| Details | Don’t miss this unique collaboration between visionary jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and legendary trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith. Iyer has been named Artist of the Year four times in DownBeat magazine, and Smith has been honored as Artist and Album of the Year by Downbeat in 2017, Artist of the Year by Jazz Times in 2016, and a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Los Angeles Times critic Chris Barton described their 2015 duo album, A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke, as “haunting, meditative and transportive in a work that draws from abstract Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi and reaches for the stars.” New Yorker critic Alec Wilkinson called it a “two-figure play in which the exchanges involve mortality or impermanence or divinity . . . the discourses are both cultivated and passionate.” And the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, in reviewing the Big Ears Festival, noted, “I was mesmerized most by the lonely meanderings of the trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith and the pianist-composer Vijay Iyer. A few days later, making a five-hour drive from Los Angeles to Death Valley, I listened five times in a row to Smith and Iyer’s album . . . the music nearly as vast as the landscape around me. On the way back, I listened five times again.” Read more about Vijay Iyer at vijay-iyer.com/about/ and Wadada Leo Smith at wadadaleosmith.com/about/. This concert is presented as part of the Smithsonian’s Future of Music Public Forum, December 12–14, 2019. For more information please visit music.si.edu. |
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