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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on-demand, I'm grateful you are here. I'm also grateful to Kerry Nolan and Tiffany Hanssen for filling in last week so I could spend school break with my son. All I've got to say is Miami is going to Miami. You know what I mean everybody.

On today's show, we'll consider New York City in words and images. We'll hear about photographer Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929, which is now on view at the Met. We'll crowdsource what books to read if you really want to understand New York. We want your suggestions, get ready to call in. We'll also get an assist from a New York Public Library historian, and we'll learn how Major League Baseball is trying to speed up the game and get the ball in play more frequently. We'll talk about the new rules. That's our plan for today. Let's get this show started with an All of It listening party for the new album Love In Exile.

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That is Shadow Forces, a track off the new album Love in Exile, from a trio of celebrated musicians with a knack for experimentation and sonic exploration. It's the work of Vijay Iyer, Arooj Aftab, and Shahzad Ismaily, who first teamed up in 2018 and have performed together several times since, this album, Love in Exile, was recorded live in New York and is their first album as a trio. Vijay Iyer is a jazz pianist and MacArthur Fellow who has recorded in various combos. He last joined us to talk about the 2021 album, Uneasy, recorded with his other trio of bassist Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey.

Arooj Aftab is vocalist and composer who also joined us in 2021 to discuss her solo album Vulture Prince, which earned her a Grammy Award for best global music performance and a nomination for Best New Artist. We are excited to get to know Shahzad Ismaily, the multi-instrumentalist producer and engineer who's worked with Beth Orton, Moses Sumney, Lori Anderson, Yoko Ono and more. He's also a band member of Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog. So nice to have all of you with us. Welcome.

Arooj: Thank you. Hi, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Shahzad, I'm going to start with you since you're new. You're a new guy on our team. Pitchfork described your first time performing together back in 2018 as unplanned and improvised. What was the setting and what was the catalyst?

Shahzad: The setting was the Kitchen, which is a longstanding experimental music venue in the west side of Manhattan around the meat market area, I believe. Meatpacking District. Vijay had a large-scale piece there, retrospective art piece, and he had several performances that were set up with different groupings of people. He called me to play bass with one of the bands that he had performing that evening. Then luckily for me, I believe that on spontaneous short notice, he thought to add me to this short opening set that he and Arooj were going to do. Then the three of us played for the first time on that occasion.

Alison Stewart: Vijay, what was that original performance? What was happening that night and what made you call Shahzad?

Vijay: Like Shahzad said, it was in a series of concepts that I was convening, and they were all, I'm not sure if I'd say purely improvised, but created in real-time from what we all had among each other as a certain relationship or rapport or mutual understanding. I think Shahzad was, for me, a wild card because I actually hadn't played with him in many years. I first met him at the turn of the millennium, I think, when he moved to New York. I had kept track of what he'd been up to, but I hadn't actually made music with him much except maybe one time with Rafiq Bhatia and Marcus Gilmore, one time I remember I sat in with them.

Knowing that he would come in as this unknown, I think we were all just prepared to be especially attuned to the moment and to take care to build something that had its own inner strength and its own sensitivity. Out of that was just born this something beyond what we even expected in the sense of its coherence and its direction. Mainly the feeling. I would say the feeling of it felt right. It felt like it was meant to happen. It felt like it was all coming into existence fully formed in that moment.

Alison Stewart: Arooj, what do you remember about that performance and a moment in that performance and that instance when you thought to yourself, "Oh, this is clicking. This is making sense."

Arooj: I remember that the audience had a lot of expectation from this particular opening set, or at least that's the energy that I felt in the room that day. I think there's something about the Kitchen, and I think there's something about New York and Vijay. Me, Vijay, and Shahzad have been making music in New York for a long time, so I think there was already this original excitement for what this would sound like, so the audience was very beady-eyed and aggressively waiting for us to perform. I remember that being a little bit stressful for me because I was like, "I don't know what we're going to do," but as a result of that, I was like, "You know what? We're going to bring it."

[laughter]

Vijay: That's right.

Arooj: We're going to give them the exact match of the energy that I'm feeling. There's these incredible artists in the audience and there's people that we know. There's musician community. They're all just like watching us. I was like, "Ah, I don't know what's going on happen, but whatever it is, it's going to be amazing." I think that was the vibe I was like, "I'm going to listen. We're going to gel and it's going to be super." That's just how singularly I felt.

Aside from the fact that there is a difference between the experience that Shahzad and Vijay have versus what I have from a musical growth perspective, but definitely, once we played a bunch of shows and now that this record is out, I feel like a full-grown-up inducted into the adult music scene.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: This is a question for all of you. Shahzad, I ask you to go first. What is something you learned about your colleagues here that you really didn't know before? Whether it's about them musically or even personally after, or about the way they work after working with them on this project.

