Vijay Iyer And Craig Taborn at Big Ears Festival at Tennessee Theatre

Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn are among the most important pianists working in music today. A MacArthur fellow, Grammy nominee, Harvard professor, and winner of DownBeat’s artist-of-the-year honors multiple times, Iyer is a tireless composer, improviser, and bandleader. Described by The Los Angeles Times as “a boundless and deeply important young star,” he is a master of integrating varied interests and traditions, internalizing his enthusiasms in his music in the great mold of Steve Coleman. Taborn, meanwhile, has pushed more toward jazz’s outer experimental limits, playing with hardliners like Tim Berne and Evan Parker, David Torn and Ikue Mori. But his solo albums, particularly 2017’s brilliant Daylight Ghosts, demonstrate his sophisticated sense of harmony and poise, a supreme bandleader holding the center fast....

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Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn are among the most important pianists working in music today. A MacArthur fellow, Grammy nominee, Harvard professor, and winner of DownBeat’s artist-of-the-year honors multiple times, Iyer is a tireless composer, improviser, and bandleader. Described by The Los Angeles Times as “a boundless and deeply important young star,” he is a master of integrating varied interests and traditions, internalizing his enthusiasms in his music in the great mold of Steve Coleman. Taborn, meanwhile, has pushed more toward jazz’s outer experimental limits, playing with hardliners like Tim Berne and Evan Parker, David Torn and Ikue Mori. But his solo albums, particularly 2017’s brilliant Daylight Ghosts, demonstrate his sophisticated sense of harmony and poise, a supreme bandleader holding the center fast.


Iyer and Taborn shared piano credits on Roscoe Mitchell’s 2010 album Far Side.For the last several years, they’ve also shared a tantalizingly rare piano duo. With their grand pianos interlocked like yin and yang, Iyer and Taborn move between dozens of musical modes. Sometimes, they swing, bouncing back into ancestral jazz piano revelry. At other times, they slink into near stillness or seeming discord, their sense of harmony pushing against one another in captivating angularity. At Big Ears 2019, Iyer and Taborn sit together at center stage, offering this simultaneous glimpse at two modern mastery.

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