Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer on what it takes to lead a defiant life

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Wadada Leo Smith (left) and Vijay Iyer have known and collaborated with each other for decades. They have just released their second album as a duo, Defiant Life, with Smith on trumpet and Iyer on piano.

The live spark and open surrender of musical dialogue has long been a founding principle for trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist Vijay Iyer. Each is a justly heralded composer who often strikes a negotiation between freedom and form. Smith, 83, has been a creative visionary since the late 1960s, developing his own musical language — Ankhrasmation, a colorfully visual substitute for standard notation — even as he engages with touchstones of Black history. (His sweeping 2011 album Ten Freedom Summers, about the Civil Rights Movement, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.) Iyer, 53, first met Smith a few decades ago, later becoming a protégé and collaborator; his many accolades include prestigious fellowships from United States Artists and the MacArthur Foundation.

Both artists are drawn to work that pursues revelation. And while they come from different life experiences and generations, their improvisational practice as a duo accesses a deep, moving current of mutual discovery. They have a powerfully transfixing new album, Defiant Life, just out on ECM Records. Recorded over two days in Lugano, Switzerland, it's a follow-up to their previous duo album, A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke, which met with overwhelming acclaim upon its release in 2016. (It landed at No. 2 in the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll.) But as the title implies, their new album also brings ideas of resistance and liberation into primary focus. It's a manifestation of core convictions for Smith and Iyer, arriving at a charged and turbulent moment.

The two artists will perform this music at the Big Ears Festival on Saturday. Last week, on the eve of the album's release, they convened at NPR's New York bureau to talk about the intention and inspiration behind their new music, the inherent challenge of spontaneous invention, and the power of art to help us imagine a better world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nate Chinen: This album is clearly a testament to the deep relationship that the two of you have, and also to a shared set of convictions. What sort of conversation did you have going into the recording?

Wadada Leo Smith: The best way to think about it is as a notion of dialogue, where you look at the essentials, and you look at the possibilities, and you look at that which is necessary. We don't try to prophesize as to what it's going to be like, or sound like, or how we're going to do it. It's more akin to allowing each of us to connect through this dialogue, and to move past former ideas about how we felt.

Vijay Iyer: Mr. Smith just said that we do what's necessary — but it's not that we do what we're "supposed" to do. So it's not governed by any preconceived idea or enforced notion of form. It's really that we bring all of the wisdom we have about shape and sequence and relationships into the present moment, so that it's all being made before us and through us. In terms of what we were talking about, I mean, it was hard not to talk about everything that was happening outside of the studio, in the rest of the world. But honestly, that's what we've always done. I remember our first tour, which was exactly 20 years ago in Europe with Wadada's re-formed Golden Quartet, which included myself and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and bassist John Lindberg. And I remember these long train rides where I learned so much, just sitting among these guys, about history and our place in it. I feel like we've always been in that kind of conversation.

Chinen: Each of you brought a composition to this session. Vijay, I want to address the dedication of your piece "Kite," for the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who died in Gaza late in 2023. I'm assuming the kite is a reference to his poem "If I Must Die"...

Iyer: That's right.

Chinen: This is a poem that has traveled far, for really terrible reasons. It concludes in a moment of imagined beauty that has been wrought out of death and destruction. I'd love to hear you talk about that, and the specific inspiration you drew from that poem.

Iyer: Wadada has reminded me that a kite is, generally speaking, a universal symbol of freedom. The way it shows up in this poem, which Refaat wrote actually quite some time before he was killed, is that he invites the reader to make a kite and fly it so that a child might see it and imagine that it's an angel. And so, as you said, the way that it might spark some moment of inspiration or imagination in the observer is the key insight. It's sort of like the whole poem hinges on that truth, and so it felt like the best I could do in tribute to him was to do what he asked, and to try to build a kite, a sonic kite.

Chinen: What was it like for the two of you, translating that intention to a musical syntax?

Iyer: I think I can say that all of this music flowed the way it always does for us. I won't say that it's not difficult, or that there's not work involved, but it feels effortless somehow. It always feels correct to me. We just did one take of this piece, and it arrived fully formed in that way. There's just a fragment of notation, and it had a high note in it. I said, "Mr. Smith, can you play this high note?" He said, "I'm gonna try," and he did.

Chinen: Bringing the kite aloft.

Iyer: That's right. It becomes a pinnacle of the piece, and really of the whole album, for me. This moment of beauty. So, yeah, I've always felt that our music, even though it is often concerned with moments of struggle or resistance, it itself does not feel like that. It always flows.

Chinen: Wadada, the other piece that was composed before the session is "Floating River Requiem (for Patrice Lumumba)." With that dedication to the slain Prime Minister of the Congo, the song has a historical reference point. But it's obviously still very, very relevant.

