Mutations is the first album Vijay Iyer made as a leader for ECM, and a recording that widens the picture of his work as pianist and composer. At its centre is Mutations I-X, a ten-part suite for string quartet, piano and electronics, built from small cells that change step by step. Solo pieces frame it, so the record travels from acoustic piano to a hybrid of notated strings, improvisation and laptop sound.
The suite was written and first performed in 2005, commissioned by Ethel's Foundation for the Arts with funds from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. Iyer rebuilt it with each later performance, keeping the notated elements while giving more weight to what happens in real time. Here the strings are played by Miranda Cuckson and Michi Wiancko on violins, Kyle Armbrust on viola and Kivie Cahn-Lipman on cello. Iyer appears as interpreter, as improviser and, in his own words, as "a sort of laptop artist, mixing in noise and different sounds". The album was recorded in September 2013 at Avatar Studios in New York, with James Farber as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.
The movements carry short titles such as Air, Canon, Chain and Kernel. Air opens the suite with repeated string phrases and a lyrical violin line, without piano. In Automata short bursts of mechanical activity are mixed with looped string passages until the recorded and the live blur together. Before the suite, Spellbound and Sacrosanct, Cowrie Shells and the Shimmering Sea returns to a solo piano piece Iyer first recorded on Memorophilia in 1995. Vuln, Part 2 and When We're Gone, both made in summer 2013, set the piano against electronic rhythms and textures.
Jon Turney of London Jazz News praised the solo pieces as "gleaming miniatures that are all about touch and the careful use of space". He also warned that the suite would not suit every listener. On the Free Jazz Collective blog, Troy Dostert heard the suite as "a true ensemble endeavor" rather than a piece for piano with strings. Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews pointed to Iyer's fifteen years of violin study behind the string writing.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2372, first released on 28 February 2014.
