Composed by Vijay Iyer
Libretto by Michael C. Ladd
Conceived and Directed by Ibrahim Quraishi
Upcoming performances:
February 9, 2007 — Festival Sons d'Hiver, Paris, France
March 9, 2007 — Royce Hall, UCLA Live, Los Angeles, CA
April 20, 2007 — Lisner Hall George Washington U, DC
January 19, 2007 — Stanford U, Palo Alto, CA
New York Premiere:
Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, December 6-10, 2006
European Premiere:
Kontracom Festival, Salzburg, Austria, June 16, 2006
World Premiere:
Memorial Hall, UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina, March 24, 2006
Album
on iTunes
Release March 6, 2007, Savoy Jazz Worldwide
''...the piece, with its uneasy resonances, holds up a fun-house mirror to our culture of information overload. And somehow the results are not just galling, but also often gripping. Like the subject of its critique, it draws you in." (New York Times - December 8, 2006)
A bass groove, deep and reassuring, lures us in like a subterranean heartbeat, only to be buried under a sublime, electro-acoustic fog of sounds competing for our attention — it's the perfect opening for Still Life with Commentator, a timely show about the disorienting effects of wartime media. The composer is the brilliant pianist-improviser Vijay Iyer, recently named Down Beat Rising Star Jazz Artist and Composer of the Year. Together with post-hip-hop poet Mike Ladd ("one of contemporary hip hop's greatest innovators,") The Village Voice) and world renowned conceptual artist and director Ibrahim Quraishi, the trio delivers a trenchant and darkly comic down-tempo distillation of our romance with the digital world.
Introspective and articulate, Still Life builds upon Iyer and Ladd's In What Language? ("simply a masterpiece," Signal to Noise; 2004 Album of the Year, Jazzwise), fortifying it with live actors, video, and music in a way that seduces us from every sensory angle - just like the media-saturated world it seeks to elucidate. Here, the objects of our sustenance come as much from a virtual landscape as they do from a physical one: Jon Stewart is an action figure with posable limbs. Animated cable news graphics are souped-up thrill rides. And televised atrocity, pixilated and bloodless, competes with sitcoms for prime-time ratings. More of a bittersweet contemplation than a one-sided critique, Still Life takes the chatter of the information age and translates it into compelling, collaborative art.
is an oratorio about our virtual surroundings: the information landscape of modern news, the consumer technologies that connect us to it, and the effects of these technologies on our intimate selves. As we grow accustomed to constantly broadcasted states of crisis, the news media assume new roles in our daily lives. News is no longer an institution confined to a newsroom. Today's news media have become our life-sustaining atmosphere - and we are deeply immersed. We do not merely live with the news; increasingly we live in the news. And, with greater frequency, we find it necessary to become the news, to participate in it, to deliver it. Perhaps this impulse is our only defense; reality television, the blogosphere and YouTube are but a few examples. These are the new narrative forms of our time.
Digital reportage, punditry, and testimony are now integral to the way we define ourselves. Meanwhile, we are living through an era of endless war and atrocity. As the nature of the news media has altered, the nature of warfare has expanded; so, too, has the notion of the refugee. Endless war still maintains its physical theaters of operations, where bullets are fired at bodies, individuals disappear without warning, and real refugees suffer real tragedies. But somehow another theater of operations monopolizes our attention instead: a virtual war, constructed by the news media. This theater has effectively created a class of information refugees, or infogees, for whom the expediency and immediacy of personal media (e.g. blogs) enable an atmosphere of anxiety, speculation, and rumor. Ultimately the infogee is a stand-in or all of us, engulfed by the multitude of news and commentary, weathering and becoming psychically displaced by the daily data storms. Thus the news starts to feel like actual weather, rivaling nature's own grip on humanity.
In Still Life with Commentator, we explore this new reality with familiar senses. Like the 19th century Naturalist poets or their resurgent counterparts today who use landscape as their muse, infogees issue prosodic descriptions of Dan Rather's face, CNN's title sequence, or the news images seared in our memory. These landscape poems are elegiac responses to the sensations created by our fragmented, televised present. Of course we all know that news is not natural. Even if we regard news culture as a complex system like the weather, we know also that its narratives are freighted with ideology, steered by power and capital, invested with desire. We start to see that it's not only the continual flurries of breaking news and blog mania that keep us transfixed; it's also the way in which TV news's signature image - still life, exterior shot, a single commentator, microphone - keeps lulling us into a stupor. It's that narcotic effect of everyone on television singing the same song. Here we attempt to sing those comfy, beautiful songs, while at the same time laying bare their insidious inner workings. It is not our agenda to issue a knee-jerk critique of our symbiosis with the media, but rather to try to reimagine its expressive and redemptive possibilities.