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Fieldwork: Your Life Flashes (Pi Recordings)


 

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product information:

Personnel:



Vijay Iyer-keyboards

Elliot Humberto Kavee-percussion

Aaron Stewart-bass


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UPC: 808713000528

Label: Pi Recordings
Catalog ID: PI 05
Squidco Product Code: 837

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2002
Country: USA
Packaging: Jewel Tray
Recorded at Sorcerer Sound, in New York City, New York, on March 27th, 2002 by Cookie Marenco.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"The first four releases from Pi Recordings feature brilliant but underappreciated veteran jazz giants: Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, and Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet. But the label also looks to jazz's future with Your Life Flashes by Fieldwork, a collective trio of inspired and vibrant young jazz men. The group's leader (unofficial, perhaps, but he wrote ten of the twelve tunes) is pianist Vijay Iyer, who sounds like a man possessed here. He's from the percussive school of piano. Think Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner, but with an urgency and perhaps an outsider's perspective. As the son of Indian immigrants, Iyer apparently has a deep knowledge of the music from his parents' homeland. And while the influence of Indian music isn't in-your-face on his compositions, it is there in a rhythmic undercurrent, married to a very American groove. And more than anything, it's this groove suffused with a free jazz clamor that makes this recording so compelling and fresh. Saxophonist Aaron Stewart and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee are Iyer's band mates on Fieldwork; and what's interesting about their sound-apart from the driving urgency-is the way the trio shares the rhythm chores. Fieldwork is a densely, deeply polyrhythmic band. While Iyer and Kavee set up a a couple of different grooves apiece, Aaron Stewart's saxophone grit seems to polish the "avant garde-ness" off the overall sound, an attempt to pull it toward the mainstream, before he slips into a rhythm mode and Iyer takes flight. Your Life Flashes sounds foreign and familiar and avant-garde and mainstream all at the same time. Vijay Iyer has drawn from his experiece playing in Roscoe Mitchell's band, a unit that can do the same thing. With his talent, energy, and brashness plus his outsider's perspective, he is taking jazz on new and facinating tangent. If you're interested in hearing change and innovation anchored in the jazz tradition, Iyer is a player to follow. Start with Fieldwork."-Dan Mcclenaghan


Artist Biographies

"Described by The New York Times as a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway," VIJAY IYER has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last twenty-five years, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation.

He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German "Echo" awards, and was voted Downbeat Magazine's Jazz Artist of the Year four times in the last decade. He has been praised by Pitchfork as "one of the best in the world at what he does," by the Los Angeles Weekly as "a boundless and deeply important young star," and by Minnesota Public Radio as "an American treasure."

Iyer's musical language is grounded in the rhythmic traditions of South Asia and West Africa, the African American creative music movement of the 60s and 70s, and the lineage of composer-pianists from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk to Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen. He has released twenty-four albums of his music, most recently UnEasy (ECM Records, 2021), a trio session with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; The Transitory Poems (ECM, 2019), a live duo recording with pianist Craig Taborn; Far From Over (ECM, 2017) with the award-winning Vijay Iyer Sextet; and A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) a suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.

Iyer is also an active composer for classical ensembles and soloists. His works have been commissioned and premiered by Brentano Quartet, Imani Winds, Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Silk Road Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, and virtuosi Matt Haimowitz, Claire Chase, Shai Wosner, and Jennifer Koh, among others. He recently served as composer-in-residence at London's Wigmore Hall, music director of the Ojai Music Festival, and artist-in-residence at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A tireless collaborator, he has written big-band music for Arturo O'Farrill and Darcy James Argue, remixed classic recordings of Talvin Singh and Meredith Monk, joined forces with legendary musicians Henry Threadgill, Reggie Workman, Zakir Hussain, and L. Subramanian, and developed interdisciplinary work with Teju Cole, Carrie Mae Weems, Mike Ladd, Prashant Bhargava, and Karole Armitage.

A longtime New Yorker, Iyer lives in central Harlem with his wife and daughter. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a Steinway artist."

-Vijay Iyer Website (https://vijay-iyer.com/about/)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Elliot Humberto Kavee has performed/recorded ground-breaking new music with Omar Sosa, Joseph Jarman, Henry Threadgill, Steve Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Francis Wong, Ben Goldberg, John Tchicai, Glenn Horiuchi, Elliot Sharp, Tim Berne, Jon Jang, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Vijay Iyer, and his own projects. Before moving to New York, he was the drummer of choice among the San Francisco Bay Area's most gifted creative musicians, playing on over 40 critically acclaimed recordings. In addition, Kavee was a musician, composer, musical director, actor and writer with the Tony award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe for seven years - the only musical director in the group's 40 year history to win a dramalogue award. He was a percussionist, cellist and composer with the Club Foot Orchestra, who performed their score for G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box at Lincoln Center. His collaboration with Asian-American Jazz pioneer Francis Wong has yielded 20 recordings and countless performances. As a founding member of the trail-blazing Omar Sosa Sextet, Kavee recorded four CD's and has toured the world. For his debut recording as a solo performer (on Eliasound records), "not only did Kavee make his skin and metallic percussion instruments sing by effecting a polytimbral/polyrhythmic approach, he further mixed up the program by doubling on cello. (Yes: drums and strings, one player, at the same time.")"- SF Weekly

-SF Weekly (https://pirecordings.com/artist/Elliot+Humberto_Kavee)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. In Medias Res 6:03

2. Accumulated Gestures 5:43

3. Sublimation 4:37

4. Generations 5:49

5. Mosaic 4:51

6. Sympathy 4:21

7. Step Lively 2:53

8. Horoscape 4:51

9. The Inner World 5:29

10. Path Of Action (For Horace Tapscott) 5:24

Related Categories of Interest:

Free Improvisation
Trio Recordings
Before April-2006
Pi Records
Improvised Music
Piano & Keyboards
Free Improvisation
Trio Recordings
Before April-2006

Search for other titles on the label:
Pi Recordings.


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The Squid's Ear Magazine

The Squid's Ear Magazine

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