Iyer wraps up S.F. run with fiery new combo
Vijay Iyer and his wild new jazz combo Thums Up treated fans to a mind-widening rap/jazz/Sufi poetry concert on Sunday, Jan. 21, at SFJazz Center’s Miner Auditorium.
“And now,” Iyer announced at the top of the set, “SFJazz presents something off the beaten path.” He wasn’t kidding. Sunday was the final concert of Iyer’s four-day run at SFJazz, where he has been serving as the venue’s resident artistic director since January 2017. Over the weekend, Iyer performed with his world-acclaimed trio and his currently hot sextet, whose hard-edged “Far From Over” was proclaimed by Downbeat, NPR and Rolling Stone as the best jazz record of 2017.
On the basis of such recent visible acclaim, most of the crowd probably came out for his last concert Sunday just to hear the Bay Area native perform. What they didn’t expect was the brilliant showcasing of another Iyer group, Thums Up, which made its West Coast debut. (These incredible musicians, as Iyer wryly noted, had “the fewest Anglo names” of the weekend.)
The concert was broken up into two sections; the first was a trio featuring Iyer on piano, Rafiq Bhatia unassumingly slaying on guitar and the featured Pakistani composer Arooj Aftab singing Sufi poems. It’s impossible to forget this simple yet punchy group — Aftab, flanked on either side by jazzmen of
color who endlessly arpeggio and play mellow loads of notes, floating above them with her incantation of Sufi verse about “love and melancholia and nostalgia.” Aftab marvelously translated the poems’ emotions with a voice that filled you with sudden, strange love in erratic bursts. Her subdued wails captured a romantic longing for a specific human being or the memory-racked need for a dear dead one. Most of us did not “understand” the Sufi, but we were moved anyway.
The first half was spaced out with rich musical silences, as if Iyer and company were trying to immerse themselves in Brian Eno-like concentration. The goal: to reach a state of blissed-out focus. Bhatia’s guitar was a consistent highlight in that regard; no matter who was the center of attention, one could always turn back to Bhatia and lose oneself in his persistent, unobtrusive needling. He pushed his big black boots into the ground, struggling with earth as he eked out tremulous guitar runs like he was possessed with the spirit of Santana. His runs were jagged, unstable — one minute, the guitar was placid wind chimes; the next, it had a violent Hendrix-like grit to its feedback, as doom-ridden as the decrepit America that stoked its anger.
In the second half, Kassa Overall joined on drums, along with Himanshu Suri’s spitfire rapping. The result was a sound of harshness and agitation, overflowing with a world-weary venom and verve. Suri’s observations of American life from a Punjabi-Indian perspective was nothing short of allencompassing. His woke lyrics are not immediately obvious, nor does he peddle generalized liberal platitudes. His meanings only become apparent in flash dribbles, because Suri filters them through the abstracting impulses of jazz.
To those who complain of the politics, I redirect them to the historical precedent: John Coltrane’s Black Power-inspired, Wattsera yelps during his free jazz period (e.g., his 1966 Temple University concert). Just as the pioneering Coltrane added an element to jazz typically left out (a raw voice in the service of social consciousness), Suri shows his willingness to push the boundaries of what jazz in 2018 should be, via his skillful integration of rap-as-POC-America’s-TV-station, rap-as-truth.
A clear highlight was Suri rapping back to the posh San Francisco “rich folks” in attendance: “Comin’ for the culture like they was on a mission/ Comin’ for the culture like they were from the Mission.”
To defuse the tension, the SF-Jazz crowd broke out the hoots, the claps, the “yeah!” s.
Through all this, Iyer, amazingly, never made himself a hub of lookat-me action. Sunday night, Iyer was comfortable as burbling support, playing his piano with a rumbling grandeur, or nudging the ensemble along with mysterious three-note chains of steps, up then down, up then down. Iyer’s constancy was his strength.