TELEGRAPH Review: TRIO 3 & VIJAY IYER

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, UK / 10th SEPTEMBER 2014

Trio 3 & Vijay Iyer, Wiring, album review

Trio 3 are joined by Vijay Iyer, that intellectually self-aware pianist, on their new jazz album Wiring

Trio 3 + Vijay Iyer are Olive Lake, Reggie Workman (below left), Andrew Cyrille and pianist Vijay Iyer Photo: www.intaktrec.ch

By Ivan Hewett, Jazz Critic

2:20PM BST 10 Sep 2014

The incandescent free jazz of late John Coltrane and Albert Ayler lives on, in Trio 3. In recent years, they’ve released a number of albums on the Intakt label with pianists who share their free spirit. On the latest they’re joined by Vijay Iyer, that intellectually self-aware pianist who unites a reverence for the American tradition with memories of his Indian parentage.

Iyer embraces to the visionary aesthetic of the Trio, which means he’s had to rein in his fascination with pattern and number. However it peeps out here and there, particularly in the repeating bass patterns of Slimm, the first movement of the Suite for Travyon (and Thousands More).

You’d expect anger in a piece in memory of the black teenager Travyon Martin, shot by a neighbourhood watchman in a case that’s still unresolved.

In fact it’s movingly restrained, and has a tone of stoic dignity. In Reggie Workman’s Willow Song Iyer often shadows Oliver Lake’s saxophone melody, before spinning off into some free-wheeling idea of his own. The effect is of something so big it casts a soft-edged shadow. As always with this trio, the blues is never far away, and the pull between that earthiness and the music’s freewheeling impulse is fascinating.

Trio 3 & Vijay Iyer: Wiring (Intakt Records)

Trio 3 & Jason Moran - review in THE GUARDIAN

THE GUARDIAN

25 July 2013

4 out of 5 Trio 3 Plus Jason Moran

 Refraction - Breakin' Glass

  (Intakt Records)

by John Fordham

That raw, elemental, soul-baring jazz sound inspired by Albert Ayler and late-period John Coltrane has fewer guardians nowadays, perhaps as cutting-edge jazz has reverted to structures, albeit more precisely mathematical ones. But three of its most creative current representatives are Trio 3 – performers with close connections to the African-American "New Thing" of the 1960s in sometime Coltrane bassist Reggie Workman, drummer Andrew Cyrille, and World Saxophone Quartet alto and sopranino player Oliver Lake. Trio 3 date from 1986, but they've enjoyed very fruitful recent collaborations with brilliant contemporary pianists – Geri Allen and Irène Schweizer, and now Charles Lloyd sideman Jason Moran. Long passages on this set still involve the uninhibited Lake unleashing wild, multiphonic sounds and high-end inquisitions, or Workman scurrying through tumbling group-improv episodes with dark bowed-bass slurs. But the set is full of good tunes, too, such as the nu-funky, distantly Bad Plus-like title track, Cyrille's free-swinging Listen and the jarring, exclamatory Vamp. Moran steers everybody with ingenious hooks, and his own loose-limbed solos show how inventive he can be whether the setup is prescriptive or non-existent.