Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer on their new album, ‘Defiant Life’ : NPR

The reside spark and open give up of musical dialogue has lengthy been a founding precept for trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist Vijay Iyer. Every is a justly heralded composer who typically strikes a negotiation between freedom and type. Smith, 83, has been a inventive visionary for the reason that late Nineteen Sixties, creating his personal musical language — Ankhrasmation, a colorfully visible substitute for traditional notation — whilst he engages with touchstones of Black historical past. (His sweeping 2011 album Ten Freedom Summers, concerning the Civil Rights Motion, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.) Iyer, 53, first met Smith just a few many years in the past, later turning into a protégé and collaborator; his many accolades embody prestigious fellowships from United States Artists and the MacArthur Basis.

Each artists are drawn to work that pursues revelation. And whereas they arrive from completely different life experiences and generations, their improvisational follow as a duo accesses a deep, shifting present of mutual discovery. They’ve a powerfully transfixing new album, Defiant Life, simply out on ECM Data. Recorded over two days in Lugano, Switzerland, it is a follow-up to their earlier duo album, A Cosmic Rhythm with Every Stroke, which met with overwhelming acclaim upon its launch in 2016. (It landed at No. 2 within the NPR Music Jazz Critics Ballot.) However because the title implies, their new album additionally brings concepts of resistance and liberation into main focus. It is a manifestation of core convictions for Smith and Iyer, arriving at a charged and turbulent second.

The 2 artists will carry out this music on the Huge Ears Pageant on Saturday. Final week, on the eve of the album’s launch, they convened at NPR’s New York bureau to speak concerning the intention and inspiration behind their new music, the inherent problem of spontaneous invention, and the facility of artwork to assist us think about a greater world.

This interview has been edited for size and readability.

Nate Chinen: This album is clearly a testomony to the deep relationship that the 2 of you’ve got, and in addition to a shared set of convictions. What kind of dialog did you’ve got going into the recording?

Wadada Leo Smith: The easiest way to consider it’s as a notion of dialogue, the place you have a look at the necessities, and also you have a look at the probabilities, and also you have a look at that which is critical. We do not attempt to prophesize as to what it’ll be like, or sound like, or how we will do it. It is extra akin to permitting every of us to attach via this dialogue, and to maneuver previous former concepts about how we felt.

Vijay Iyer: Mr. Smith simply stated that we do what’s vital — nevertheless it’s not that we do what we’re “supposed” to do. So it isn’t ruled by any preconceived concept or enforced notion of type. It is actually that we deliver all the knowledge we now have about form and sequence and relationships into the current second, in order that it is all being made earlier than us and thru us. By way of what we have been speaking about, I imply, it was laborious to not speak about the whole lot that was occurring outdoors of the studio, in the remainder of the world. However actually, that is what we have all the time accomplished. I bear in mind our first tour, which was precisely 20 years in the past in Europe with Wadada’s re-formed Golden Quartet, which included myself and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and bassist John Lindberg. And I bear in mind these lengthy practice rides the place I realized a lot, simply sitting amongst these guys, about historical past and our place in it. I really feel like we have all the time been in that sort of dialog.

Chinen: Every of you introduced a composition to this session. Vijay, I need to tackle the dedication of your piece “Kite,” for the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who died in Gaza late in 2023. I am assuming the kite is a reference to his poem “If I Should Die“…

Iyer: That is proper.

Chinen: This can be a poem that has traveled far, for actually horrible causes. It concludes in a second of imagined magnificence that has been wrought out of loss of life and destruction. I might love to listen to you speak about that, and the precise inspiration you drew from that poem.

Iyer: Wadada has jogged my memory {that a} kite is, typically talking, a common image of freedom. The way in which it exhibits up on this poem, which Refaat wrote really fairly a while earlier than he was killed, is that he invitations the reader to make a kite and fly it so {that a} baby may see it and picture that it is an angel. And so, as you stated, the best way that it’d spark some second of inspiration or creativeness within the observer is the important thing perception. It is kind of like the entire poem hinges on that reality, and so it felt like the most effective I may do in tribute to him was to do what he requested, and to attempt to construct a kite, a sonic kite.

