My wife and I are led down a long aisle away from the other passengers and asked to remove our shoes and place them in molded plastic tubs so that they may be x-rayed with our coats and bags. As I step through the metal detector, it says nothing, but I'm still shepherded to an enclosed space where I'm told to spread my arms as a security guard runs his wand over me. Nothing again, but I'm used to this now-- it's been this way for more than two years. The guard places my shoes on a table and looks at them, then glances at my aged OK Computer t-shirt and remarks, "Hey, that's a pretty good band." He stares at the floor and distantly mutters, "Alright, you can go ahead and put your shoes back on now."
For me in my white skin, traveling through airports was never difficult before September 11th, 2001. Even today, any delay I encounter is never more than an inconvenience, a standard set of instructions to follow in the name of an abstract concept called "national security." Others aren't always so lucky. In April of 2001, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was merely passing through New York's JFK International Airport, in transit from a film festival in Hong Kong to another in Buenos Aires, when he was detained by the INS for refusing to be fingerprinted, and kept in a crowded holding cell for ten hours. He was ultimately returned to Hong Kong in handcuffs, famously attempting to explain himself to his fellow passengers: "I'm not a thief! I'm not a murderer! I am just an Iranian, a filmmaker. But how could I tell this, in what language?"
Indian-American jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and underground hip-hop luminary Mike Ladd have seized upon this incident for both the title and inspiration for this collaboration, a cycle of songs about lives in transit, brown-skinned people from around the world living in unfamiliar places, passing through the world's airports in search of work, home and asylum. It's a world of businessmen, cab drivers, refugees, porn sellers and detainees, each of whom Ladd brings to life with his vivid poetry and spiraling rhymes, several of which he hands off to guest vocalists who inhabit their characters as needed.
Ladd himself veers back and forth from the wide-eyed poetic delivery that he perfected on Welcome to the Afterfuture's "Feb. 4 '99 (For All Those Killed by Cops)," and his usual, unpredictable flow on his six lead vocal tracks, which he uses to lay out his thoughts on the topic at hand in broad terms. His actors, Allison Easter, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs and Ajay Naidu, are called upon to elaborate on these themes through narrative and dialogue. This kind of setup has plenty of potential for disaster, but Ladd keeps it all together with his wit and expansive knowledge of the subject matter.
"Swipe the coded stripe and my name drops in ones and zeroes/ Somewhere a computer may know/ Ladd is to Pratt as Cawthorne is to Willis is to Pickett and on/ What it won't show are the moments/ Of love or lust that swirl through centuries/ And tan me here/ Making me one more memento/ Of a close-quartered world," he reels on the opening, "Color of My Circumference I", setting up a journey that is by turns harrowing and humorous. Naidu takes a hilariously acerbic turn as a thick-accented NYC cab driver from Mumbai, blasting through verses like, "My cab as amusement/ My cab as escape/ My cab is my job/ No tip? Then fuck off/ New York to Bombay/ BJP's Mumbai/ As Bloomberg is to play-pen is to/ I'm too tired/ 1010 WINS Radio/ 94.6/ WIN India's number one station, all hits," with liquid fluency, something that must be tough when delivering rhymes you didn't write.
Ladd hits everything hard, feeding lines like "My language a threat as well as my limbs/ My skin a question/ My skin a critique" to Easter on "Asylum", wherein she plays a refugee from Sierra Leone forced to hide under beds from soldiers in sneakers and flip-flops through multiple countries only to be detained in her promised land. Naidu tears it up again on "Rentals" as he discusses his adult magazine stand: "I am a porn walla/ I mop Dahi for thirty dollars a day/ I can police shoplifts in four different languages/ Can they?/ They are cops/ I'm a cop/ A laser eye close-cam brain/ A lust proctor/ And they search me/ Green carded/ Legal as 18, baby."
The girl in front of me has syringes. Nine of them, with needles at least an inch long. She sets off the metal detector, but the guard, an old white man who seems to be in charge, ignores this, leaves his wand on the fold-out table and pores over the syringes in their case. The girl tries to explain that they're for her medicine, and that she needs to have them with her on the plane. The second guard, a young black woman perhaps 19 years old, waves me through the metal detector and I set it off. She tells me to stand aside and wait, but the man turns away from the syringes and yells at her: "Don't tell him to stand over there." He looks at me and says, "You can go." The guy behind me in line, a light-skinned black man who's maybe about 30 in a tie and glasses, has now come through the detector. It hasn't gone off. The guard allows the syringe girl to leave, and directs the man behind me to stand aside and spread his arms, picks up his wand and tells me to go again. I look at the female guard but she's too busy trying to explain that I should be getting wanded to the male guard to notice my glance. I pick up my bag and head into the terminal.
Without a compelling backdrop, Ladd's words would still be compelling, but they wouldn't be much to listen to, and Iyer's arrangements range over a broad swath of improvisational and textural ground, flirting with hip-hop, ambient drone and jazz noir. Iyer's piano playing is expressionistic and cloudlike, more Edvard Munch than traditional jazz. He builds those clouds up to thunderheads on the four "Color of My Circumference" tracks, and creates a riverlike current for closer "Plastic Bag", with cellist Dana Leong floating amidst the eddies and whitecaps. "Asylum" is told over trumpets and piano clusters that hang like cobwebs, while drummer Trevor Holder explodes in whip-crack breakbeats on "TLC".
One thing Iyer doesn't do is concern himself much with thematic development or melody, submitting his compositions solely to the service of Ladd's subject matter. This works surprisingly well, as there's already a lot to take in without the top of the mix getting any busier. The way Ladd constructs his rhymes also hints at melody more than most, so it's not missed.
What might make In What Language? truly important, though, is that it's focused intently on probing social issues in meaningful ways. We've all spent time lately lamenting the fact that modern music is so apolitical, and this is a good start for an antidote. If it takes a poet and a jazz pianist to expose some truth in an age where the American dream is being able to watch TV and play video games at the same time, so be it. We can only hope it inspires real discourse and real thought.
