Recording of the Week, Vijay Iyer & Craig Taborn

The Transitory Poems is the first duo release from Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, a working relationship stretching back to 2002 when they worked together in Roscoe Mitchell's group The Note Factory. The seeds for this current project were sown as The Note Factory evolved over the years from a hard blowing group into something more akin to chamber improv. The two pianists were given increasingly complex notated music to improvise around by Mitchell, forcing them to rely on each other.

Of course both have had great success as solo artists in their own right and stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the cutting edge in terms of contemporary piano improvisation. Some of the stylistic contrasts between the two dovetail nicely within this duo context - Iyer tends towards a more analytical approach with often jagged, insistent rhythms, which works well with Taborn’s more playful, filigree lines. But these are subtle differences and ultimately on this occasion it is near impossible to discern who is playing what. 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. From the get-go there is drive and purpose to the music, with Iyer and Taborn walking the fine line between pre-prepared structures and themes and improvisation very convincingly. The synchronicity is so strong that if one wasn’t aware that this is a duo there are many sections that sound like a solo performance. The fact that this was recorded in front of a (inaudible) live audience at the Liszt Hall in Budapest underlines just how confident and familiar within their own idiom these players are.

The album also stands as a moving homage to several artists who had passed away prior to the concert - Cecil Taylor, Richard Muhal Abrams, Geri Allen, and artist Jack Whitten. Luminous Brew, the title being a play on Taylor's epic album It is in the Brewing Luminous draws upon that firebrand’s sheer energy, recalling solo marathons like Silent Tongues, but with airier and less claustrophobic textures. Although I found this to be one of the less interesting pieces I can imagine in the live context it would have been exhilarating. More convincing is the closing track, dedicated to Geri Allen which starts by tossing around motifs from one of her early tunes “When Kabuya Dances” into the maelstrom of the improvisation Meshwork / Libation, before the energy finally dissipates and Allen’s theme appears in a gently moving close to the album.

Aside from the jazz dedications it is also clear that Iyer and Taborn have a deep knowledge of the twentieth century piano repertoire. Compare the fleeting moods of opening piece Life Line (Seven Tensions) to some of the quieter moments from Schoenberg’s evolutionary Piano Suite Op.25 or the Six Little Pieces Op.19. They share a similar sense of repose, clarity of line, and echoes of rhythmic figures like the gavotte, but with a sense of rhythm that only jazz artists can bring to the table. Ligeti’s late Piano Études also come to mind when Iyer or Taborn create a harmonic continuum (pun intended) for the other to skip across, or Messiaen's Vingt Regards in some of the more mysterious, reflective passages.

With 2019 marking the 50th anniversary of ECM it's reassuring that the label continues to maintain a commitment to this kind of challenging and un-categorisable music-making, a project which will never become the label's next Officium. When I played it here in the Presto office a colleague asked if it was Ives. In fact the title of The Transitory Poems does have something of an Ivesian, transcendentalist ring to it. And like Ives’s music, this is music existing in the here and now - though the journey may get rocky in places, Iyer and Taborn reward us with some incredible views.