!!! new album „Defiant Life“, released on ECM on 21.3.2025 !!!

“Our time together, from the moment we meet right until the moment we play, is most often spent talking about the state of the world, studying histories of liberation, and sharing readings and historical references, as a means of grounding ourselves purposefully in our present.” Vijay Iyer


Composer, trumpeter and author Wadada Leo Smith is one of the creative music world’s most heralded artists. He grew up steeped in the musical traditions of the South,performing in Delta Blues and other traditional bands before moving to Chicago, where he joined the legendary AACM collective. Smith defines his work as “Creative Music,” and his diverse discography reveals a recorded history of music centered in the idea of spiritual harmony and the unification of social and cultural issues of his world. Amonghis major recordings are Ten Freedom Summers, America’s National Parks and String Quartets Nos. 1-12. A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Smith has received numerous other awards and honors including a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hammer Museum's 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement "honoring brilliance and resilience,” the UCLA Medal, and the 2022 Vision Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among many others. In 2023 he was selected for induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. An esteemed educator, from 1994–2013 Smith was on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts, where he served as director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. He most recently served as the Spring 2024 Fromm Foundation Visiting Lecturer on Music at Harvard University.


Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active and revered across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last three decades, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, three Grammy nominations, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. His newest albums are Defiant Life (ECM, 2025), his second suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith; Compassion (ECM, 2024), featuring his celebrated trio with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; Trouble (BMOP/sound, 2024), a composer portrait album comprising three of his orchestral works, including the titular violin concerto performed by Jennifer Koh; and Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), his Grammy-nominated collaboration with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. The New York Times observed, “Iyer’s music has always been both intelligent and unpretentious, complex without being opaque; [he] ponders a phrase with obsessive rumination, unveiling layers of shifting, subtle emotion, before letting it fly with joyous abandon.” He is a professor at Harvard University.