Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith

We welcome the long-awaited return of a pair of master improvisers and long-term collaborators for a landmark evening of duets drawing on their two ECM Records albums, 2016’s A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke and their 2025 follow-up, Defiant Life. 

“One of the truly great jazz musicians of our time” (Stereophile), pianist and composer Vijay Iyer  stretches the boundaries of jazz but has long reached beyond the music’s vocabulary. He was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant” in 2013 and his current trio with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey is among the most acclaimed small groups in modern jazz.  

A lion of the avant-garde since his membership in Chicago’s AACM in the late 1960s, trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith is in the midst of a spectacular late career creative burst. Over the past decade, the 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award-winner released nearly two-dozen albums, most notably 2012’s epic Pulitzer Prize finalist Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform), an orchestral four-disc project inspired by the civil rights movement. 

2016’s A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke took its title from a line in the diaries of Indian visual artist Nasreen Mohamed, and their follow-up for ECM, 2025’s Defiant Life, is devoted to the necessary resistance to state-sponsored violence, at home and abroad.