Chinen: What was it like for the 2 of you, translating that intention to a musical syntax?

Iyer: I feel I can say that each one of this music flowed the best way it all the time does for us. I will not say that it isn’t tough, or that there is not work concerned, nevertheless it feels easy one way or the other. It all the time feels appropriate to me. We simply did one take of this piece, and it arrived absolutely shaped in that manner. There’s only a fragment of notation, and it had a excessive observe in it. I stated, “Mr. Smith, are you able to play this excessive observe?” He stated, “I am gonna attempt,” and he did.

Chinen: Bringing the kite aloft.

Iyer: That is proper. It turns into a pinnacle of the piece, and actually of the entire album, for me. This second of magnificence. So, yeah, I’ve all the time felt that our music, regardless that it’s typically involved with moments of wrestle or resistance, it itself doesn’t really feel like that. It all the time flows.

Chinen: Wadada, the opposite piece that was composed earlier than the session is “Floating River Requiem (for Patrice Lumumba).” With that dedication to the slain Prime Minister of the Congo, the music has a historic reference level. Nevertheless it’s clearly nonetheless very, very related.

Smith: Effectively, Refaat and Patrice, they each died making an attempt to liberate their homelands. They’ve the identical concept and quest for liberty and justice. Patrice, otherwise: He realized that the one manner that an African nation may actually construct its assets, and its communities, and its folks’s needs and desires for a future, was to say all of the assets within the nation. That hasn’t been accomplished earlier than. And I consider that is his largest legacy.

However let me converse in a extra symbolic manner. The picture of Floating River comes from the final second when Patrice Lumumba, who was in the midst of the river along with his household, appeared again and noticed that his comrades had been captured. He may have gone all the best way to the opposite aspect, which might have been his escaping from that space. However he selected to let his household go throughout and he got here again, to be able to sacrificially be along with his comrades. Every of them was killed in a most vicious, violent manner. So, symbolically, we’re taking a look at a person that selected his future by an act of nice defiance. With “Floating River Requiem,” I am additionally imagining a river that is within the sky, floating with a sanctuary on the backside. And that sanctuary on the backside is the vitality pressure that reclaims the land and reinvigorates a continent. And simply to point out you why I feel it is prophetic, proper now in Africa, principally Western Africa, they’re creating their very own drugs and analysis about pathogens and pandemics and issues like that. They’ve this stunning dedication to create a medical community that doesn’t want the surface. And the explanation they’re doing that’s as a result of through the time of the pandemic, the USA and Europe shared vaccines with one another, however they did not share them with Africa.

Chinen: Proper.

Smith: So I feel that is one of many prophetic strikes proper there, is self reliance, independence. And asking nobody for something.

Iyer: Yeah. Steadfastness.

Smith: Steadfastness.

Chinen: There’s a creative corollary to that, and I take into consideration your life in music for instance. Figuring out your individual path, setting your individual phrases, and never ready for anybody to current a chance. You have actually created these areas and alternatives for your self. Is {that a} truthful analogy?

Smith: That is a transparent and really actual analogy. I can inform you that on the age of 12, I realized then that you do not ask no person for one thing. And the factor that I produced that I did not ask anyone about was my first composition. I wrote it after I was 12. I had lecturers, I may have gone and stated, “Educate me how you can compose.” However I did not. I wished to compose, I had the urge to compose, I composed. And after I completed, I spotted that that was a selection that I made, to be self-reliant. And now at 83, I can look again and say, “Clearly Wadada had an urge to be heading in the right direction.” Why would a 12-year-old child try this? As a result of my grandfather and his brother did not work for anyone. They created their very own jobs, you see. They developed patches of land to develop meals. They usually grew to become self-sufficient. I labored with them as a younger child, from 7 as much as 11 or 12. These sorts of issues present you that there are different methods of doing stuff in a society that has prohibition towards no matter you need to be.

