Vijay Iyer

Photograph: Pooja Bakri

The Kitchen; Wed 16, Apr 17

No sense denying pianist Vijay Iyer’s ambition. A postmillennial career in jazz demands that a musician be versatile, but the breadth of Iyer’s collaborations seems to explode the parameters. Although it’s possible he overreached a bit with Still Life with Commentator, the multimedia oratorio he brought to BAM two years back, the growth in Iyer’s recent work suggests a definite learning curve. Next week, he keeps up the pace by dropping two albums simultaneously: Tragicomic (Sunnyside), a quartet disc that adds a prog-ishly kinetic chapter to his ten-plus-year partnership with acidic altoist Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Door (Pi), Iyer’s latest excursion through the polyrhythmic complexities of Fieldwork, the collective he shares with reedist Steve Lehman and drummer Tyshawn Sorey.

Perhaps fittingly, however, the pianist-composer’s trip to the Kitchen won’t include much from either of his new releases. One recurring motif in Iyer’s work is the use of cascading ostinatos that suggest the charmed repetitions of Indian raga cycles; trancelike qualities will no doubt come to the fore in the improv portion of the evening, as Iyer solos with electronics and accompanies Bill Morrison’s silent film Outerborough. Later, he pilots a Mahanthappa-less version of the fiery ensemble on Tragicomic, before unveiling a chamber work, “Mutations I–X,” that enlists the string quartet Ethel. Using suitably ambitious terms, Iyer says it contains “uneasy variations of the ordered and fixed.”

—K. Leander Williams