Break Stuff - Vijay Iyer Trio

Track list:

1. Starlings
2. Chorale
3. Diptych
4. Hood
5. Work
6. Taking Flight
7. Blood Count
8. Break Stuff
9. Mystery Woman
10. Geese
11. Countdown
12. Wrens

Running time: 70 minutes
Released: 2015

So much for momentum. A busy and varied week back at work, a bunch of evening engagements and a full day of boardgaming on Saturday mean that another week has passed with no post. This purchase was directly related to a positive opinion of Accelerando back in 2014. Like many new buys, I am not sure if I ever gave it a listen before now... possibly thinking "it's a B, it'll surface soon" at the time. Over a year later (there are a lot of Bs it turns out), its time to finally give it a go.

It has been a mild winter until the last couple of weeks, and I find myself shivering along to the trembling high notes that open Starlings. It's a strange piece that never really seems to get going, and yet disappears in no time... so I have to check and I find that somehow I started it playing in the lead out. What the hell? Starting again (how I didn't want to have to do that on a disc that runs over an hour already), there is a much more rounded track here. Heavy percussion (all relative) and a sparse, much lighter piano, though the tones are not as flighty as the volume setting, a little disturbing in places... unsettling. It wouldn't feel out of place soundtracking some dark night scene. The piano fades into the shivering notes that I first heard as the piece closes and this time I let it run on into Chorale, which has a much more stately air.

Slow, piano alone to begin with before the bass and drums are added as soft undertones. The character of the track changes a minute or more in, the volume rising the support growing in strength and the playing more statement like. An almost funereal tone jettisoned for a more recognisably jazzy approach. It is still a little tempestuous though, not easy listening and not a relax back into things tune, notes roiling around with beats and crashes. I am not sure why but I am picturing someone struggling to stay afloat on a troubled sea, cast overboard. Like with Starlings, the ending has a different character - it almost immediately quietens, stills, then stops. Neither of these pieces have really conformed to my hopes for piano-led jazz, which I really want to have soothe and relax me, even when it has a stronger or more energetic presentation.

It might be the cold (it's not that cold really!) but I find myself struggling to type today. Fingers going over all the wrong keys, mind ahead of hands, gobbledygook arising from my digits and a lot of backspace delete. Diptych is also somewhat edgy. There is no pattern here to sink into and it feels broken, pieces put together every which way. It works, in a sense, but it feels like graft to get through it. Hood is staccato to a fault, disjointed, disembodied sounds somehow wound together in a way that  nevertheless manages to offer something more. It has an intensity about it, mostly created by hammering the same notes a lot. The effect is like a mash-up, snippets of other tunes looped several times each and cut in and amongst each other. There are points where those loops are left to go too long and too many cycles, but generally they make a good fist of moving the pattern along before each segment gets unbearably repetitive.

This is, I feel an album that - if played to a non-jazz enthusiast - would confirm several stereotypes about the genre. Its a little all over the place, unstructured and giving the impression that there was no goal, or that the group didn't know what they were trying to achieve when they set out on any given track. I suppose that if you take the album title as ethos it makes a bit more sense; break the rules, break with tradition, break the mould... yet all whilst conforming to the outside viewpoint. There are elements of... reggae or dub rhythms in places, which gave my ear a prod, there is a lot going on. There is a swirl of sounds, short and quick transitions, no one theme getting a long play treatment. Its all a little much; I must still be tuckered out from yesterday's mental exertions. There are elements here I like, and I think this album enriches others by its presence. For each prematurely killed theme, I value Esbjörn Svensson's best works more. Break Stuff provides a contrast, and that is valuable in itself, not that there aren't other merits here.

Blood Count is a softer, piano-centric tune, an oasis of calm amidst the calamitous crashings and ever-shifting sands of the other pieces. It feels a little out of place, lonely and lost. I very much like it for itself and for providing contrast within the context of the work, so I don't have to look outside the disc for reference. The title track picks up this baton, too. Whilst it returns to a busier sound, it provides a tune with a sense of continuity that I found missing in the earlier tracks, then breaks itself as if to make a point. Its effective, though when it gets stuck in a rut of repeating short phrases soon thereafter the magic of the effect is quick to wear off. I find myself rather confused, not sure whether I really like this or cannot stand it for itself. I then find myself wondering whether that has something with the ossification of taste with age. I have definitely been buying less new music in the past year or two, and keeping up with new releases has gone out the window entirely. In my mind's eye I still crave novelty, but how true is that really?

Some of the brasher sounds here are novel, and some of the combinations - the playing really is exceptional in its meshing of the three instruments - are delightful. I still seem to be wavering on whether much of it is enjoyable though. Constantly wondering about how this doesn't seem to stack up to favourites rather than appreciating what it is. There is always a line somewhere; is Break Stuff crossing one? 

The opening sounds of Geese could, if you squint, be taken as the honking those animals make. This beginning is trying - sparse to the point that I am confused as to whether some of the softer sounds I hear are on the record or background noise coming in from outside. Certainly that emergency siren is the road, but other more subtle squeaks and susurrations? By the half-way mark the tune has picked up and is offering more. I was about to say some consistent theme again, but it abruptly broke and changed on me, turning into a plodding yet irregular, disconnected stroll. That pattern is interesting, though I don't like how they implemented the switch, and it develops into a more easily followed strand again.

One thing I will say for certain... this is not Sunday lunchtime music. This time of the week should be about many things, but not hard work, and simply keeping up with Iyer's piano at times is exhausting. He can certainly rattle those keys apace when he wants to, and the breakneck speed at which ideas are picked up, explored and discarded over the course of this album means you are racing to keep up. That's why I liked Blood Count so much - it was an opportunity to switch off a bit whilst still paying attention. Many of the other tracks are dense with either sheer note count or a multitude of different sub-clauses which are picked up and then dumped in short order. As we head into the final piece and the final few minutes, the one sentence summation is "all over the shop." Yet for all that I am disinclined to start cutting pieces out, as if doing so would somehow diminish what was left. Part of that may be the problems that I would have in identifying which tunes to drop, but much is that sense of worth, of difference, and the perspective they offer on music beyond the limits of this disc. Whilst I am waffling on, Wrens is actually proving a much more accessible closer, a more tuneful use of the piano, and the bass and drums supporting in a more traditional manner. I wonder if there is any significance to the fact that first and last tracks are both named for birds, which is probably a suitably random question on which to close.