8:30pm.
Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith
"Powerfully transfixing...brings ideas of resistance and liberation into primary focus. It's a manifestation of core convictions for Smith and Iyer, arriving at a charged and turbulent moment."
– NPR Music
“Sublime, meditative…a calming masterpiece.” - Glide
Two of creative music’s most heralded luminaries, each feted with prizes and critical accolades from across the globe, composer-pianist Vijay Iyer and composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith construct powerful, uncategorizable duets full of subtle emotion, mystery, and spiritual intensity. Their music reveals the improvisational magic of the duo, the expressive individuality of the participants, and the ways that they can – as Smith says – “merge as a single wave, or a single voice.”
Referring to Smith as his “hero, friend and teacher,” Iyer played in the AACM icon’s “Golden Quartet” from 2005 through 2012. Their duo, first formed in the crucible of that band, received sweeping praise for their 2016 album A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM). Nine years later, with Smith now an octogenarian, the duo returns with spellbinding music from their March 2025 release Defiant Life (ECM). As Iyer writes in the liner notes to Defiant Life, “This recording session was shaped by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility.”
“What follows might be a two-figure play in which the exchanges involve mortality or impermanence or divinity. The musicians seem to trade remarks and sometimes talk with one another … The discourses are both cultivated and passionate.” As The New Yorker so poetically described, the visionary collaborations of Smith and Iyer express the rigor, care, and strength of a deep human connection spanning generations and nurtured over decades.
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