Uneasy

Uneasy—the title of the taut and enveloping new album by pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey—holds a welter of timely implications, from pandemic precarity to political instability. Another choice, less intuitive but just as apt, would have been Unfinished—not as a comment on the album itself but an allusion to the kind of work these three musicians are doing together.

Creative music, to use their preferred term of art, relies in part on this understanding. As Anthony Reed puts it in Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production, a new scholarly book that Iyer has vocally endorsed, the core project of the improvisational avant-garde is “a commitment to ongoingness, to experimental open-endedness grounded in something other than the circularity and circulation of received forms.” Throughout Uneasy, there’s a strong pull toward that open sensation, even as Sorey, Oh, and Iyer negotiate complex parameters of rhythm and harmony with the soaring precision of raptors on the wing.

The album is credited to all three musicians, with Iyer as the first among equals. His previous working trio, with Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, stood as a defining ensemble of the 2010s; its most recent release, Break Stuff, was widely hailed in the jazz press as one of the best albums of 2015. The trio on Uneasy bears no small resemblance to that earlier band—it retains Iyer’s attraction to dark colors, elliptical shapes, and plunging momentum—but there’s a more pronounced expression of equal say among the musicians, along with a powerful sense of shared purpose and a stratospheric level of attunement.

Within the last several years, Sorey has achieved a rarefied stature in creative music: Like Iyer, he’s been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant, joined the faculty of an Ivy League institution, and been the subject of adulatory profiles, which tend to focus on his extravagant inventions as a composer. Oh is on her way to becoming one of the most highly regarded bass players of our time, if she hasn’t already secured that place—and her achievements as a bandleader and composer are estimable. The three musicians first coalesced as a trio at the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in Alberta, Canada, where Iyer and Sorey are co-artistic directors, and Oh a longtime guest instructor. From the start, their interaction was understood as a collective endeavor.

Still, Iyer contributed most of the compositions on Uneasy, and it’s his sensibility as a bandleader that informs the album. Part of that sensibility involves his relationship to “the jazz tradition,” less as a construct than as a tangle of relationships. One of the two non-originals on the album is “Drummer’s Song,” a chiming, intricately layered piece by Geri Allen, one of Iyer’s lodestars as a pianist; the trio approaches it with reverence, but not at any kind of respectful remove. (Sorey simultaneously calls to mind a surgical team and a demolition crew.) “Night and Day” is a Cole Porter standard, but as Iyer has confirmed, the key reference point for the trio is Joe Henderson’s version of the song, featuring McCoy Tyner’s ringing chord voicings at the piano. And for a certain type of listener, the backbeat groove of “Combat Breathing,” in a slouchy 11/8 meter, will almost instantly recall Julius Hemphill’s 1972 cut “Dogon A.D.”—a song that Iyer’s previous trio actually covered.

“Combat Breathing,” of course, also comes out of a pressurized context: Iyer composed the piece after the death of Eric Garner in 2014, amid waves of protest aligned with a recently coined movement, Black Lives Matter. (In its premiere, Iyer performed “Combat Breathing” with a modern dance collective, whose members enacted a “die-in” onstage.) The title track of Uneasy, which Iyer created in 2011 with choreographer Karole Armitage, originally alluded to the contradictions and swirling undercurrents of the Obama era, a decade after 9/11. More to the point is “Children of Flint,” whose foreboding intrigue faintly evokes the compositional signature of Andrew Hill, and whose title refers to the plight of communities affected by a contaminated water supply in Flint, Michigan.

Each of the musicians on Uneasy has devoted considerable energy to sociopolitical critique; nothing about this expression represents a new impulse. But the immediacy that burns within the group’s cohesion, from one moment to the next, makes this album feel especially urgent. And with that urgency, again, comes an awareness of this art as part of a larger work in progress. “As the arc of history lurches forward and backward, the fact remains: Local and global struggles for equality, justice, and basic human rights are far from over,” Iyer wrote in the liner notes to Far From Over, his 2017 sextet album, which also featured Sorey. (One unused study from that project, “Retrofit,” is among the more fluidly dynamic pieces here; listen for a wind-down coda that underscores Sorey’s facility with post-Dilla beat placement.)

In the face of these weighty ideals, it feels meaningful that Uneasy concludes with “Entrustment,” a slow, resonant piece that registers as a kind of hymn. It occasions some of Iyer’s most delicate pianism on the album: tolling overtones, silvery glissandi. And it serves as a reminder that the work of recovery ahead, as a society or as a scene, will depend on some form of cooperation, and on good faith.

In a recent conversation on the writer Hanif Abdurraqib’s Object of Sound podcast, Iyer acknowledged that the tradition of radical thought has often bent away from hope. “There’s a sense [that] optimism is a trap,” he mused. “But at the same time, there’s no way that you could make music for others without feeling some sense of possibility—possibility for connection, possibility for empathy, possibility for a shared future.” The riveting intensity of the musical exchange throughout Uneasy shows how productive that intermediary space can be when everyone involved embraces it as a challenge. 

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