A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke is the first duo album by pianist Vijay Iyer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, the musician Iyer calls his "hero, friend and teacher". At its centre is a seven-part suite dedicated to the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990), whose spare, linear drawings suggest abstract rhythms. It is quiet, carefully paced music for two players who have known each other for nearly twenty years.
Iyer had played often in Smith's Golden Quartet, and the two had last met in a studio on Smith's 2009 album Spiritual Dimensions. Smith is thirty years the elder. Here Iyer plays piano, Fender Rhodes and electronics, and Smith trumpet. The suite takes its title from a line in Mohamedi's diaries and is credited to both musicians. It was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Mohamedi exhibition that opened the Met Breuer in March 2016, where the duo premiered it. James Farber recorded the album at Avatar Studios, New York, on 17-19 October 2015, and Manfred Eicher produced.
The suite is framed by Iyer's Passage at the start and Smith's Marian Anderson, a tribute to the American contralto, at the end. Its opening section, All Becomes Alive, sets long declarative trumpet tones over a hollow drone. Uncut Emeralds is spare and gestural, while in Labyrinths the two join seemingly unrelated phrases with the ease of conversation. Iyer mostly works as a discreet partner, with clusters, ripples and occasional changes of direction, and a little electronics sometimes supplies the simplest pulse.
In The New York Times, Ben Ratliff heard in the suite the qualities of Mohamedi's work, "repetition and mysticism, bold purpose and open space, abstraction and gorgeousness". John Fordham in The Guardian compared Smith's tone and phrasing to mid-period Miles Davis blended with free jazz, and heard a muted descent that recalls Sketches of Spain. For Seth Colter Walls at Pitchfork the set was "frequently gorgeous, sometimes roiling" and stood out in both catalogues. Jon Turney in London Jazz News found the conversation sometimes brooding but mainly quietly celebratory.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2486, released on 11 March 2016.
