jackson against jazz classics by the likes of Andrew Hill and a selection of his own compositions. The idea was to draw a continuum in the history of American music, but the programming seemed at times too self-consciously diverse. With Accelerando, Iyer repeats the strategy, but here the efforts seem more appealingly modest and the selections more intuitive. Henry Threadgill’s great “Little Pocket Size Demons” can stand side-by-side with ‘70s funk band Heatwave’s “The Star of a Story,” but in the context of the record—which also features five original compositions—the choices make sense. While the Heatwave song, full of lovely, shimmering piano passages that prove Iyer’s style to be much more than knotty rhythms and off-kilter melodies, is undoubtedly one of the album’s highlights, it’s only a prelude to the greater pleasures of the follow-up track, the trio’s nearly ten-minute tribute to/deconstruction of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.”

While Iyer had previously tackled that composition as the lead track on his 2010 solo record, here he enlists his rhythm section to take the piece further out than before. What’s great about the recording on Accelerando is that even as the pianist seems determined to pick apart the tune and take it to near cacophonous levels of abstraction, he’s equally reverent toward the composition. He plays the theme over and over as someone who’s not only spent a lot of time thinking about how the dynamics of the song operate, but as a genuine fan. The piece also functions as yet another study in the rhythmic tension this group is capable of generating. When, after three-and-a-half minutes of a relatively straightforward reading, Iyer starts to deconstruct the tune into fascinating shards of broken non-melody, Gilmore and Crump seem so intuitively locked into what the leader is doing that the piece maintains perfect coherence. When, three minutes later, the theme returns, as lovely and plainspoken as ever, it’s with an awed sense of relief at how Iyer and his group managed to return so effortlessly from seeming chaos to comforting order. It’s an act repeated more or less with success on Accelerando’s 11 cuts, but even if nothing can quite measure up to “Human Nature,” there are few songs on the record that don’t illustrate the Vijay Iyer Trio’s masterful sense of control, their hard-won cohesiveness, and—perhaps somewhat surprisingly, given the potentially academic nature of the project—their sly sense of playfulness.

Review by:
Andrew Schenker