The following is jazz journalist Morgan Enos’s interview with pianist and electronicist Vijay Iyer and trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith. Their second duo album, Defiant Life, was released 21 March via ECM Records. Links to purchase the album, and to Iyer and Smith’s websites, can be found at the end of this article.
“Should something happen, or should it stay as is?” posits Vijay Iyer. On the surface, it’s a nebulous dichotomy: action or inaction? But in the context of a recording studio – alongside the creative music legend Wadada Leo Smith, and ECM founder/producer Manfred Eicher – that question takes on so many dimensions.
It can be boiled down, however, to the idea of creativity as defiance – hence Defiant Life’s title.
“The stance of an artist is a defiant stance, because on some level, we’re not supposed to be doing it,” Iyer continues. “No one asked us to, and by and large, they seem to not want us to.” Smith takes it a step further: “It’s something we cannot possibly stop from being made,” he says. “It touches areas untouched by any other kind of institutional source on the planet.”
Accordingly, Defiant Life feels unadulterated by expectations or paradigms. As sparse, elemental, and heady as one might expect from an ECM duo album, Iyer and Smith’s second album together also feels tactile and real. Within this atmospheric program, every chalk-scraping note from Smith and terse, punctuative reply from Iyer renders survival strangely subversive.
Below, the intergenerational collaborators hold forth on Defiant Life. They play Wigmore Hall in London on 31 October.
UK Jazz News: To me, defiance doesn’t mean having all the answers. It’s far afield from diminished forms of defiance, like self-righteousness. It’s a posture, a combat stance. What does the word mean to you?
Wadada Leo Smith: I’ll say it this way: we’re already demonstrating defiance in the sense that we mark art. Art is an implication of defiance, and there’s no art made when there’s absence of life. Those are two crucial, connecting tissues of presence.
Even just the idea of resistance, of not allowing this to happen in our name – those are kind of cool things, but they are actually the absolute lowest form of resistance. The great Central African leader Patrice Lamumba showed the pure example of a defiant life, and [Palestinian professor, poet and writer] Refaat Alareer showed the pure example of a defiant life.
Both of them: not just in the liberation of their countries, but in the fact they used their sacrifice as a method, or pathway, or bridge towards that liberation. It was not advanced upon them by some kind of force or voting commitment. It was chosen and selected by them precisely based on the level of their commitment to liberty and justice.
Vijay Iyer: I think what were individual choices to make pieces about those two men – in Wadada’s case, about Patrice Lamumba, and in my case, about Refaat Alareer – were not merely in dedication to them, but a moment, an opportunity to study them. To actually study the course of their work and their lives, and, like you said, the ongoing moments of defiance that characterised their entire way of being. That is what we remember them for.
That became the frame for this album, but it’s also not out of the ordinary, I think, for either of us to work that way. A lot of it is what I learned from working with Mr. Smith for 20 years.
This method of art-making as a form of investigation, it’s not science. [Chuckles] It’s something else. Which is: what does it mean to seek inspiration through that method, and then to share it, to broadcast it and propagate it in that way? Not just doing deep dives, but using them as a method of engagement with the world?
I guess the word ‘defiance’ in this day and age almost doesn’t do enough, because all words have been cheapened. All discourse has been cheapened.
But I think that the practice we’re taking part in allows you to think differently about the moment you’re in. We use the present to tunnel into the past, recover something about it, and understand its ongoing significance.
WLS: It’s not static at all. And the reason words have become cheap today – and, I mean, literally, you can buy a barrel of words for a bowl of spit, basically – is because words used to have sound, power, and action in them. They used to infer all of that, and what they infer now is one’s ability to Google it or search it in some kind of way, which is not really research. It’s a kind of functionality that we attribute to communication.
But, look, Vijay and I look across at each other [on Zoom], and instantly, 100,000 pieces of data and information have been transferred without a single word, you see? And instantly, that same information that we just shared reciprocally is put into practice.
UKJN: How do we defy the very real cheapening of language, when it carves such a massive scoop out of human value and dignity and experience?
WLS: We’re in America. We’ve already had a coup, and once you’ve had a coup, there’s only one recourse. And that is answering no to everything.
And it takes time. ‘No’ is a progressive accumulation of action and power. The time to have motivated this idea of ‘no’ would have been before the coup. But after the coup, you have no choice, because you can’t refine a coup. You can’t make a coup better. You can’t pretend that liberty and justice and rights and conditions don’t matter. The coup snatches the cover off of everything.
VI: Right? Because the language of the state, the governing documents, that kind of stuff fails to matter. It fails to count. That itself has been undermined, so that you can’t kind of lie, like the logic of even citizenship. That is not a given, despite what we think about ourselves.
UKJN: Vijay, can you expand on the concept of the ‘aesthetic of necessity’ between you two, and your overall hookup in the studio while making Defiant Life?
VI: When I wrote that phrase, it was to describe an experience I had with Mr. Smith on our first gig together 20 years ago. It was at Banlieues Bleues Festival in Paris with his band, Golden Quartet – a reforming of that group with myself, [drummer] Ronald Shannon Jackson, and [bassist] John Lindberg.
That was the first time that we experienced playing as a duo, and it was necessary, because in the context of that concert, there was a moment or two where things kind of collapsed. So, we had to make something from that to get to the next destination.
So, that is what I mean. It’s not an idea. It’s a description of what happened. We’re always doing what needs to happen next. It may be in our control; it may not be; but it always has this feeling of inevitability to it, and purpose.
UKJN: It sounds like collapse isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
WLS: Ensemble crisis has happened with every ensemble out there in the world. There’s a very famous one that happened with Bob Marley onstage in London. He threw his hands up, and the band didn’t respond. So, he held his hand up for a considerable amount of seconds, and repeated the same song. On the next queue, they went back into the song.
So, it’s a normal reality from one end of the expanse to the next. Crisis is part of the normal flow of stuff. Some break down completely, some not. Some architect [themselves] to break down.
I’ve been performing with the Golden Quartet, absent Vijay, where I walked around to all five players, took the scores off their stands, walked back to my seat, and put them down beside me, and they had to play music. Those things are normal. But the person that learns from them, that skilfully dissects them and puts them back in to play – that’s the beauty there, you see.
VI: The last piece on the album, ‘Procession: Defiant Life’: you [Wadada] remarked that it was a perfect piece of music. And the reason was because of how things converge in the final minute. It initially feels like some mysterious and unknown territory, and very gradually, over 10 or so minutes, things coalesce into this moment of completely intentional and unified resolution.
