The songs up Compassion they had different origins, but they are in conversation, as answers to questions that Iyer has been asking since the beginning of his career. Several of the numbers were written for an event honoring the victims of COVID, while others were composed as part of a tribute project to poet and scholar Eve Ewing, whose nonfiction has most famously explored the bigoted legacy of Chicago's school closures. “It Goes,” a ballad with a dreamy, unique beat that elevates a potentially slow stretch to depth, was originally written as a lyrical setting that imagined Emmett Till having lived a long life—instead of being kidnapped, tortured, and lynch him. Mississippi racists at age 14.
Compassion it trembles with the horror of those roots, but the relentless sense of pacing means the album never feels like a collection of works written to order. “Panegyric” slows the record down after several numbers slide and undulate, while Roscoe Mitchell's cover of “Nonaah” forms a dissonant scar in the center of the LP, nicely distorting an otherwise melodic mood. CompassionHis brushes with social history are not uncharted for Iyer, even when he deals exclusively with instruments, as he does here. However, the haphazardly worn expertise and nested sadness he brings to the work feel like the culmination of a life's quest.
On a performance level, Iyer works in his heroic strain—what Coltrane sounds like on “My Favorite Things,” as if despair and giddy optimism are always a note away. On the electrifying “Maelstrom,” his arpeggios sound like a chorus of voices, circling each other in a canon. However, its static harmonies and slippery choruses float thanks to the life raft provided by Oh and Sorey.
The double bassist, whose The hours of the glass was a great, overlooked jazz release from last year, she approaches her instrument with a melodic ease that belies the glitz. She often solos at the bottom of her standing position, as Iyer points out in the liner notes—capturing images of ghosts that are faint but dramatically change their surroundings. Elsewhere, he subsumes and redefines the pianist's lead lines, taking over the head of the beautiful “Arch” so that it rings like a fading memory. The soaring “Where I Am” is a more spacious opportunity for her to roam, while her interplay with Sorey on the final track reinforces the record's busy pinnacle, an exhibition of each player's individuality that serves up a vast landscape of collective emotion – grief for the dead. like admiration for the living, it is layered with the knowledge of life's vast and terrible potential. Compassion it thrives in that groove between awe and callous tolerance.
