This was, of course, the sine qua non approach of the 1959-61 Bill Evans Trio, with further admixtures from Paul Bley’s harmonic ambiguities, Andrew Hill’s dark hues, McCoy Tyner’s peaks and troughs, and the frequently-commented-upon cap-doffing of Iyer’s trio to the flow of the great pianistic bebopper himself, Bud Powell. Iyer’s fellow band members, bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, conduct a three way conversation, with absolutely no grandstanding from anyone. Happily, this is far from the case with Uneasy, and this is an album of mostly quiet triumphs, subtle escalations and unshowy virtuosity, delivered with an immaculate sound balance and ambience.
Most artists, of many and various persuasions, can become subsumed by the famous and much-discussed ‘ECM sound’ (label manager and producer Manfred Eicher remains present here, as co-producer with Iyer himself), a factor which can be seen as both a boon and a potential curse for musicians who want to be heard as ‘individuals’, not as drones filtered through a ‘studio factory’. Or have I misjudged the photo, and the boat is in fact, entering into the New York waters? America as a ‘hostile environment’? Or perhaps as a lost opportunity? It’s unusually thought-provoking and ambiguous for an ECM product. The album cover, whilst in many ways being ‘standard ECM’, with its grey extended landscape, all clouds and cluster, with suggestions of fastnesses and vastness, also features, unusually, a specifically solid and iconic image, that of the Statue of Liberty, seen receding from the stern of a departing boat, with two spumes of spray in the foreground. So it is nice, in the light of this unpleasantness, to hear a towering performance by a trio ‘led’ by just one of these vilified Asian-Americans, the pianist Vijay Iyer, on its latest recording, Uneasy, released on ECM Records, a label which has fairly recently (2019) celebrated its fiftieth birthday. Vijay Iyer and ECM Records: (Un)Easy Listeningĭonald Trump’s infamous (infra)dig about ‘Kung Flu’, his witlessly racist name for the Covid-19 epidemic, was also indirectly a kick in the teeth for Asian-Americans, who have suffered the inevitable backlash caused by the orange loser’s jibe (whether Trump was bright enough to see the connection is open to debate, however).