Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith

On this rare concert date, Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith revisit the music from their collaborative albums – 2016’s A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, and 2025’s Defiant Life – for this evening of duets. Of Defiant Life, Pitchfork writes that “The second collaborative album by the jazz composers and instrumentalists is a searching meditation on resistance and revolutionary potential.” Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first century music. A composer and pianist active and revered across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last three decades, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. Iyer’s musical language is indebted to the great composer-pianists from Duke Ellington to Alice Coltrane, the rhythmic traditions of South Asia and West Africa, and the African American creative music movement of the sixties and seventies. Born in 1941 in Leland, Mississippi, Wadada Leo Smith began his musical journey steeped in the musical traditions of the South. He composed his first piece of music at the age of twelve, and at thirteen started performing with Delta blues and other traditional bands. Smith is a trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, creative composer, and performer, whose diverse discography reveals a recorded history of music centered in the idea of spiritual harmony, and the unification of social and cultural issues of his world. Smith is the creator of ‘Ankhrasmation’, a symbolic image-based language for performers or musicians. ‘Ankhrasmation’ has played a significant role in Smith’s development as an artist, ensemble leader and educator.

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