The songs on Compassion had different genesises, but they’re in conversation, like answers to questions that Iyer has posed since his career’s start. Several of the numbers were written for an event honoring COVID victims, while others took shape as part of a project saluting poet and scholar Eve Ewing, whose nonfiction has most famously explored the bigoted legacy of school closures in Chicago. “It Goes,” a ballad with a dreamy, singular cadence that raises a potentially slow stretch to profundity, was originally penned as a setting for lyrics that imagined Emmett Till had lived a long life—instead of being kidnapped, tortured, and lynched by Mississippi racists at the age of 14.
Compassion shivers with the horror of these roots, but its relentless sense of pacing means that the album never feels like a compilation of works written on commission. “Panegyric” slows the disc down after several numbers glide and ripple, while the Roscoe Mitchell cover “Nonaah” forms a dissonant scar in the LP’s center, beautifully disfiguring an otherwise tuneful mood. Compassion’s brushes with social history are hardly uncharted for Iyer, even when he holds himself solely to instrumentals, as he does here. Still, the casually-worn expertise and inlaid sorrow that he brings to the task seem like the culmination of a life pursuit.
On the level of performance, Iyer operates in his heroic strain—how Coltrane sounds on “My Favorite Things,” as though despair and giddy optimism are always just a note away. On the electrifying “Maelstrom,” his arpeggios sound like a chorus of voices, circling each other in a canon. His static harmonies and slippery refrains, though, float along thanks to the life raft offered by Oh and Sorey.
The double bassist, whose The Glass Hours was an excellent, overlooked jazz release from last year, approaches her instrument with a melodic facility that refuses flashiness. Oh often solos on the lower register of her upright, as Iyer points out in the liner notes—capturing ghost images that are faint but alter their surroundings dramatically. Elsewhere, she subsumes and redefines the pianist’s lead lines, taking over the head of the gorgeous “Arch” so that it thrums like a fading memory. Stately “Where I Am” is a roomier opportunity for her to rove, while her interplay with Sorey on the final cut fosters the record’s busy apex, an exhibition of each player’s individuality that serves a sprawling scape of collective feeling—grief for the dead, like admiration for the living, is layered with a knowledge of life’s immense and terrible possibility. Compassion flourishes in this furrow between awe and hardened forbearance.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