Chinen: It has been virtually 10 years because you recorded your earlier duo album, A Cosmic Rhythm With Every Stroke, which was effectively acquired. Sure issues are clearly constant, however there’s a completely different sonic character to Defiant Life. I might love to listen to you speak about that.

Iyer: Within the pacing, for example, and the main target, I might say that the music was made in very a lot the identical manner. However perhaps what’s completely different is us, on some stage. Not simply every of us as people, but in addition what we perceive about what we will do. For instance, once we made the primary duo album, we had performed many occasions collectively in Wadada’s band, and we might performed a handful of duo concert events. However most frequently the duo sound emerged within the context of Wadada’s band, typically out of necessity.

Smith: When issues break down.

Iyer: Proper. When, for example, what was imagined to occur did not occur, after which one thing else wanted to occur. That is once we arrived at this technique of shifting step-by-step into an unknown area that then felt full simply by itself one way or the other. It got here to have its personal wholeness and its personal inside sensibility, its personal manner of shifting. So that is what we wished to honor with that first album. The primary album was extra smaller episodes, and with this one, we will consider a compositional type sprawling over 12 or quarter-hour, and having its personal inside shifts and inside dynamics, and that that complete factor could be a whole assertion. As composers, each of us are conversant in creating on that point scale. However to do it collectively on this very centered, inventive collaboration, that’s one thing I feel we have cultivated. And it is knowledgeable so many different issues I’ve accomplished; it is actually turn into part of me on this significant, important manner.

Chinen: One factor that strikes me about this recording, with respect to what you simply stated, is your use of electronics and the Fender Rhodes. It’s liberated from any sort of grid — it is extra like a change in atmospheric circumstances. If that is not a brand new improvement, it appears no less than like one thing that’s prioritized on this file.

Smith: Yeah, it units up what one may probably name a vertical stream. And I do not imply streaming vertically, however the width of the vertical stream that is bigger than, we could say, between right here and Jupiter, and that the sounds which might be being emitted via that stream have all types of saturations of goodwill, or concord. Once you hear that, and it is coming via your ears and thru your physique, and you’ve got a trumpet in your hand, you both look ahead and pull the set off on the valve, otherwise you decide up the mute and insert it and nonetheless pull the set off on the valve. And what comes out, nobody is aware of till it is over, as a result of through the course of, it is such a deepening and widening command. You do not know the time span that you just’re shifting via it till you’ve got completed it and look again over it. That occurred many occasions throughout this session.

Iyer: Yeah.

Smith: The place we fall utterly silent afterwards. And never a silence in a manner wherein we’re intimidated, however a silence in a manner wherein we will think about that we now have simply made a journey, and do not know the way we obtained there.

Chinen: I actually respect that reply, as a result of it frames what we’re speaking about in experiential phrases. So the language of musicology or evaluation just isn’t actually satisfactory. It is one thing that you’ve got lived via, that you’ve got moved via.

Iyer: One of many first issues I realized, working with Wadada, was that it was attainable to talk about music in human phrases, and in addition that it really works higher. It’s extra correct in some methods, and it is richer, these sorts of descriptions. Like, I bear in mind him saying: “You do that, and I’ll play throughout it.” And I might by no means heard it phrased that manner earlier than. So even simply that specific preposition was like a revelation to me. It is like, effectively, that is how we do the whole lot: We transfer throughout and thru. It is all about relationships, really. It is all about human motion and relation. After which it is also about dreaming and imagining. About imagining past ourselves, imagining past the human — you understand, stretching out to Jupiter, and past.

Chinen: This seems like a superb second to return to that phrase, “defiant.” We have talked about a few highly effective examples of embodied defiance. However how did that phrase animate this music?

