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Vijay Iyer, Break Stuff (ECM)
It would be safe to say that the pianist Vijay Iyer is the only jazz musician who constructs his music on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers introduced by the Medieval Italian mathematician. Safe that is, if Iyer didn’t credit saxophonist Steve Coleman with giving him the idea years ago. Maybe Coleman got it from Bartók (e.g., “Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta”). Whether Iyer’s ascendency in jazz can be credited to his mathematical expertise and intellectual romance with numbers is beside the point. What
counts is the effectiveness of the music. On some of the pieces here, Iyer, bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore avoid the boredom of repetition by overlaying sheer lyricism. In Thelonious Monk’s “Work,” Coltrane’s “Countdown,” Iyer’s own “Wrens” and “Break Stuff,” and his langorous unaccompanied solo on Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count,” boredom is unlikely.
Composer Elliott Sharp has written several works based on the Fibonacci series. One example is “Tessalation Row.” In the liner notes, the composer points out that the average of the numbers in this series is the proportion known as the Golden Ratio, “the logorithm generating the spiral” which also describes the growth pattern of flower petals, the shapes of galaxies, DNA sequences, and other natural phenomena. (Anyone who hears a relationship in this music to any of those has a much sharper sense of geometrical proportion than I do.)