Vijay Iyer returns to the Village Vanguard with his trio for two live performances during the pandemic lockdown

Who: The Vijay Iyer Trio featuring Nick Dunston and Jeremy Dutton
What: Livestreamed concerts direct from the Village Vanguard
Where: Village Vanguard online
When: Saturday, June 20, $7, 7:00, and Sunday, June 21, $7, 2:00
Why: On May 29, the Boston-based Irish punk band the Dropkick Murphys performed a blistering live set from an empty Fenway Park, joined for two songs by Bruce Springsteen from his home in New Jersey. (You can watch the show here.) It was absolutely exhilarating; frontman Ken Casey and the band were thrilled to be able to blast out no-holds-barred music again, and their enthusiasm was contagious. I imagined that the tens of thousands of other viewers from around the world were dancing just as wildly as I was in my Manhattan apartment, making the most of this communal moment. Over the last few months, I’ve enjoyed many short concerts with singer-songwriters playing from their living rooms or groups getting together over Zoom, but the Murphs took it all to another level, for more than two nonstop hours. Live music is meant to be a shared experience; we cram into stadiums, arenas, and clubs, seeking the camaraderie of strangers who have the same great taste as we do. We might not know when concerts will come back given the pandemic lockdown, but our opportunities to gather together online are expanding, as evidenced by the Village Vanguard, the ever-shining beacon of jazz.

Since 1935, the Vanguard has been hosting live shows in its cramped, intimate downstairs space at 178 Seventh Ave. South. But with the coronavirus crisis, it has been closed since March 16 — until last week. On June 13-14, the oldest continuously operating jazz club in the city opened its doors to the Billy Hart Quartet, which performed live sets on the Vanguard stage, playing Saturday night and Sunday afternoon without any fans in person; hungry jazz aficionados tuned in to the livestream, forming a unique music community. This weekend the new series hosts the Vijay Iyer Trio, with pianist Iyer, bassist Nick Dunston, and drummer Jeremy Dutton. Last month, New York native Iyer released InWhatInstrumentals: Music from In What Language?, consisting of songs from a 2003 performance at Asia Society, about selective security enforcement at airports, inspired by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s pre-9/11 detention at JFK while traveling from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires.

“The airport is not a neutral place. It serves as a contact zone for those empowered or subjugated by globalization,” Iyer and his collaborator, Mike Ladd, wrote in the liner notes back in 2003. “It is a center of commerce and a crossroads of cultures, as well as a place that enforces its own globo-consumer culture. It is a frontier, a place of conflict and quarantine, reception, departure, and detention.” Those words ring truer than ever in 2020; on the new release, Iyer, who helped inaugurate the Met Breuer in 2016 with his “Relation” residency, explains, “Poet-producer Mike Ladd and I created In What Language? in 2003, in post-9/11 New York City. We were just coming to terms with the facts on the ground, which today seem frighteningly ordinary: mounting intolerance and hate crimes against Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, and other nonwhite people; traumatic raids of immigrant communities by the INS (later Homeland Security); the prospect of endless, amoral war waged under false pretenses; the callous neoliberal agendas of globalization and disaster capitalism; and an unprecedented power grab enacted under cover of jingoism and feigned incompetence.” He continues, “For us as travelers of color, the swift transformation of international airports made it all too plain. These formerly optimistic spaces of encounter and adventure swiftly devolved into irrational zones of anxiety, suspicion, surveillance, and the hyperpolicing of Black and brown bodies, even as the labor force in these spaces mostly comprised the same people being surveilled…. Something about 2020’s rolling tragedy has led me back to these old, haunted, nearly empty rooms of sound. In 2003, I hadn’t imagined that this music, so tied to its original context, could mean something seventeen years later. In the darkness of that moment, we weren’t so sure that the world would hold together for this long. But somehow back then, [producer and engineer] Scotty Hard and I chose to preserve these instrumental mixes anyway, setting them aside for a rainy day.” That rainy day is here. All proceeds from the sale of the album go to immigrant organizations and communities of color disproportionately affected by Covid-19.

The Vijay Iyer Trio might not be kickass in the same way as the Dropkick Murphys, but they will dig deep into your soul, especially as you’re sheltering in place, seeking respite from our insane world. They will be playing two sets of about seventy-five minutes each, at 7:00 on June 20 and 2:00 on June 21; online admission is a mere seven bucks, and you can set your own food and drink minimum at home. Streaming Live continues June 27-28 with the Joe Martin Quartet featuring Mark Turner, Kevin Hays, and Nasheet Waits, July 4-5 with the Joe Lovano Trio Fascination featuring Ben Street and Andrew Cyrille, and July 11-12 with the Eric Reed Quartet featuring Stacy Dillard, Dezron Douglas, and Jeremy Bean Clemons.