Pianist-composer Vijay Iyer

Vijay Iyer’s music has an almost frantic energy that pulsates through his work with Fieldwork, his own trio, and now on his first solo album that was released last week. Like his contemporary Brad Mehldau, Iyer embraces artists outside of the traditional jazz sphere. He covered M.I.A on his highly praised Historicity and this time tackles Steven Pocaro and John Bettis’ “Human Nature” that was popularized by the late Michael Jackson. It’s not the first jazz cover of the song I’ve heard – Ravi Coltrane and Jack DeJohnette put their particularly rousing stamp on it at the Blue Note last year – but it’s striking nonetheless.

Iyer’s technical skills are staggeringly impressive, but he’s not the kind of musician that has to play as many notes as physically possible to hold an audience captive. Instead, he chooses to take it in the opposite direction, connecting the verse and chorus with a single vibrating note that’s supported by highly syncopated chord changes. As a result, the song is given space to build as it progresses through it’s six minute running time without feeling overly repetitive despite not having the lyrics to distract.

This inventive interpretation opens the album, setting the pace for the rest to follow. There are a handful of straight up jazz tunes - including a pair of Duke Ellington compositions (“Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Fleurette Africaine”) along with Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy” and the standard, “Darn That Dream” – but even these have a fresh air to them. Iyer plays “Epistrophy” at such a lightening speed it’s nearly an assault of the senses. Much like a good punk song, when you’re done with it you feel like someone’s bashed your head around underwater, and you’ve just surfaced for air. It’s exhilarating, though thankfully it’s followed by the more tranquil, “Darn That Dream.”

Iyer’s own compositions fill the middle of the album, allowing him to express more abstract shades of abilities. The atmospheric “Prelude: Heartpiece” kicks off a quartet of songs that includes an eight minute composition, “Patterns”, that begins in a rare quite moment with a simple melody that spazzes out a minute or so into constantly evolving and ferociously paced patterns. Iyer’s musical ear is quite good, but I often found myself wishing he would just slow down and savor what he’s creating. This happens largely in “Desiring”, which feels similar in tone to his “Human Nature” cover.

It’s amazing how connected all the notes feel, not just in melodic structure but in their physical relationship to each other. It’s as if he has eighty-eight fingers, which might be why there are moments when it’s easy to forget this is a solo album. He fills the space nicely, calling upon bebop and modern influences and filtering them through his unique style. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if he drinks a lot of double espressos. The album has an inescapably caffeinated feel that occasionally grows weary, making me long for quarter notes, half notes, and even a few whole ones. If we’re lucky, maybe his next project will be an album of instrumental ballads. 

Sufjan Stevens is known as much for his talent as sheer ambition (he once said he would make an album for each of the fifty states), so it’s somewhat surprising that a good chunk of his new album, All Delighted People, is inspired by a melody line from Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence.” He expands on it with richly orchestrated sections and repeats it to gain momentum throughout the two tracks that bookend the album. The opening track has the effect of a prologue, encompassing all the textures of the album. It starts off quietly with Sufjan singing against a soft wash of “oohs” and “aahs.” The chorus swells with brass momentarily before retreating into a lull that teases us with the potential musical power that could be unleashed at any moment. At the halfway mark of the twelve-minute piece, everything gets turned up to eleven for a ferocious minute of sonic chaos but then vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

This epic track is followed by “Enchanting Ghost”, that seduces as its title implies, but with little more than guitar and voice, it’s acts almost as a palate cleanser. Upon repeated listens, though, it holds up and reveals itself in complicated textures that are a pleasure to unravel. “Heirloom” has similar instrumentation and a light and incredibly addictive guitar riffs that feels like both a throwback to ‘60s folk and signature Sufjan.

Despite clocking in at nearly sixty minutes, All Delighted People is dubbed an EP. This first struck me as odd – I recently reviewed a full-length album that was half as long – but the more I listened, the more sense it made. Compared to Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lake State and Illinoise, it has much less of a thematic structure and arch. There aren’t any lyrically driven songs like “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” that paint specific, quietly terrifying pictures. Instead, there’s a wash of color and abstract images. It’s as though it was made in an endless cornfield somewhere between civilization and the wilderness. There’s an excitement that pulsates through the eight tracks of an artist pushing his boundaries, inviting us to witness his successes and failures. A beautiful vocal interlude infuses “The Owl and the Tanager” with a mythically classical feel, grounded in in an alt-folk melody.

