The Transitory Poems is the first duo album by pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, recorded at a single concert in Budapest in March 2018. Two grand pianos, eight long pieces and no standards: the music is made in the moment, yet it moves with the logic of composition. Several pieces are dedicated to artists who shaped both players, among them Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams and Geri Allen.
Iyer and Taborn learned to mesh their approaches inside Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory, the ensemble heard on Mitchell's ECM album Far Side, and they kept giving duo concerts after that. Iyer has described their way of working as "very compositional in real time", with no plan made beforehand and each performance shaped by the instruments and the room. This one took place on 12 March 2018 in the concert hall of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. Stefano Amerio engineered the recording and Manfred Eicher produced it. The title borrows words of Cecil Taylor, quoted in the booklet from an interview with Chris Funkhouser.
The opening Life Line (Seven Tensions) runs for thirteen minutes of dense, colliding lines, two players finishing each other's phrases. Sensorium, for the painter and sculptor Jack Whitten, starts from delicate trickles of notes and thickens into a shimmering cloud. Clear Monolith, for Abrams, opens in near-minimal fashion and builds by degrees, while Luminous Brew, for Taylor, works with the resonance of the two instruments. The closing suite Meshwork / Libation / When Kabuya Dances is dedicated to Allen and ends with her own tune, taken from her album The Printmakers. Across the set it is often hard to say which pianist is playing what.
Critics treated the record as a rare addition to the two-piano tradition in jazz. In Pitchfork Matthew Kassel wrote that "the Iyer-Taborn mind meld sets a high standard for future entries in the canon." Mike Hobart of the Financial Times heard "a programme of mischievous scampers, agitational rumbles and soothing contemplations", and the Free Jazz Collective gave it five stars in 2019.
CD edition, ECM 2644, released on 15 March 2019, with liner notes by both pianists.
