Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith - Defiant Life (ECM, 2025)

By Stef Gijssels

This album has been out for a while, and if one deserves our attention, it's this one. This is not the first time that luminaries Vijay Iyer - piano, Fender Rhodes, electronics and Wadada Leo Smith - trumpet - collaborated. They had their first duo release with "A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke" (2016). Other collaborations include the trio with Jack DeJohnette on "A Love Sonnet For Billie Holiday", and Iyer was the pianist for quartet and large ensemble albums. 

If "A Cosmic Rhythm" was a tribute to musicians, "Defiant Life" honours the efforts by individuals to come up for their rights. This is a topic that we are familiar with in Smith's music: his defense of human rights and his craving for a world that is more human and just. 

In the liner notes, Vijay Iyer writes: "This recording session was conditioned by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility". The outrage is hard to find musically, but the sorrow and the hope are omnipresent. It is sad, melancholy, emotional, bluesy, and meditative in its most neutral moments.

They worked two days on the album, some time last year in Switzerland, talking about the state of the world, and translated their feelings and ideas into the music. Their music is one of full openness to inspiration and follows the flow of the sound itself. 

Two of the tracks were notated, “Floating River Requiem” by Smith is dedicated to the first ever Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba, assassinated in 1961 after the independence from Belgium, and "Kite" by Iyer is dedicated to the Palestinian writer and poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in 2023. 

The first track, "Prelude: Survival", is a dark and ominous piece, setting the context for the future of humanity, with dark piano chords, altered by electronics and a sparse, struggling trumpet. "Sumud" is again driven by long tonal center on electronics, Iyer on his Fender piano, and Smith's trumpet soaring as can be expected. The approach is minimalist yet incredibly intense. 

"Elegy: The Pilgrimage" is the slowest track, very open-textured and bluesy, with Iyer's electronics creating a kind of washing sound from a distant ocean or the wind blowing.  

The role of the musician in all this, is also to participate in the political debate, to give a true expression of fearlessness and defiance, with strong moral codes and no boundaries for humanity: "Music has that quality, too" says Smith "both in terms of how inspiration works, and also how we think about ourselves in a space that has been limited by political boundaries. The expanse that art looks at is more akin to the deeper philosophical notion about being, you know, and also about this notion of comprehending why we are who we are."

Vijay Iyer writes in the liner notes: "I'm always struck by how our music simply appears. And I've wondered how you understand that particular quality that it has. It just unfolds ... which is different! I don't have many experiences like that." To have music "appear" and "unfold" in the way this album sounds, is quite exceptional. It requires two brilliant musicians and a mutual understanding on how to 'compose' in a live environment. 

The last track on the album illustrates this. It's simply majestic, as you can hear on the ECM promo video below.

It seems that my credit for giving five-star ratings to Wadada Leo Smith albums has depleted, but trust me, this album is again an absolute winner. Don't miss it!