Shahzad: I learned about Vijay that there's a side of him that is coexistent with his seriousness, which is that there is also a high level of sensitivity and compassion and heart holding. That wouldn't be something that I would've assumed in years past from listening to his music or reading an interview here and there, or hearing a bit about his work. That's been a new experience for me, both in playing the music on stage, in spending time with each other, and in listening to Vijay in interviews as we do them together collectively.

Then with Arooj something I discovered quickly after playing with her was her desire to create community onstage and offstage in the work that she does as a musician. The reason I mention that is it's to a higher degree than just laughing together on the train en route to the gig. It's grander than that. It wasn't something that I'm all together used to, because often, especially in New York, everyone is quite atomized, running to this gig, and as soon as the gig is over, running to something else.

Alison Stewart: Vijay, how about for you, something that you didn't know before about your two colleagues that you now know.

Vijay: I think something about them I did know even before we came together, which is that we could trust each other, that we would take care of each other, that we would have a good time together. That's all come true in ways that I maybe intuited when I pulled us all together. I think what I've learned about Shahzad is that he is so profoundly insightful about the world and about people. It's been amazing to just hear him. I never know what he is going to say in these interviews, about me or about anybody else, but he's just a profoundly wise and sensitive person who understands a lot. I feel like I'm learning from him every time.

With Arooj I've gotten to witness her stratospheric ascent in the last few years. We've done a bunch of things together over the last five or six years. I think she always brings us authenticity to every occasion, the sincerity that is-- I'm able to say I knew her before she was the global phenomenon that she is. What I've learned is that she actually hasn't changed. She hasn't been changed by that kind of success or that kind of attention, that limelight. That she's still very much the endearing foul-mouthed drunkard.

I have a good time because I can go there with her when we have our nights after working together when we can just hang out and critique. I think the sharp analysis that she has about the world that underlies her artistry, so it's not just this divine voice, which it is, but it's also this, again, wisdom that's hard-earned, that came from enduring a lot of, I don't know, I guess I'd say the indignities of the music business and rising above them and claiming a space. Just seeing that kind of strength that she has brought to it has been really beautiful.

Alison Stewart: Arooj, you're up.

Arooj: First of all, I think Vijay calling me a foul-mouthed drunkard on radio--

Vijay: Hey, look, it takes one to know one is what I'm saying.

Arooj: One of the things that's been beautiful is getting to know these guys. In the beginning, definitely, I was shocked by the fact that-- The first time Vijay and I played, he spoke probably a sentence that had maybe just five words in it, then we went and played. I was really shocked by that because it broke the wall or that thing that we have where we overthink or we think at all. We discuss at least something about what we're going to do when we're doing it for the first time. We didn't do that. Then we went and we played and it was amazing.

I think because of that also, it forced me to calm down my mind and just listen. Then it continued that way. Now we know each other better, and yes, we do have these after-hangs and stuff, so there is more talking, more than five words, for sure. In the beginning, I was very just surprised that Vijay is someone who is a man of few words in general. Whatever he says is really well thought out and very intentional and has gravity because of that. He's the opposite of me who's just rambling and talking nonsense all the time.

[laughter]

Vijay: I'm pretty sure the five words, or maybe four words, are "it's going to be okay." I'm supposing that's what I say.

Arooj: Or it was, "Let's play something in F."

[laughter]

Either of those things, it was something very sparse. Vijay. Then, Shahzad, I was really pleasantly surprised by his authenticity too, his humor and his freedom. A lot of really incredible-- I'm trying to use the word wisdom but Shahzad does impart a lot of wisdom. He's very poetic. I don't know if that has something to do with having roots from Pakistan, but there's definitely a lot of poeticism there. I was like, "What is a bass player going to do anyway? What could possibly happen that is something that I haven't heard before?"

He is unbelievable. He is so fresh and he can find a really great idea or several great ideas, link them together, and just repeat them. It won't sound monotonous. He is very good at music. I knew that because of just how much people talk about him and his track record, but I didn't really know, know. In playing with him every time, actually, it's like a concert for me within our own show where I'm silently watching these two play this beautiful stuff while I'm not singing inside of the set. It's amazing.

Alison Stewart: The name of the album is Love in Exile. My guests are Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily, and Arooj Aftab. As we go to break, let's listen to another song from the album Love In Exile, another track. This is To Remain/To Return.

