17 years after its third album, Door (Pi, 2008), the American super-trio Fieldwork – alto sax player Steve Lehman (a Guggenheim Fellow and a Doris Duke Performing Artist), pianist Vijay Iyer (alternating on Fender Rhodes, a MacArthur Fellow, a United States Artist Fellow, and a three-time GRAMMY nominee), and drummer Tyshawn Sorey (winner of the the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition «Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith)» –  reconvened and recorded the long-anticipated fourth album, the masterful Thereupon. The album was recorded at Okatave Audio in Mount Vernon in May 2024.

Fieldwork’s music for Thereupon was collaboratively developed through extended improvisations, with three compositions by Iyer and four by Lehman, but it is impossible to know what was composed and what was spontaneously improvised. This democratic trio still sounds greater than the sum of its parts, operating as an intense, fieldwork sound lab, and enjoying a profound and strong affinity among the three innovative composers, improvisers, and educators, and embracing their individual differences (as one of the pieces is titled).

The music is urgent, dense, risk-taking, wise, inventive, reflective, and exploratory, expanding Fieldwork’s sonic palette and dynamics. The nine short pieces are layered with Lehman’s serpentine lines, extended breathing technique, and microtonal fingerings; Iyer’s complex and cyclical, propulsive playing, kaleidoscopic in its harmonic and timbral variety; and Sorey’s endlessly inventive thrust and orchestration of the music with subtlety and nuance. You can hear the echoes of seminal AACM musicians that Lehman, Iyer, and Sorey have collaborated with before – Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and George Lewis.

The album demands repeated, attentive listening to decipher its labyrinthine, thought-provoking inner logic and its many sonic wonders, a notion corresponding with the album’s title, borrowed from the Buddhist Vimalakīrti sutra, where Buddha shows that the world can be much more than it appears. The cover artwork is by American visual artist Charles Gaines, whose work interrogates the discourse of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, reinforcing Fieldwork’s ever-evolving, rich, and nuanced musical language.

Eyal Hareuveni

Steve Lehman (alto saxophone), Vijay Iyer (piano, Rhodes), Tyshawn Sorey (drums)