In What Language?

Vijay Iyer & Mike Ladd

Downbeat

Pianist/composer Vijay Iyer is a rhythmic powerhouse who along with poet/playwright Mike Ladd explores the virtues of jazz via a multilateral slant. On In What Language?, the twosome fronts a program of narratives set to music. It's all based upon the pre-9//11 experience of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was wrongfully detained by INS officials at New York's JFK airport.Ê Supported by an 11-piece band featuring saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, and poet Latasha Diggs, the message is deeply rooted within the errors of racial/ethnic profiling. Iyer and Ladd interconnect layers of effects to complement an electro-acoustic production awash with looping ostinato grooves, horns, string overlays and perky funk/techno beats. Ladd and the actors' recitations are extraordinarily moving, while the ensemble does its best to counterbalance the earnest and sometimes disturbing lyricism by integrating and shaping tuneful themes into the mix. Iyer draws upon his East Indian heritage to coincide with a genre-hopping perspective throughout the body of his compositions. He skillfully emphasizes the emotive characteristics of the text with notions of quietudeÊ augmented by hard-driving passages. During "Taking Back The Airplane," Diggs iterates a slightly abstract, yet artfully poetic discourse on the solstice of flight to coincide with the musicians' soft horns atop a budding melody. The album's closer, "Plastic Bag," serves as an introspectively wrought climax, honed down by Iyer's lower register chord progressions and dreamy countermelodies.

Guardian Unlimited (UK)

Randy Newman was on good form last week, bitching about Clint Eastwood's score for Mystic River. "Suddenly the music got better ... then I realised it was a cell phone ringing." Newman also reminded us that he had written several songs on the subject of racism. And that as a result, "racism no longer exists".

I guess it would be nice to see musicians eliminate envy and sexism, too, not to mention hunger and war. In What Language (Pi, £13.99) by Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd is an ambitious musical response to the high-profile humiliation of Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi, whose movies include Crimson Gold (2003) and The Circle (2001). In April 2001, When Panahi, travelling between film festivals in Hong Kong and Buenos Aires, refused to be fingerprinted at Kennedy airport, he was thrown into a cell. INS officials chained his feet and attached his chain to the other prisoners, locked to a dirty bench for 10 hours. He was eventually sent back to Hong Kong. Iyer and Ladd explain that, "as fellow brown-skinned travellers, we could not ignore this tale".

The resulting project, a long (69 mins), 17-track CD combining composition, improvisation and spoken work, is a stimulating collection of travellers' tales. Ladd's words get under the skin of several characters: the Iraqi businessman, a Godfather fan, talking about "the thugs that we endure"; New Yorker Rishu from Calcutta, who can "police shoplifts in four different languages"; and Nadine from Ivory Coast, living in Paris, working at De Gaulle airport, "a passer-by who is passed by".

The title track addresses Panahi's story, portraying him being flown back to Hong Kong, looking "outside the plastic oval" of the plane: "I'm handcuffed in a vessel that cheats day/While speeding west to east we swallow night." You might expect an angry blast, given the subject matter, and the mood is certainly tense, but the words, whether opaque, poetic or direct, thankfully lack the whingeing profanity of everyday hip-hop and address a complex subject with subtlety - even Randy Newman-like humour.

Iyer's music embraces many styles, from sequenced beats (Three Lotto Stories) through edgy swing (The Color of My Circumference IV) to a chilled, dinner-jazz ambience (Taking Back the Airplane), featuring Liberty Ellman's guitar, Allison Easter's supple spoken-word performance and the composer's chiming piano.

Django Bates, another pianist of prodigious talents, hit the music scene in the mid-1980s. Legend has it that when it was known that Bates was attending an audition, the other pianists wouldn't bother to show up - he was bound to get the job. Two decades later, Bates's latest gig is as the artistic director of FuseLeeds04 (March 3-7). Bates explains that what he looks for in music is "craft and emotion". And he's pleased that most of the names on his first, hastily scribbled list of people he would like to hear in the festival are heading up to Yorkshire for next week's events. (FuseLeeds.org.uk includes Bates's diary for the project.)

The imaginative programme unwittingly emphasises the fact that many of the UK's best creative musicians are fundamentally live acts. The record industry might as well be a parallel universe. The Bays, who play at the Wardrobe on March 5, make a point of not releasing records, while Gary Husband's new suite for Force Majeure is bankrolled by BBC Radio 3's Jazz on 3. FuseFilm brushes the mainstream by screening work by Michel Gondry, but veers away again with a night of improvisations to silent films by Matthew Bourne, Joanna MacGregor, Billy Jenkins and Jan Kopinski (March 6).

Bates himself has been busy, too, assembling a 60-composer tribute to Evan Parker writing a violin concerto and transcribing Zappa's Jazz from Hell in his spare moments. There's also a brand new album in the works by his band Human Chain, but Bates has just turned down a deal, preferring to release it on his own label.