Jazz Notes

INTO THE ABYSS: If one were to postulate that improvisation, exploration, and the process of discovery form the backbone of jazz, then New York-based trio Fieldwork is doing an excellent job of immersing itself in the music's most primal and essential elements. Consisting of pianist Vijay Iyer, saxophonist Aaron Stewart, and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee, the band's recorded debut, Your Life Flashes, bows Oct. 15 on the Pi Recordings label.

The members of the 2-year-old Fieldwork have worked together in various aggregations since the early '90s, when they resided in and around the San Francisco Bay area. "That is where we started working in the intensely cooperative way that continues to this day," Iyer says. "It is rare to find people who are willing to rehearse and push themselves into domains they had not worked in before, or to go further into domains they thought they were familiar with. The trio was a good fit for the three of us, because of our seriousness toward growth through experimentation."

Not surprisingly, considering the free-jazz leanings of their music, all three band members have worked closely with some of the more experimental members of the jazz cognoscenti. Iyer is a member of Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory and has released three dates as a leader, the most recent being Panoptic Modes on the Red Giant label. Stewart is a member of the Collective Identity saxophone quartet and performs in ensembles led by Muhal Richard Abrams. Kavee has worked with Joseph Jaman, Henry Threadgill, and is a founding member of the Omar Sosa Sextet.

If there is a defining element to Fieldwork's music, it is the exploration of rhythm in an intimate and intensely purposeful dialogue. Iyer often centers his playing around the more percussive possibilities inherent in the piano, adding charging polyrhythms to the intricate harmonies of the group's compositions. Those rhythmic underpinnings, along with Kavee's drums, propel the music through a host of polyrhythmic devices, with Stewart's tenor adding rich harmonic flavor to the heady brew.

Iyer says that the project's opening track, "In Medias Res," exemplifies Fieldwork's collaborative approach to composition and improvisation, which often finds its genesis in world-music-derived rhythms. "The composition grew out of something I wrote based on ideas found in West African music," Iyer says. "There is an idea of cyclic polyrhythms layered on top of each other in the tradition of West African drumming, but done in a structure that does not exist in that tradition. We try to draw from a culture without representing it in a single gesture, so conceptually it is analogous to the original idea but done in a totally different setting."

Often, Iyer says, the band's material developed through sketches of ideas that were too difficult for the musicians to initially play. "By challenging ourselves, we would stumble upon aspects of ourselves that were enlightening and productive. We used to tape all of our rehearsals on a cheap tape recorder, and when we listened back, it sounded radically alien. It brought an awareness that the music is larger than any one of us. The entire vibe of the music was shocking, because there were things going on that we were not even aware of. That's why we call ourselves Fieldwork—we are exploring the vast field of possibility inside us, peering into the abyss and then jumping in. We are finding things inside ourselves we didn't know we had."



SWEET STUFF: Sweet Rhythm, the new club located in the former downtown New York location that was home to Sweet Basil, has opened for business after delays stemming from the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Although the new club will present a diverse array of musical styles, including world beat and spoken word, manager/partner James Browne clearly has not forgone the room's jazz roots, judging from upcoming bookings of Jimmy McGriff and Marc Cary & Indigenous People.



AND: It's a good fourth quarter for fans of classic jazz guitar. Legacy's recently released Charlie Christian compendium, The Genius of the Electric Guitar, hit retail Sept. 24 (debuting on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart at No. 12), and now the second pillar of jazz guitar, Grant Green, finds four CDs dedicated to his own genius on The Grant Green Retrospective (Blue Note, Oct. 22). The set features material dating from 1961 to 1966 drawn from Green's dates as both a leader and sideman for Blue Note.