Smith: Well, Refaat and Patrice, they both died trying to liberate their homelands. They have the same idea and quest for liberty and justice. Patrice, in a different way: He realized that the only way that an African country could really build its resources, and its communities, and its people's desires and wishes for a future, was to claim all the resources in the country. That hasn't been done before. And I believe that's his largest legacy.

But let me speak in a more symbolic way. The image of Floating River comes from the last moment when Patrice Lumumba, who was in the middle of the river with his family, looked back and saw that his comrades had been captured. He could have gone all the way to the other side, which would have been his escaping from that area. But he chose to let his family go across and he came back, in order to sacrificially be with his comrades. Each of them was killed in a most vicious, violent way. So, symbolically, we're looking at a man that chose his destiny by an act of great defiance. With "Floating River Requiem," I'm also imagining a river that's in the sky, floating with a sanctuary at the bottom. And that sanctuary at the bottom is the energy force that reclaims the land and reinvigorates a continent. And just to show you why I think it's prophetic, right now in Africa, mostly Western Africa, they are developing their own medicine and research about pathogens and pandemics and things like that. They have this beautiful dedication to create a medical network that does not need the outside. And the reason they're doing that is because during the time of the pandemic, the United States and Europe shared vaccines with each other, but they didn't share them with Africa.

Chinen: Right.

Smith: So I think that's one of the prophetic moves right there, is self reliance, independence. And asking no one for anything.

Iyer: Yeah. Steadfastness.

Smith: Steadfastness.

Chinen: There's an artistic corollary to that, and I think about your life in music as an example. Determining your own path, setting your own terms, and not waiting for anyone to present an opportunity. You've really created those spaces and opportunities for yourself. Is that a fair analogy?

Smith: That's a clear and very exact analogy. I can tell you that at the age of 12, I learned then that you don't ask nobody for something. And the thing that I produced that I didn't ask anybody about was my first composition. I wrote it when I was 12. I had teachers, I could have gone and said, "Teach me how to compose." But I didn't. I wanted to compose, I had the urge to compose, I composed. And when I finished, I realized that that was a choice that I made, to be self-reliant. And now at 83, I can look back and say, "Clearly Wadada had an urge to be on the right track." Why would a 12-year-old kid do that? Because my grandfather and his brother didn't work for anybody. They created their own jobs, you see. They developed patches of land to grow food. And they became self-sufficient. I worked with them as a young kid, from 7 up to 11 or 12. Those kinds of things show you that there are other ways of doing stuff in a society that has prohibition against whatever you want to be.

Chinen: It's been almost 10 years since you recorded your previous duo album, A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, which was well received. Certain things are clearly consistent, but there is a different sonic character to Defiant Life. I'd love to hear you talk about that.

Iyer: In the pacing, let's say, and the focus, I would say that the music was made in very much the same way. But maybe what's different is us, on some level. Not just each of us as individuals, but also what we understand about what we can do. For example, when we made the first duo album, we had played many times together in Wadada's band, and we'd played a handful of duo concerts. But most often the duo sound emerged in the context of Wadada's band, often out of necessity.

Smith: When things break down.

Iyer: Right. When, let's say, what was supposed to happen didn't happen, and then something else needed to happen. That's when we arrived at this process of moving step by step into an unknown space that then felt complete just by itself somehow. It came to have its own wholeness and its own inner sensibility, its own way of moving. So that's what we wanted to honor with that first album. The first album was more smaller episodes, and with this one, we can think of a compositional form sprawling over 12 or 15 minutes, and having its own inner shifts and inner dynamics, and that that whole thing might be a complete statement. As composers, both of us are familiar with creating on that time scale. But to do it together in this very focused, creative collaboration, that is something I think we've cultivated. And it's informed so many other things I've done; it's really become a part of me in this meaningful, essential way.

Chinen: One thing that strikes me about this recording, with respect to what you just said, is your use of electronics and the Fender Rhodes. It is liberated from any kind of grid — it's more like a change in atmospheric conditions. If that's not a new development, it seems at least like something that is prioritized on this record.

Smith: Yeah, it sets up what one could possibly call a vertical stream. And I don't mean streaming vertically, but the width of the vertical stream that's larger than, let's imagine, between here and Jupiter, and that the sounds that are being emitted through that stream have all kinds of saturations of goodwill, or harmony. When you hear that, and it's coming through your ears and through your body, and you have a trumpet in your hand, you either look forward and pull the trigger on the valve, or you pick up the mute and insert it and still pull the trigger on the valve. And what comes out, no one knows until it's over, because during the process, it's such a deepening and widening command. You don't know the time span that you're moving through it until you have finished it and look back over it. That happened many times during this session.

Iyer: Yeah.