Iyer: As you talked about, the Palestinian poet and the Congolese chief, each have been assassinated, have been killed in a wrestle for liberation. We hadn’t consulted with one another earlier than arriving in Lugano, Switzerland, aside from to say: “I feel we must always make one other file.” We each agreed that it was the precise factor to do, and the precise time to do it. However we hadn’t stated what’s it about or who’s it for, or why it ought to exist. Besides to proceed this lifelong dialog that we have had about music and life and the whole lot else. Wadada’s music may be very a lot recognized for considering these extraordinarily important historic tableaus, or moments or tiny stretches of time. Just like the seconds earlier than Medgar Evers was killed, for instance. These scenes that bear the burden of all that is come earlier than, and all that comes afterward.

I feel perhaps there was a way that I realized from him about this explicit sort of focus, that it wasn’t nearly placing it in a title, however really an all-encompassing technique of making. These two named items — the 2 single-page items of music that we used as tent poles for the entire undertaking — they stood for the whole factor. They knowledgeable the whole lot else that was on this suite of music, and collectively they articulate a a lot bigger concept about defiance. And about not simply defiance via being martyred, but in addition what’s it to reside on. The phrase sumud, which I realized in my research across the Palestinian wrestle, means “steadfastness.” Like, how do you reside on within the face of this? And likewise not simply reside on mournfully, however reside on and have fun life defiantly — reside on in a manner that really is stuffed with goal and pleasure, even within the face of state terror. And that kind of grew to become the spine: not simply an act of mourning or tragedy, however really celebrating what one does within the face of it, and trying to these points that make up the historical past and the way forward for liberation. After I consider titling an album, typically it might probably provide a companion to the aural expertise, in order that they full one another, they complicate one another, they fill and empty one another. So what may this sign to a listener, to any viewers, to anybody who holds it of their hand? May it work in the identical manner that kite may work for a kid in Gaza — as one thing that prompts the creativeness?

Chinen: What you are saying emphasizes that within the title phrase, it isn’t simply defiance, proper? “Life” is the opposite phrase, and the 2 usually are not in opposition. They’re, in actual fact, inside the similar breath.

Smith: Frederick Douglass stated that whoever needs to hunt liberty and justice should struggle daily. As a result of the victory itself on Thursday doesn’t final via on Friday. So one should always exert a defiant motion in the direction of their very own realization of being. I prefer to suppose that magnificence is contained in the thriller of defiance. I might say that realizing that your life goes to be snuffed out in just a few seconds — a view that none of us have ever had, or can have till it occurs — that is the thriller. However what counters that thriller on the opposite aspect is the view that appears into the longer term, as Martin Luther King stated: “I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I’ve seen the promised land.” That too is a part of that thriller, as a result of that one that can see each side, the aspect of transition and the aspect of mobility. Magnificent thriller.

Iyer: A non secular energy is what it’s, proper? It is a very particular sort of enlightenment.

Smith: Yeah.

Chinen: As you are speaking, I am eager about ritual and ceremony, which feels pertinent on this album. Not simply because there’s a procession, there’s an elegy, there’s a prelude, there’s a requiem. What’s created on this music seems like a meditative and maybe non secular area. It is a area for contemplation, for receiving. Is {that a} dimension of this give you the results you want?

Smith: Effectively, it appears that evidently the frequent notion about meditation is to sort of chill out and get right into a zone. However this type of meditation that we’re frightening, via sonic artwork, is definitely to propel, to ship out like a missile, this fixed want for stability and concord, liberty and justice. The notion of legislation and rule of legislation, the entire gamut of residing.

Chinen: That course of is all the time unfolding, and ceaselessly unfinished. The way in which that the 2 of you join, musically, it seems like tapping into some ingredient of the everlasting.

Smith: Yeah, collaborations are laborious. And the factor about Vijay and I, we now have a lot success at it. However it’s really laborious, as a result of there is a second once we are taking part in the place there is not any data by any means about what’s occurring.

Iyer: Mmhmm.

Smith: It is an lively, evolving second. By some means, once we end it, we all know what it is about — however we by no means talk about it, as a result of, as they are saying, it isn’t a secret, only a thriller.