North-American pianist of Indian descent Vijay Iyer (b. 1971, USA) is an example of the demands faced by any musician in the twenty-first century. Although he had classical training in violin when he was a child, Iyer is essentially a self-taught musician with an academic curriculum including studies in math, physics, musical cognition and, finally, composition and improvisation. Once he made the decision of being a professional musician, he has been building up a remarkable body of work as composer, improviser and collaborator of important jazz musicians such as Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman and, more recently, Wadada Leo Smith. Vijay Iyer’s career is marked by two central artistic partnerships: with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and, outside of jazz’s boundaries, with hip-hop producer and poet Mike Ladd. More recently, Iyer has composed music for films, concerts and dance and has been working extensively in several bands, namely in trio, in duo with Wadada Leo Smith and in sextet. An eclectic and brainy musician, Vijay Iyer already possesses a body of work that, in its several artistic dimensions and intentions, can be considered one of the most relevant in modern jazz.

Vijay Iyer’s most recent project is precisely this new trio in which the pianist is accompanied by Malayan bassist Linda May Han Oh and by North-American drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who recorded the album “Uneasy”, released in 2021 by reputed jazz label ECM. In his second work in the format of a trio, Iyer gathers several originals composed during the course of twenty years, plus two reinterpretations of Cole Porter and Geri Allen’s compositions, and transfigures them through the sound created by two musicians who, besides orbiting very similar musical universes, share a common purpose of dissolving the formal frontiers in music and to explore wide spectra of meanings. As the album title indicates, this trio’s music sound disquiet and turbulent as the times haunting it, shaded by an atmosphere of implicit threat, but, nonetheless, its malign energies are electrified by the regenerative possibility contained it the act of creation of the new.