Iyer and Ladd: In What Language?
VIJAY IYER & MIKE LADD
IN WHAT LANGUAGE?
PI RECORDINGS PI09 CD
BY MATTHEW INGRAM
This is the album version of Iyer and Ladd's critically acclaimed multimedia performance of the same name. On stage four artists, including rootless MC Ladd, decant his "libretto" lit chiaroscuro against a video backdrop. The project, inspired by the humiliating experiences of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi at the hands of US customs officials, explores "airport myths", questioning the political impartiality of these institutions and their handling of "fellow brown-skinned travellers." The recurring motif of the X-ray (the cover image features a Radiographic snapshot of a suitcase) is used to underline the paradox that while skin colour unjustly motivates state suspicion, all Big Brother should concern itself with is what's in your pockets.
Despite the artists' contention that the project is "hybrid to the core" the predominant musical theme is Modern Jazz, unsurprising given star of Asian Improv Iyer's heavyweight credentials, matching those of Matthew Shipp. This isn't to ignore that Iyer's playing here owes as much to Steve Reich as Don Pullen. Other themes, the uncomfortable junglisms of "The Density of the 19th century" and the more successful electric chrome hip-hop of "The Color of My Circumference II" point to Ladd's input. While the text provides ample motivation for this wilfully eclectic collage of sounds, charting as it does the trajectory of disparate individuals through the Interzone of the airport, Ladd is particularly impressive in character as Jalal Nuriddin amid the more traditional Jazz setting. As such it's a shame to hear so little of him, other deliveries (regardless of instrumental context) are less charismatic though may have benefited from being witnessed on stage.
This fusion of performance-poetry and Jazz is original but reassuringly not without precedent, it's heartening to hear echoes here of The Last Poets, the operatic ambitions of Archie Shepp's "Attica Blues", shades of Divine Styler's jazz-inflected "Spiral Walls Containing Autumns Of Light" and even dystopian touches from Jon Hassell's "Works of Fiction."