In search of jazz with 'maximum creative risk'

NEW YORK -- In an essay this month on the website All About Jazz, pianist Vijay Iyer lays down a gauntlet to the highly trained music-school grads who now populate the jazz landscape. The scene, Iyer writes, is in a "hopeful flux" of new collaborations and labels and "a greater number of active, productive musicians than anyone can remember ever existing."

But Iyer says something important is missing -- a sense of risk, the idea that the musical product results from struggle, challenge, and resolution. "Now that the scene is defined by music-school graduates, I feel nostalgic for the days when musical expertise was a hard-won trait," he writes. "When I hear mastery without risk, I feel ripped off."

Coming from many 35-year-old artists, this might feel like an arrogant dismissal. But Iyer, one of the most important jazz pianists of his generation, has earned the right to levy his criticism by living by its standards. His challenge -- "let us all vow to put ourselves at maximum creative risk whenever possible" -- is one that not only his fellow musicians but also listeners can gain from hearing.

At a recent concert here, Iyer backed his words with a remarkable program of duets. The first was with longtime creative partner Rudresh Mahanthappa , an alto saxophonist with beautiful tone and control. Then came an electronic set with tabla player Suphala ; here Iyer bopped from piano to laptop, less virtuoso instrumentalist than architect of sound.

Finally, Iyer performed with Amina Claudine Myers , a respected figure whose work on piano and organ ranges from free jazz to gospel. On two pianos, the young Indian-American man and older African-American woman conducted a moving, melodic dialogue, culminating in something rare for Iyer: unreconstructed, gut-bucket blues.

It was an object lesson in possibilities from one of a number of young musicians who represent a new and exciting wave in music -- grounded in jazz, yet marked by global origins and influences, the unforced embrace of tools and idioms of the hip-hop era, and the technical skill and cultural understanding to bring it all together.

The new wave's statement of arrival was the breathtaking 2004 release "In What Language?" by Iyer and poet Mike Ladd , a multimedia work about lives in global flux. Its follow-up, "Still Life With Commentator" -- also first a performance piece and now released as an album -- explores identity in a time of media overload. Musically it is just as accomplished: an itinerary of textures and movements driven by Iyer's rolling piano and beats, layered with Liberty Ellman's guitar, Okkyung Lee's cello, and more. Pamela Z's operatic soprano soars above the mix; at other times, Ladd's gravelly recitation lurks beneath it.

These artists overflow the jazz bracket yet express its roots and apply its methods in a way uncannily suited to our time. Their creative tribe includes, through various collaborations, a host of other creative minds. Mahanthappa leads or coleads seven groups. Iyer has played with rappers (dead prez ), black-rock luminaries (Greg Tate, Vernon Reid), electronica gurus ( Karsh Kale, DJ Spooky ), and any number of mainstream jazz figures.

The labels Pi, Savoy, and Thirsty Ear offer a sampler of work from this scene, with much more under development. Mahanthappa's quartet album "Codebook," a straight - ahead burner with compositions that ingeniously explore the theme of encryption and coded meanings, and Liberty Ellman's cooler-toned "Ophiucus Butterfly," a semielectronic, guitar-led sextet that includes a tuba, are among last year's best jazz releases.

Though the musical movement that Iyer and friends are fomenting has yet to receive a catchy name, their melding of avant-garde musical sensibilities with a sense of historical responsibility brings to mind the "creative music" movement of the late 1960s and 1970s that produced brilliant eccentrics such as Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Cecil Taylor, one of Iyer's great influences.

The difference is that those elder figures, reflecting the artistic and cultural politics of their time, often chose a path of musical abstraction that makes their work to this day an acquired taste. In contrast, today's creative musicians are reaching out to the foreign traditions in which many of them, being children of immigrants, were trained, and most of all to a popular culture that they refuse to disavow. The "maximum creative risk" they are tackling is to make music that is not only brilliant, but relevant and democratic.