Smith: Where we fall completely silent afterwards. And not a silence in a way in which we are intimidated, but a silence in a way in which we can imagine that we have just made a journey, and don't know how we got there.

Chinen: I really appreciate that answer, because it frames what we're talking about in experiential terms. So the language of musicology or analysis is not really adequate. It's something that you have lived through, that you have moved through.

Iyer: One of the first things I learned, working with Wadada, was that it was possible to speak about music in human terms, and also that it works better. It is more accurate in some ways, and it's richer, those kinds of descriptions. Like, I remember him saying: "You do this, and I'm going to play across it." And I'd never heard it phrased that way before. So even just that particular preposition was like a revelation to me. It's like, well, this is how we do everything: We move across and through. It's all about relationships, actually. It's all about human action and relation. And then it's also about dreaming and imagining. About imagining beyond ourselves, imagining beyond the human — you know, stretching out to Jupiter, and beyond.

Chinen: This feels like a good moment to return to that word, "defiant." We've mentioned a couple of powerful examples of embodied defiance. But how did that word animate this music?

Iyer: As you mentioned, the Palestinian poet and the Congolese leader, both were assassinated, were killed in a struggle for liberation. We hadn't consulted with each other before arriving in Lugano, Switzerland, other than to say: "I think we should make another record." We both agreed that it was the right thing to do, and the right time to do it. But we hadn't said what's it about or who's it for, or why it should exist. Except to continue this lifelong conversation that we've had about music and life and everything else. Wadada's music is very much known for contemplating these extremely significant historical tableaus, or moments or tiny stretches of time. Like the seconds before Medgar Evers was killed, for example. These scenes that bear the weight of all that's come before, and all that comes afterward.

I think maybe there was a method that I learned from him about this particular kind of focus, that it wasn't just about putting it in a title, but actually an all-encompassing method of creating. These two named pieces — the two single-page pieces of music that we used as tent poles for the whole project — they stood for the entire thing. They informed everything else that was in this suite of music, and together they articulate a much larger idea about defiance. And about not just defiance through being martyred, but also what is it to live on. The word sumud, which I learned in my studies around the Palestinian struggle, means "steadfastness." Like, how do you live on in the face of this? And also not just live on mournfully, but live on and celebrate life defiantly — live on in a way that actually is full of purpose and joy, even in the face of state terror. And that sort of became the backbone: not just an act of mourning or tragedy, but actually celebrating what one does in the face of it, and looking to these issues that make up the history and the future of liberation. When I think of titling an album, sometimes it can offer a companion to the aural experience, so that they complete each other, they complicate each other, they fill and empty each other. So what could this signal to a listener, to any audience, to anyone who holds it in their hand? Could it work in the same way that kite might work for a child in Gaza — as something that prompts the imagination?

Chinen: What you're saying emphasizes that in the title phrase, it's not just defiance, right? "Life" is the other word, and the two are not in opposition. They are, in fact, within the same breath.

Smith: Frederick Douglass said that whoever desires to seek liberty and justice must fight every day. Because the victory itself on Thursday does not last through on Friday. So one must constantly exert a defiant movement towards their own realization of being. I like to think that beauty is inside the mystery of defiance. I would say that knowing that your life is going to be snuffed out in a few seconds — a view that none of us have ever had, or can have until it happens — that's the mystery. But what counters that mystery on the other side is the view that looks into the future, as Martin Luther King said: "I have been to the mountaintop, and I've seen the promised land." That too is part of that mystery, because that person who can see both sides, the side of transition and the side of mobility. Magnificent mystery.

Iyer: A spiritual strength is what it is, right? It's a very special kind of enlightenment.

Smith: Yeah.

Chinen: As you're talking, I'm thinking about ritual and ceremony, which feels pertinent on this album. Not just because there is a procession, there is an elegy, there is a prelude, there is a requiem. What is created in this music feels like a meditative and perhaps spiritual space. It's a space for contemplation, for receiving. Is that a dimension of this work for you?

Smith: Well, it seems that the common notion about meditation is to kind of relax and get into a zone. But this kind of meditation that we are provoking, through sonic art, is actually to propel, to send out like a missile, this constant desire for balance and harmony, liberty and justice. The notion of law and rule of law, the whole gamut of living.

Chinen: That process is always unfolding, and forever unfinished. The way that the two of you connect, musically, it feels like tapping into some element of the eternal.

Smith: Yeah, collaborations are hard. And the thing about Vijay and I, we have so much success at it. But it is actually hard, because there's a moment when we are playing where there's no knowledge whatsoever about what's happening.

Iyer: Mmhmm.

Smith: It's an active, evolving moment. Somehow, when we finish it, we know what it's about — but we never speak about it, because, as they say, it's not a secret, just a mystery.