Human beings have invented hundreds of instruments for themselves, on which to play an incredible range of different musics-- I went through a phase in my music listening where I'd buy an album just because it had weird instruments on it. But as fun as it is to seek out all the different timbres and tonal possibilities on offer, you could spend a pretty satisfying lifetime just listening to all the ways a single instrument can be used a re-employed in different contexts and by different players. Hell, you could probably spend a lifetime just building a thorough understanding of all the ways the piano is used in jazz.
Take a trawl back through the instrument's recorded history in the genre, and you'll find all kinds of approaches-- a knowledgeable listener will never mistake the swirling, busy style of Art Tatum for Thelonious Monk's dissonant, strangely twisting improvisations, for instance. In the jazz world, it's a fight for every musician to carve out his or her own little instrumental niche, to find that thing as a musician that makes them distinct. Some never do, others constantly change in a search for their style, and still others are just born to sound like no one but themselves.
It's not a stretch to put Vijay Iyer in that final category. Iyer has a very unique approach to comping chords, constantly moving back and forth between notes in the chord to create a throbbing background pulse. It's more a sheet of sound than traditional jazz piano. You'll hear it used as an effect frequently in jazz, but it's rare that this textural technique becomes the center of a player's style, and it's made Iyer's playing uniquely suited to crossing the thin lines between jazz and hip-hop to collaborate with indie hip-hop auteur Mike Ladd.
Along with his two headlining collaborations with Ladd, Iyer's helmed or co-helmed a dozen LPs-- he stretches his style in every direction imaginable, and his compositions tend to mix moody textural passages with bursts of odd rhythm, some that even sound like riffs. Modern jazz rarely follows the old "head/solos/head" format that typified be-bop, and Iyer uses his compositions as mood pieces, setting them against each other in a bid to change the feeling the record produces from song to song.
He has a versatile band in saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, bassist Stephan Crump, and drummer Marcus Gilmore, who flow right along with him and easily handle the odd meters and start-stops he gives them. The album creeps into being with the nebulous, slowly coalescing "The Weight of Things" (it's an open improv credited to the whole group) before exploding into a full-on lurch on "Macaca Please". Mahanthappa does some of his most ferocious lead playing on this track, though he outclasses himself later in the album on "Without Lions", where his sax line practically sounds like a jazz take on "Flight of the Bumblebee".
Tragicomic, true to its title, is an album about balance-- see the way, for example, that Iyer follows the buoyant sunny "I'm All Smiles" with the evil, odd-metered stormer "Machine Days"-- and what rises from nothing at the beginning dissipates again into nothing again with the final track. It's the end note to a satisfying album from a unique pianist who continues to show us what his instrument can do.
