A Conversation about Simulated Progress with Vijay Iyer & Steve Lehman of Fieldwork

June 25th, 2005 – New York City

Steve Lehman: One of the things I wanted to ask you about, and we’ve talked about it a little bit as well, is the fact that for me, I find there’s actually a good deal of continuity between the first album and the second, and in the album itself between the tracks.

Vijay Iyer: I agree – Simulated Progress still sounds like Fieldwork, despite the transition since the first album – namely, you! And it all seems to emanate from one place, even though we’re all contributing compositions pretty equally.

SL: It’s happened to me, and I think to you also, after concerts people would ask, “Well, which one of you wrote all that?” So certainly within the material that we were working on there was a strong thread of continuity. And I feel it too from the first album as well, and I don’t know if you sensed that or felt there were reasons for it.

VI: Well, I think that it’s sort of a result of the process that we put ourselves through with this group, collaboratively rearranging and transforming each other’s pieces. Eventually this sort of meta-logic comes together – how we’re all going to deal with the situation regardless of who’s writing what. And you know, we each develop strategies that are specific to that situation that help us deal with the material and help us reach beyond what’s on the page. Part of it is that we’ve had fairly high standards about how we treat any one of these compositions. So it’s not really just playing it down. It’s always really been about unpacking it somehow.

SL: Right. Every piece is very refined in terms of what we’re doing and the roles we’re all playing.

VI: I think there are maybe some tunes that are more in that traditional head-solos format, but other ones where the structure is a bit more mysterious in terms of what we’re dealing with that’s preordained and what isn’t. And I think maybe we’re all interested in preserving that ambiguity. There’s a lot of sustained ambiguity in this music which seems to maybe have something to do with where we’re all at as people… maybe what we all crave out of the musical situation.

SL: Right. I remember we were at the Jazz Gallery a couple of months ago and we were listening to a CD they had playing, and somebody was taking a certain type of solo, and we were saying “Who could be that empowered,” you know? And I think there’s really something to that. Just in terms of the dynamic of this period, and the current vibration. I don’t personally feel comfortable putting something forth that I consider to be definitive in any way: “This is the material. This is the piece. This is the melody. This is my solo.”

VI: “This is the emotion called joy.” (both laugh)

SL: Right. Because that kind of stance doesn’t seem to do justice to, like you say, the ambiguity of who we are, and what the music means, and all these layers of literal information, and also layers of meaning.

VI: I think that’s maybe a more interesting thing to talk about, because people tend to fixate on the structural complexity of our music, but I’m more interested in the emotional complexity of it. What kind of composite statement is being made out of bringing together all these realities, and presenting them in dialogue with one another?

SL: And the history of musical collectives in general is pretty bespeckled, and most of them are quite short lived, with a few exceptions: The AACM as a larger umbrella group being one, and then maybe the Art Ensemble of Chicago being the best example of a group that’s enjoyed a great deal of longevity. So, to have three people working on something and to be individuals but have interests that are similar enough to be able to put in the kind of work that we do, is an emotional thing. And I think it kind of implicitly points to issues of community and working with others which has a very human side to it – in terms of how we all work together and lean on each other. On a musical level and also interpersonally, what’s entailed in bringing the music to life.

VI: Yeah, it tells an important story, I think… just the sheer fact of it.

SL: And just the nature of the group. I know that with the pieces I brought into the group I was trying to write something that I couldn’t do with any other group and something that was significantly beyond the reach of what I thought I could actually execute as a performer. And then see if the other two guys are interested enough to put in the time.

VI: Yeah, that was definitely the mentality all along. Especially after we all started bringing in material. I think the compositions on the first album are mostly mine, but eventually it became more and more of an equal situation as far as that aspect goes. And it became really about how we could all participate in each other’s realities and also augment them. And that’s what’s really interesting to me is when what you get out of it is something much larger, not only than what you put in, but also what you anticipated. There’s something very non-linear about it…about the kind of return that you get out of this process. It’s sort of like we’re all exponentiating each other’s input.

SL: Right. And even the evolution of the pieces that ended up on the record didn’t seem gradual or linear, or like they were evolving at the same rate of change. It was more like a series of plateaus. We would kind of collectively explode to another place and then work with it.

Transforming Fumba Rebel into Reprise

VI: I thought it might be interesting to talk about Fumba Rebel ( mp3 stream), which became Reprise ( mp3 stream) on the album. Because that was a pre-existing piece of yours that then became treated very differently in the context of this group.

SL: Well, from my point of view, I remember bringing the piece in and thinking that it would be a good kind of example of work I had done in the past, and maybe work that would be applicable to what I knew of the work that you and Elliot had done in the past. And this process of refinement that we’ve talked about kind of happened. First thing we did is we got rid of the melody (both laugh). And the other thing that sticks out in my mind is that, in terms of the harmonic structure and pitch information, it became clear that that wasn’t going to be what was essential to us in our performance of the piece.

VI: Well, you know, what I kind of noticed about it initially was that a lot of those chords that you had written seemed like chords that I might have written – or that I might have improvised, even. And then, also, I found that I really wanted to preserve the possibility of discovery each time we played it. And for me to be faithful to the chord changes you’d written was to kind of freeze it in a way that felt like being faithful to an original, in a way that might impede that process of discovery. So I found that dealing with the changes you had written not as literal harmonies but as harmonic rhythms was a way to crack it open a little bit. And I think that one thing we probably both share is a high degree of relativism with regard to pitch information.

SL: Right.

VI: The way that we kind of literally compose harmony. Like making composite pitch structures by placing one set of pitches in counterpoint with another. So it really is about that process of discovery and permutation and circulation of these different aggregates. And that’s how I sort of arrived at the approach that I ended up taking with the piece. And I think it’s still pretty recognizably that piece. Even though you changed the title, which is fair because if you take away the chords and the melody, the one thing that’s left is a rhythm track which is naked enough that it could be re-titled.

SL: I’ve found that people who have performed the piece are able to recognize it, but those who have heard the original and then hear our arrangement are not able to connect one to the other. But what you’re saying makes sense. And in some ways I can view what you’re talking about as a subtle shift, because a lot of those chords are Lydian chords, which I personally view as one of the influences of Andrew Hill’s early music on my work, and a lot has been written about this, and that construction as one that is very flexible and very permeable and open to this phenomenon that you’re talking about of having pitches in dialogue, or constellations of pitches in dialogue. So for you to make that leap or to kind of intuit that background makes sense.

VI: Well, speaking as someone who’s spent a lot of time with Andrew Hill’s music, and even some time with Andrew himself, not that I would necessarily reduce it to the idea of the Lydian chord, but there’s a certain way of creating harmonies that I could read in your music. And maybe I could see a similar lineage, from dealing with Monk and Andrew Hill, and that whole history. And I guess that meant I had my own similar yet fairly distinct take on it, which maybe made it possible to kind of open it up in a different way.

SL: And in a much more kind of mundane sense, before we started working together, I hadn’t really had the confidence in somebody playing a chordal instrument, where I felt I could leave that kind of space and where there would be an understanding on that level, where someone could perceive what you’re talking about. So in the case of Fumba Rebel, putting in those chord changes was kind of like a compromise to preserve what I felt needed to be there, but if I could let it go, so much the better, actually.

VI: Yeah. And actually this is an instance where the instrumentation serves us in a very specific sense, because there’s only one person making those kinds of moves. And you’re looking at him! (both laugh) So it doesn’t run the risk of getting cluttered because there’s only one other pitched instrument.

SL: And you’re looking at him. (both laugh)