Pianist
Vijay Iyer's fifth album for
ECM, 2017's fiery sextet date
Far from Over, follows his superb 2016 collaboration with trumpeter
Wadada Leo Smith,
A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke. Where that album found
Iyer and
Smith engaged in a deeply interconnected series of often abstract chamber improvisations, here we find him exploding outward, but with no less interconnectedness between him and his bandmates. Joining
Iyer is his adept sextet featuring cornetist
Graham Haynes, alto saxophonist
Steve Lehman, tenor saxophonist
Mark Shim, bassist
Stephan Crump, and drummer
Tyshawn Sorey. Together, they play with an exuberance and a flair for group interplay that brings to mind such classic ensembles as
Miles Davis' late-'60s groups and
Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band. The
Hancock influence explicitly comes to mind here on cuts like the eerie "Wake" and the spacy "End of the Tunnel," in which
Haynes' cornet, filtered through a soupy, acidic delay, swims like an aquatic alien through
Iyer's endless Fender Rhodes and piano soundscapes. Similarly, the hip-hop slow-burn-funk of "Nope" finds
Haynes,
Shim, and
Lehman dropping dissonantly soulful melodic statements like shards of glass onto
Iyer's warm Rhodes bed. Elsewhere,
Iyer's group dives headlong into a tantalizing cross-cultural aesthetic on cuts like "Far from Over," with its edgy, Eastern European-meets-Indian classical folk dance rhythm, and "Good on the Ground," in which
Sorey deftly bashes his way through the song's roiling post-bop raga. No less engaging are the album's more straight-ahead tracks like the rambunctious post-bop swinger "Down to the Wire" and the unnerving and elegiac "Threnody," both of which draw upon the far-eyed spirituality and muscular improvisational style of late-'60s
John Coltrane. What's particularly engaging about
Far from Over is
Iyer and his band's sense of danger and risk-taking. Ultimately, it's that balance of harmonically adventurous exploration and no-holds-barred blowing that make
Far from Over nothing short of thrilling. ~ Matt Collar