Vijay Iyer’s career is marked by two central artistic partnerships: with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and, outside of jazz’s boundaries, with hip-hop producer and poet Mike Ladd. More recently, Iyer has composed music for films, concerts and dance and has been working extensively in several bands, namely in trio, in duo with Wadada Leo Smith and in sextet. An eclectic and brainy musician, Vijay Iyer already possesses a body of work that, in its several artistic dimensions and intentions, can be considered one of the most relevant in modern jazz.

Considered by Downbeat magazine one of the jazz’s new wave visionaries, Craig Taborn (b. 1970, USA) is undoubtedly one of the most respected pianists of today, both due to the quality and the integrity of his work as well as to his uncompromising attitude towards the star system that is currently dominating the entertainment industry. Although he studied musical composition at a very precocious stage of his education, Taborn is, like Iyer, a self-taught musician with studies in social sciences who unexpectedly engaged on a remarkable career in jazz, both as a composer as well as collaborator of some of the fundamental names of the genre, such as Tim Berne, Steve Coleman, Evan Parker, Michael Formanek and Chris Potter. Taborn’s musical language, somewhere in between formal composition and improvisation, and in between melody and dissonance, begins in Monk and converges to a myriad of references where we find echoes of swing, of Cecil Taylor’s hyper-expressive approach, of and abstract and minimal electronics, as well as other forms of musical expression.

Unanimously considered one of the two most influent jazz musicians of today’s music, in duo Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn create a music that, though distanced from the faery fire of a certain kind of jazz popular in the twenty-first century’s second decade, aspires both to project new possibilities of musical expressivity in contemporary music and to apprehend the world in its multiple dimensions. Their recent, and well-praised, album Transitory Poems documents an artistic partnership between two pianists who, despite their stylistic differences – Iyer more restrained and rhythmic, Taborn more melodic and narrative –, achieve a high degree of complementarity, in order to create a music at the same time canonical and disruptive, and in which the jazz from the past and the jazz from the future are juxtaposed within a continuous time line.