Description
Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey – Uneasy – Double Vinyl Record
Uneasy, released in April 2021 on ECM Records, is a trio album featuring pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey—three of the most forward-thinking musicians in contemporary jazz. The album is a dense, politically charged, and deeply expressive work that navigates the turbulence of modern life—both internal and external—with precision, empathy, and intellectual rigor. It’s not simply a piano trio record in the traditional sense; rather, Uneasy is a sonic investigation of instability, unrest, and resilience, rooted in jazz but extending far into experimental and classical territories.
This is Vijay Iyer’s first trio album on ECM, though he had worked with the label before in other contexts. The ensemble here is particularly striking. Linda May Han Oh brings melodic clarity, rhythmic elasticity, and subtle power to her bass lines, while Tyshawn Sorey—a polymath composer and improviser—is an absolute force behind the drum kit, balancing silence, density, and texture with astonishing control. Their interplay is not a backdrop for Iyer’s compositions—it is co-equal, dialogic, and often revelatory.
The album opens with “Children of Flint,” a meditative, mournful piece dedicated to the victims of the Flint, Michigan water crisis. The music is spare and somber, grounded in a sense of unresolved grief. Iyer’s chords are both beautiful and heavy, allowing space for Oh’s subtle phrasing and Sorey’s gestural percussion to shape the emotional contour. This sets the tone for much of the record, which maintains a kind of moral urgency—each track feels like it’s grappling with larger forces, whether personal, historical, or societal.
A key track is the title piece, “Uneasy,” originally composed in 2011 but updated here to reflect the heightened instability of the 2020s. It embodies the album’s conceptual and rhythmic complexity—full of asymmetric grooves, shifting harmonies, and intricate interlocking parts. There is tension not just in the composition but in the way the trio resists resolution, constantly pulling apart and reconverging. It mirrors the political and emotional instability suggested by the title: beauty colliding with dread.
Another highlight is “Combat Breathing,” which Iyer wrote during the Ferguson uprisings in 2014 and recontextualized in light of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. The piece draws from spiritual and protest traditions, with an insistent pulse that never fully erupts but continually threatens to. The trio holds that tension masterfully, making silence and restraint as potent as sound.
There are moments of reflective grace as well. “Entrustment,” a solo piano piece dedicated to Iyer’s late mentor Amiri Baraka, is hushed and crystalline, floating in the ECM aesthetic of open resonance and slow pacing. And in “Drummer’s Song,” a reimagining of a tune by Geri Allen (another one of Iyer’s heroes), the trio moves through lush harmonies with reverence and lift, highlighting Allen’s legacy of complex lyricism and rhythmic innovation.
Stylistically, Uneasy resists easy categorization. It is unmistakably jazz in its improvisational core, but it draws freely from modernist composition, Indian rhythmic cycles, post-minimalism, and socially conscious music traditions. The musicians are not just playing notes—they are engaging in critical thinking through sound, asking questions about history, identity, and agency. The album’s flow feels composed yet spontaneous, intellectual yet deeply emotional.
The recording quality, in classic ECM fashion under the guidance of Manfred Eicher, is pristine. Every brushstroke, pizzicato note, and sustain pedal resonates with clarity and depth, allowing the music’s tension and nuance to shine through. But while the production is beautiful, it’s the unsettled emotional landscape that gives Uneasy its enduring power.
In the canon of contemporary jazz piano trio albums, Uneasy stands as a brave and compelling statement—one that refuses to offer comfort in times of chaos but instead reflects that chaos with complexity and care. It’s not an easy listen, nor is it meant to be. But for those willing to engage with its intricacy and moral urgency, it is one of the most significant and thought-provoking jazz records of the 2020s.
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic
Track Listing
Children Of Flint
Combat Breathing
Night And Day
Touba
Drummer’s Song
Augury
Configurations
Uneasy
Retrofit
Entrustment
