Pianist and composer Vijay Iyer has announced a new album with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Out March 21, via ECM, Defiant Life is the artists’ second collaborative record, following 2016’s A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke. Today, Iyer and Smith have also shared the album’s closing song, “Procession: Defiant Life.” Listen to it below.
“Our time together, from the moment we meet right until the moment we play, is most often spent talking about the state of the world,” Iyer said in a press statement, “studying histories of liberation, and sharing readings and historical references, as a means of grounding ourselves purposefully in our present.”
Revisit the Best New Music review of Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily’s Love in Exile.
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Defiant Life:
01 Prelude: Survival
02 Sumud
03 Floating River Requiem (for Patrice Lumumba)
04 Elegy: The Pilgrimage
05 Kite (for Refaat Alareer)
06 Procession: Defiant Life