Fieldwork: Thereupon

Early in his recording career, pianist Vijay Iyer formed his most compelling group, Fieldwork. The initial album release, Your Life Flashes (Pi Recordings, 2002) broke new ground and put down the roots from which everything Iyer has created in 20-plus years has grown and flourished.

Iyer's recording career began in 1995 with Memorophilia (Asian Improv). The ensuing 30 years have seen more than a score of albums from the pianist in a leadership role as well as dozens in a sideman stints. His three previous Fieldwork outings include the previously mentioned Your Life Flashes, as well as Simultaneous Progress (2005) and Door (2007), all on the Pi Recordings label. Then Fieldwork went fallow, until the disc at hand, 2025's Thereupon, emerged.

The group has always been a trio—piano, saxophone and drums. And while the personnel has changed—two different saxophonists (Aaron Stewart and Steve Lehman), and two different drummers (Elliot Humberto Kavee and Tyshawn Sorey)—the sound has remained the same. It can be described as headlong (borrowing the opening tune of Simulated Progress). Fieldwork plows into music-making in a headlong mode. It swirls into town like a gale. Shingles come off the rooftops. Chimneys tumble. Storm shutters break loose and bang against the sides of the houses. "Propaganda," Thereupon's opener fills this bill—fierce and implacable. "Embracing Difference" is similarly expressed. Iyer and Sorey flail like crazy, with a method to their flailing. Lehman blisters the air. On other tunes, the group is more sedate—a term used in a relative sense.

"Astral" is a dark, churning, out-of-body experience. So is the title tune. Perhaps the pianist's hexis has arrived. In his astute—and deep—liner notes to his 2010 alone-at-the-piano project, Solo (ACT Records), Iyer describes viewing of the self from above. He writes about autoscopy, a term that refers to an out-of-body experience where (in his case) he sees himself, his hexis, from above as he plays his music. It is complicated, and Iyer is a cerebral guy, working perhaps on a higher intellectual level than most of us. The hexis may have come around in the recording of a tune or two here, beyond time and space with Fieldwook as locked into the beyond—or the now?—as any ensemble can be.

Call Fieldwork a power trio, three instrumentalists creating a primal sound on a foundation of intellectual underpinnings perhaps not apparent on an initial listening session. Repeated spins bring this deep and intricate root system to light.

Beyond the intensity and relentlessness, Thereupon also displays a more "Astral" side, a calming, suspended-in-time feeling with that particular tune and with the closer, "The Night Before." That influence may come, at least in part, from Iyer's work with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith on Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke (2016) and Defiant Life (2025), both on ECM Records.

The resurfacing from the sands of time of Fieldwork is a welcome move by Iyer. Thereupon is worthy of a place on the top 10 of the year lists. And will we see a reemergence of the pianist's quartet of the early 2000s featuring saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa? We can hope.

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