Disciples Without the Master?

Craig Taborn and Vijay Iyer (photograph by Monica Jane Frisell, courtesy of ECM)

Tomorrow ECM will release its first recording of the piano duo of Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, entitled The Transitory Poems. (Purchase from this hyperlink will be enabled tomorrow; but it will also support pre-order from those who click through today.) Both Iyer and Taborn (who are almost the same age) have had a significant effect on what I would probably call “bleeding edge” jazz practices; but they share the property of a capacity for invention that is based as much on intellect as on raw spontaneity.

Their experiences in playing together date back to 2002, when they were both members of Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory. Indeed, it was as members of the Note Factory that they contributed to Mitchell’s Far Side album, one of the recordings included in the ECM 21-CD box set The Art Ensemble of Chicago and associated ensembles, discussed on this site at the beginning of this year. Recorded in Germany in 2007, Far Side took the idea of a double quartet, used by Ornette Coleman in the recording session for his Free Jazz album on December 21, 1960, in a new direction, based more on deliberate cerebral exploration, in contrast to the impetuous spontaneity of Coleman’s group. Since the Note Factory had been created in 1992, Mitchell himself could serve as an axis point across which practices at the time of origin could be balanced against new members seeking to move the performances and recordings in new directions.

I introduce this historical riff because that creative tension that Mitchell could moderate in the 2007 incarnation of the Note Factory seems to be lacking in the duo performance that Iyer and Taborn bring to The Transitory Poems. Since the tracks were recorded live in the concert hall of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest in March of 2018, one would have expected some sense of spontaneity and exploration, cerebral or otherwise. Instead we have two pianists, both highly adept technically, with over fifteen years of collaboration based on a common “master.” In other words I came away from listening to The Transitory Poems with the feeling that Iyer and Taborn had run out of things to say to each other, because everything had already been said.

Perhaps the problem is one of too much shared influence. If Mitchell is present implicitly as a “founding father,” the final three tracks of The Transitory Poems are dedicated to Muhal Richard Abrams, Cecil Taylor, and Geri Allen, respectively. (In addition, the title of the album comes from a phrase that Taylor used in an interview with Chris Funkhouser conducted in 1995. The full paragraph of context for this phrase is reproduced in the album’s booklet.) All three of those composers have decidedly adventurous spirits, but those spirits were not even lurking in the shadows of the tracks that had been dedicated to them. I found myself wondering whether Iyer’s current faculty position at Harvard University may be smoothing off some of the sharper edges that made his earlier recordings more engaging.

At the end of the day, I do not feel quick to lay all the blame on Harvard. While there were many things that disappointed me about Iyer’s San Francisco Performances concert with cellist Matt Haimovitz last Saturday night, lack of imagination was not one of them. Indeed, as I look through all of the Iyer albums that I have accumulated, I have been struck by the ways in which working with different personnel led him to take his capacity for inventiveness in new directions. Perhaps it really is the case that, as creative improvisers, Iyer and Taborn may have exhausted their capacity to engage imaginatively with each other.