The result is haunting, drawing the listener back for repeat listening. It achieves a power the title tracks never do, despite their fanfare, which initially captivates but then wane. At nearly twenty minutes together, the “All Delighted People” tracks (original and classic rock versions) wear out their welcome on your ears eventually and can’t help feeling a little bloated. It’s great to hear Sufjan go all out, though, and it pays off in the seventeen-minute finale “Djohariah” that works because of the groove it sets up early on. Reminiscent of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, it builds on the initial groove with bluesy guitar solos, orchestral flourishes, a chorus, and just about everything in his arsenal. There’s a real giddy feeling building throughout the track that almost washes away any of the album’s imperfections and signals that we’ve probably only heard a small fraction of the composer’s depth.

Paul Weitz’s striking and uneven new play, Trust—which runs through September 12th at Second Stage Theater in New York—wrestles, like other Weitz plays, with subversive ideas rarely seen on the stage.  Trust tackles aspects of BDSM with a surprising amount of heart and clarity. Far more than whips and chains, Weitz explores why someone might need to feel at the mercy of another, or conversely, in control. As the show opens the protagonist, Harry (Zach Braff), tells a dominatrix (Sutton Foster) to “dominate me because I’m a piece of shit.” He’s a thirty-something entrepreneur who sold his startup recently for hundreds of millions of dollars, and now feels that his life doesn’t have much purpose.

Watching the play, I realized that the plot doesn’t really matter much and was often undermined by hackneyed choices like deciding to give the dominatrix “daddy” issues and an abusive boyfriend. What’s interesting about it is the way Weitz and director Peter DuBois show us the power of adopting certain roles to play out conflicts that exist in our emotional terrain and are usually forced to remain hidden. There are simple thematic metaphors: Foster’s character learns to trust in her intelligence while Braff’s character learns to trust others by letting go and surrendering his power to someone else. While their motivations don’t always seem completely organic in the context of the show, the dramatic essence of the power play comes across. We don’t need many words to understand this.

Our culture often dismisses subtlety, nuance and context, preferring simpler categorizations of good and evil, gay and straight, left and right, and pain and pleasure. 24-hour news stations seem to get and mostly deserve the blame for this, but this black-and-white thinking is more pervasive. Kinsey’s scale of the many gradations of sexuality has all but been forgotten, and the opposition to the lower Manhattan Mosque proposal shows that we find it hard to distinguish a major religion from a radical terrorist group. But I digress. Drawing a hard line between pleasure and pain (as the characters in Trust discover) closes off a multitude of experiences. Part of this can be explained by scientific evidence that the neurochemical pathways that perceive pain and pleasure are connected, but there’s also a philosophical component articulated by Baruch Spinoza, “there can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope.”

Foster’s controlling boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale) learns this in a pivotal scene where he realizes that the pleasure he was seeking could only be found through pain. As the women clad in fetish wear beat up the men, a couple thoughts went through my mind. I was surprised how comfortable Broadway-darling Sutton Foster looked in an S&M get-up. She seemed to completely understand her character, blending a sadistic darkness with a disarming sweetness. When Braff’s character screamed his safe word, she expressed a deep concern for his well-being and enjoyment with just the look on her face and the way her voice softened.

The other thought I had was, how would the audience react if it were the women in the submissive role being beaten by the men? It seems it might be easier to distinguish play from abuse when a beautiful woman is holding the crop or whip, but if the muscled Cannavale was whipping Foster’s slim body, would it be harder to separate it from images of domestic violence? When the bruises can often look the same, it has to come down to context. In Trust, Weitz shows both the way Cannavale controls and dominates his girlfriend Foster in real life and the play scenes that happen between consenting adults. The play works most effectively when it forces us to confront our preconceptions of pleasure and pain and move beyond them.