“i seek another dimension in music,” the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith wrote in his 1973 book notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music. Like an astrophysicist, he discovered that time is malleable—not the neutral medium in which a piece develops, but an integral part of the composition. Time is expressed through what Smith calls “space/silence,” which he deploys with an expert hand that makes each note, when it comes, shine out like a celestial event.
In notes (8 pieces) and other early writings, Smith predicted the rise of a music that would draw from all the world’s traditions; neither composed nor improvised, it would be created through intellect and intuition. It’s a utopian ideal, and sadly one that has not come to pass. Nevertheless, his vision as a solo artist, bandleader, and member of avant-garde jazz collective the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has been influential to generations of musicians, perhaps none more than the pianist Vijay Iyer. When Iyer played in Smith’s Golden Quartet in the late 2000s, they formed a rapport that found full expression on the brilliant 2016 duo recording A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, which proved Iyer to be Smith’s perfect complement—not filling in his silences, but accentuating them, imbuing them with tension and meaning.
Defiant Life is the duo’s second album, recorded over two days of single takes in Lugano, Switzerland. To begin, Iyer and Smith discussed the state of the world and the histories of liberation that may point a way forward. The focus of those talks, and of the record, is the defiance needed to resist state-sponsored violence. “The defiant person knows completely and wholeheartedly what’s right and what’s wrong, and they cannot be persuaded to think any other kind of way,” Smith says in the liner notes. “And that defiance matches their action.” It’s an idea that has preoccupied Smith for decades, especially on his landmark Ten Freedom Summers, dedicated to key leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. During the recording of that monumental album, Iyer asked Smith what it means for instrumental music to express ideas regarding history or politics. “He said that it has to do with the sincerity of intent,” Iyer remembers. “That it matters in that way because those are the conditions under which it was created.”
The conditions that Iyer and Smith contemplate on Defiant Life are dire. The “ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties,” in Iyer’s words, are the album’s impetus, and the genocide in Gaza haunts the album. The duo’s meditations on the darkness of the world are immediately apparent in the harrowing opener “Prelude: Survival.” Smith’s trumpet struggles and gasps; once it finds momentum, it only goes in circles. Iyer’s piano encroaches like storm clouds that menace but never break. The relative calm of the following track, “Sumud,” hints at a way out; sumud is an Arabic word meaning steadfastness, used to describe a Palestinian ideology of political resistance in the face of occupation. Smith’s trumpet, distant and uncertain, emerges from a background of glittering electronics. At times it disappears completely, but returns braver and bolder until the song climaxes with a graceful solo, clear as a blue summer’s day.
The majority of Defiant Life’s songs are live composed rather than written or improvised (“We don’t have time for the term ‘improvisation’ anymore,” Iyer says. “It’s not doing us or our music any favors”). Preparatory discussions of the music and its themes set the stage, and Smith and Iyer’s intuition guide them the rest of the way. “Elegy: The Pilgrimage,” is defined by dissonant rumbles and washes of ambience. Taking it by turns, Smith playing barely above a whisper and Iyer steady and careful, they pick their way across this ghostly, blasted landscape. Then, as if on cue, trumpet and piano join in a final lament—a spontaneous exploration of grief arising from the pair’s inscrutable, indelible connection.
However, two of Defiant Life’s tracks are notated rather than live composed, and these are dedicated to figures that exemplify defiance. “Floating River Requiem,” written by Smith, is for Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader whose assassination in 1961 has been variously linked to the CIA, MI6, and the Belgian government. Smith’s sparse, bright trumpet sounds out like a clarion call over the drama that Iyer stages with persistent bass notes. It’s one of Iyer’s most compelling performances to date, marked by a bravura solo passage whose interplay between left and right hands is as free-flowing and complex as an impassioned tête-à-tête.
Iyer’s “Kite” is for Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian poet of “If I Must Die” who was killed by an Israeli airstrike. His shimmering Fender Rhodes wends its way across the track, a strong breeze that keeps Smith’s penetrating trumpet lines aloft like the angelic kite of Alareer’s poem. Though these songs were written as requiems, they are hopeful instead of mournful, insistent on the revolutionary potential that their subjects represent. In a time of darkness, Smith and Iyer hold them up as beacons, still shining, steadfast and defiant.