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You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour are Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily, and Arooj Aftab. The name of their new album is Love in Exile. Vijay, the longest song on the album is 14 minutes and 39 seconds. The shortest is eight minutes. As you're recording, what dictates the length of a track?

Vijay: It really emerges from how we move together and how we breathe together and how we go through these waves of feeling together. I never know how long anything is when we play together. I just lose any external sense of time. It's like the music we're making generates its own sense of temporality or sense of momentum or stillness, then we surrender to that. We don't think, "Oh, this is going to be the hit single," or something like that. It's really, "This is the time that this music is asking us to take." That's how it feels to me.

Alison Stewart: Arooj, where do you imagine someone listening to this album?

Arooj: I definitely was imagining yesterday when it was finally 60 degrees in New York that someone is playing this, someone who has a very serious main character energy has this on on their AirPods and is walking to brunch in Brooklyn. That's how I felt it fit really well. Also, a late-night record that you would just put on and leave on.

Alison Stewart: Shahzad, we're going to listen to the song that is 14 minutes and 39 seconds, not all 14:39. What if we could? It's called Eyes of the Endless. .

What would you like our audience to listen for in this track?

Shahzad: That's a good question. Here's what comes to mind. If someone in the audience has been in the circumstance of pretty extreme silence, whether they've been on a walk, maybe late at night in a countryside setting, or they've woken up early hours before anyone else in their house has woken up and they've been in the kind of silence where they're almost able to hear their own body or hear their own breathing, the delicacy of that kind of space can sometimes invite you to go very far within yourself.

As you do, you're holding with your fingers different threads of your thoughts and you're able to very, very gently sift through feelings or thoughts or memories that during the day are too difficult to reach because of everything taking place in your life. Not just actual sound but also emotional humdrum. If you recall those kinds of moments where you can very gently sift through thoughts and memories, that's the way in which I think you could drop into a track like this. You're listening to the threads of what any of the three of us are playing with that kind of slow, quiet attention where you allow yourself to be patient.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to Eyes of the Endless.

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That is from Love In Exile. Arooj, those lyrics are in Urdu. In your previous solo album last time you were here for Vulture Prince, we also learned it was in Urdu except for the English-language song Last Night. First question, are you improvising when you're singing on this particular album?

Arooj: Yes, I think so. Sort of. Yes.

Alison Stewart: Yes, I think so. Sort of, yes.

Arooj: Definitely.

[laughter]

Yes.

Alison Stewart: You had to work through that. I think so, sort of, yes. When you are improvising, are you making a decision about which language to speak in, or is that just part of the creative process? What comes, comes.

Arooj: Yes. I think that a lot of this stuff that we recorded, I was just going with what the-- Vijay usually starts I think, or actually, sometimes Shahzad would also start, and I would just pay attention to how it was making me feel. What is the theme of this? Is it hopeful? Is it something about a garden? Is it something about somebody's eyes? Because I have a lot of this repertoire in my head anyway. There are songs from my first album, there are things that ended up on Vulture Prince, there's poetry that I haven't sung before, and it's all together on Love In Exile. I take whatever I have that I know and move it around in the context of where the song and the music is going. It's definitely improvised, that's for sure.

Alison Stewart: Vijay, on your end, it's interesting because the press materials describe the songs created as "in real time, without any prior preparations." What does that actually mean for you practically in making of this record?

Vijay: I think the way I approach it is that every sound I make is a way of reaching out to the two of them to say like, "Here's something we might construct with together," and then they do. They take it up immediately because they have their special qualities of listening, they're so attuned and so alive to the moment in that way, and then everything starts to accumulate structure. It's like every sound becomes form, suddenly it's a song that we've made. We didn't know what it was until it happened, but it had this unity to it.

I tend to hesitate to use the word improvisation because that has a way of devaluing what I think is so special that I cherish about this process, which is that kind of attunement, co-construction, that sensibility about form and about creating a space together. It's not really like noodling or soloing or that kind of thing, it's just co-creation.

Alison Stewart: Before we play our final track, I want to read you a tweet that came in unsolicited that says, "Listening to this enchanting discussion between Vijay Iyer, Arooj Aftab, and Shahzad Ismaily, confirming that painters and jazz musicians grow in the same orchards #foul-moutheddrunkards."

[laughter]

Vijay: Oh-oh. I've started a trend. I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry. Thank you, I guess. Why not? [laughs]

Alison Stewart: The name of the album is Love In Exile. Thank you so much for joining us.

Shahzad: Thank you so much-

Vijay: Thank you.

Shahzad: -for having us, Alison.

Arooj: Thanks, Alison.

Vijay: Yes. What a pleasure. Thank you for having us.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on Sajni from the album Love In Exile.

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