Talks & Entertainment

By overwhelming consensus, the Vijay Iyer Trio (Vijay Iyer, piano; Stephan Crump, double bass; Marcus Gilmore, drums) has become one of the pivotal jazz bands of the twenty-first century. Described as “the best piano trio in jazz today” (Der Spiegel), “the great new jazz piano trio” (The New York Times), “truly astonishing” (NPR), and “the best band in jazz” (PopMatters), the trio makes “cutting-edge music, but always accessible” (The Guardian) – emotionally resonant and deeply interactive, radiating groove and brimming with polyrhythmic detail, rooted in tradition yet truly innovative in style and form.

Break Stuff (2015), “the third and best record by Mr. Iyer’s trio” (New York Times) and Iyer’s twentieth release as a leader, was produced by Manfred Eicher for ECM. It received a coveted five stars in DownBeat magazine, and the German newspaper Die Zeit raved, “This record is very, very, very good… as astonishing as it is intoxicating.”

Crucially, as DownBeat notes, “the Vijay Iyer Trio is, at its core, a working band,” distinguished most of all by a profound, seemingly effortless unity, developed over hundreds of performances in nearly a dozen years. As Howard Reich wrote in The Chicago Tribune, “The three players practically have become a single rhythmic organism… one of the great rhythm units of the day.”

The trio earned the admiration of audiences, musicians, and journalists worldwide with its two previous albums, Historicity (ACT, 2009) and Accelerando (ACT, 2012), which were both named #1 jazz album of their respective years in both the DownBeat and JazzTimes international critics’ polls, surveying hundreds of critics. The British magazine Jazzwise went so far as to say, “The Vijay Iyer Trio has the potential to alter the scope, ambition and language of jazz piano forever.”