vijay iyer

APPEARING: MANHATTAN MARATHON @ The Keith Haring Theater, Performance Space NY

With Wadada Leo Smith

Friday, January 10, 2025, 8:30 PM

APPEARING: BROOKLYN MARATHON @ National Sawdust

Saturday, January 11, 2025, 7:30 pm

The Vijay Iyer Trio + 1 featuring Adam O’Farrill

Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith

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 forthcoming 2025 release Defiant Life (ECM).

“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.

The Vijay Iyer Trio + 1 featuring Adam O’Farrill

“This is hyperarticulate, politically urgent music that speaks to where we are and where we should be.” – NPR

“a triumph of small-group interchange and fertile invention. Iyer’s piano work, whether arrestingly skittish or clothed in powerful solemnity, resounds with a visceral intensity of purpose, and his resourceful compatriots respond in kind.” – The New Yorker

Composer-pianist Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, shape-shifting presence in 21st-century music. Voted Downbeat’s Jazz Artist of the Year four times, he has released twenty-six remarkably acclaimed albums; received three Grammy nominations, numerous national and international prizes, and a MacArthur Fellowship; composed for classical soloists, orchestras, and chamber ensembles; and collaborated with poets, filmmakers, choreographers, and music-makers from across the planet. But Iyer’s artistry finds perhaps its purest expression in his most celebrated group, the Vijay Iyer Trio, praised by NPR as “truly astonishing” and by The New York Times as “one of the best bands in jazz.” This remarkable and ever-evolving trio conception, developed over 30 years with five pivotal recordings and hundreds of performances, has not only defied the old categories but created entirely new ones, along the way nurturing an enviable roster of now-revered young musicians. The latest all-star incarnation of the trio with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey achieves a pronounced expression of equal say among the musicians, a powerful sense of shared purpose, and a stratospheric level of attunement, as heard on their two landmark albums Uneasy (ECM, 2021) and Compassion (ECM, 2024).

In 2025, Iyer’s unit expands to The Vijay Iyer Trio + 1, with the addition of the phenomenal Adam O’Farrill, called “a force of nature” (JazzTrail) and “among the leading trumpeters in jazz” (The New York Times), and a member of one of of Afro-Latin music’s most revered dynasties. For this special WJF engagement, Iyer, O’Farrill, and Sorey are joined by bassist Matt Brewer to form a small but mighty supergroup.

“Iyer’s most vital strength within his expansive skill set may be his ability to ground a rotating cast of illustrious collaborators. He refracts and focuses his fellow artists, revealing a greater richness.” - The New York Time