InWhatStrumentals
by Vijay Iyer & Mike Ladd
A few weeks into lockdown in the Plague of 2020, as we took shelter from danger, loss, and uncertainty, Seth Rosner at Pi Recordings asked if I might be willing to offer some old or new music to the world. As it happened, I’d been thinking back to an earlier time of crisis, and how we had managed to make art in the face of it.
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..
Vijay Iyer
April 24, 2020
Harlem
https://vijayiyer.bandcamp.com/album/inwhatstrumentals
#vijayiyer #mikeladd #911 #covid #hiphop #jazz