The Transitory Poems

Listen on Presto Music. Free thirty day trial. Find out more.

There’s co-operation and confrontation, unity and conflict, subtle transitions and headlong interventions. The music just flows from one state to another with a mixture of energy and grace. — BBC Music Magazine, June 2019 More…

Release Date: 15th Mar 2019
Catalogue No: 7730119
Label: ECM
Length: 74 minutes

Presto Recording of the Week

22nd March 2019
BBC Music Magazine

June 2019

Jazz Choice

In stock

Usually despatched within 1 working day

Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn: Life Line (Seven Tensions)

Work length13:06

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Vijay Iyer (piano), Craig Taborn (piano)
Recorded: 2018-03-12
Recording Venue: Liszt Academy, Budapest

Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn: Sensorium

Work length4:19

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Vijay Iyer (piano), Craig Taborn (piano)
Recorded: 2018-03-12
Recording Venue: Liszt Academy, Budapest

Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn: Kairòs

Work length8:59

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Vijay Iyer (piano), Craig Taborn (piano)
Recorded: 2018-03-12
Recording Venue: Liszt Academy, Budapest

Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn: S.H.A.R.D.S.

Work length9:12

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Vijay Iyer (piano), Craig Taborn (piano)
Recorded: 2018-03-12
Recording Venue: Liszt Academy, Budapest

Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn: Shake Down

Work length6:40

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Vijay Iyer (piano), Craig Taborn (piano)
Recorded: 2018-03-12
Recording Venue: Liszt Academy, Budapest

Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn: Clear Monolith

Work length10:51

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Vijay Iyer (piano), Craig Taborn (piano)
Recorded: 2018-03-12
Recording Venue: Liszt Academy, Budapest

Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn: Luminous Brew

Work length8:17

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Vijay Iyer (piano), Craig Taborn (piano)
Recorded: 2018-03-12
Recording Venue: Liszt Academy, Budapest

Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn, Geri Allen: Meshwork / Libation / When Kabuya Dances

Work length12:48

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Vijay Iyer (piano), Craig Taborn (piano)
Recorded: 2018-03-12
Recording Venue: Liszt Academy, Budapest

About
Reviews
Explore

About

Recording of the Week, Vijay Iyer & Craig Taborn

22nd March 2019

Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn take the road less travelled on this fascinating document of a live concert from Budapest on ECM.

Pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, two of creative music’s most resourceful players and two of its most distinctive improvisers, learned to meld and mesh their artistic approaches inside Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory ensemble in 2002.

Since then, Iyer and Taborn have continued to play concerts together. The Transitory Poems, recorded live at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest, in March 2018, is their first duo album. A marvel of shared invention, it incorporates pieces offered as tributes to formative influences including pianists Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams and Geri Allen, and the painter and sculptor Jack Whitten.

Iyer and Taborn’s first shared ECM credit was the 2007 Roscoe Mitchell album Far Side (recently reprised in the box set The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles) but each has a considerable body of acclaimed recordings made for the label over the past decade.

Reviews

June 2019

There’s co-operation and confrontation, unity and conflict, subtle transitions and headlong interventions. The music just flows from one state to another with a mixture of energy and grace.

August 2019

‘Kairos’, one of the most effective tracks, begins tentatively, but builds to a gripping rolling climax. ‘Life Line’ offers bluesy probings against a walking bass, evolving into spiky turbulence and then a forbidding vamp. In the final track, ‘Meshwork/Libation/When Kabuya Dances’, intense exchanges push the two-piano format to its limits in a beautifully paced, eventful exhibition of free improvisation as compositional method.

May 2019

With the talent of each artist well established, the question is whether they are able to successfully combine their resources. The music mostly says yes. The fluidity of the phrasing, the unbroken momentum, the kind of rhythmic ‘streaming’ that has significant precedents... the many moments of beauty are quite captivating.

22nd March 2019

A great deal of the pleasure of this set comes from the development of often abstract melodic ideas, and how both players support each other as the motifs develop. Although there is plenty of fire on the record, the textures rarely get overly dense and we don’t lose sight of the path. Indeed, the most immediately striking aspect on first listen is just how composed much of it sounds, and I mean this in the best sense.

The Transitory Poems

CD

Downloads

Contents

Recording of the Week, Vijay Iyer & Craig Taborn

Download queue