I recently had the privilege and pleasure of interviewing the improvising composers Henry Threadgill, Vijay Iyer, and Dafnis Prieto for a project bio to accompany their new collaborative album, Fifteen, issued August 21 on the Nonesuch label. Here’s the edited, approved text.

Henry Threadgill/Vijay Iyer/Dafnis Prieto

Fifteen

The first question that comes up when you hear about Fifteen, the new album by creative-music luminaries Henry Threadgill, Vijay Iyer, and Dafnis Prieto, is probably pretty basic: Why Fifteen? These are, after all, artists whose previous releases bear imaginative, poetic titles: Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket, A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke, Taking the Soul for a Walk, and so on.

Turns out the answer is straightforward: these gentlemen have been playing together as a working collaborative for fifteen years. If that comes as a surprise, it’s no wonder. These are three of the most celebrated improvisers, bandleaders, and composers in contemporary music—and artists whose busy, distinguished individual careers preclude getting together all that frequently.

Even so, from the opening notes of Fifteen, you understand that you’re in the presence of a well-oiled, interdependent unit greater than the sum of its parts—a strong claim, considering who those parts are. There’s Threadgill, at eighty-two one of a handful of jazz-associated composers to win a Pulitzer Prize. He’s a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and a Guggenheim Foundation fellow, and one of the most influential, inspiring artists in contemporary music. Iyer, fifty-four, is a Harvard University professor, the recipient of a coveted MacArthur fellowship, and a four-time Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat Critics’ Poll. And Prieto, fifty-one, is another MacArthur fellow and teacher, and a collaborative musician in continuous demand.

One can understand why these three artists have sometimes been billed bluntly as The Trio. It’s that big of a deal when they hook up, something they’ve done at least once per year since Jazz Gallery artistic director Rio Sakairi first suggested that Threadgill play with Iyer’s working trio for a 2012 benefit concert. Iyer’s regular drummer wasn’t available, so Prieto was enlisted; bassist Linda May Han Oh completed the lineup.

Although that ad hoc grouping played just one piece on a crowded bill, something powerful was evident. Reconvened for another benefit the following year, Threadgill, Iyer, and Prieto worked as a trio for the first time. Each brought original compositions.

“We got through the material we had—and then we just kinda kept going,” Iyer recalls, laughing at the memory. “Dafnis said, ‘Let’s play another!’ And it was like, what is it?” Pressed to create on the fly, Iyer says, each player leaned into his long familiarity with the others, and relied on composerly intuition to find notes, harmonies, and rhythms that worked ideally in the moment.

A band was born. “We had a perfect rapport between the three of us,” Threadgill states emphatically. “And all of us had different approaches in terms of composition, which was interesting, also.”

That these players could fuse so quickly and effortlessly is a matter of paying close attention in the moment. “A lot of it is about really learning how someone listens, and how they respond to what they’re hearing,” Iyer explains, “and how to just be there with them, how to really be in it together.”

Their instantaneous rapport was bolstered by deeply intertwined roots. When Iyer was emerging as an original, uncompromising artist in the Bay Area during the early 1990s, he studied and played with George E. Lewis, like Threadgill a longtime member of Chicago’s trailblazing Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (A.A.C.M.). After working with saxophonist-composer Steve Coleman, Iyer headed to New York with guitarist Liberty Ellman, who would soon join Threadgill’s band Zooid. Word about the young pianist spread quickly; at one early performance by his collaborative sax-piano-drums trio Fieldwork, Iyer spotted Threadgill seated at a table with fellow creative-music icons Muhal Richard Abrams and Andrew Hill.

Prieto, meanwhile, became a fervent Threadgill scholar after a musical acquaintance in Toronto lent him an album. He, too, was swept into Coleman’s sphere of influence when the saxophonist traveled to Cuba. When Prieto came to New York, Coleman introduced him to Threadgill, who enlisted the young drummer to play on two 2001 albums: Everybodys Mouth’s a Book, the last recording by his band Make a Move, and Up Popped the Two Lips, the first by his freshly formed ensemble Zooid. Prieto and Iyer became acquainted and briefly collaborated before heading off in different directions.

After their initial encounters—and despite their burgeoning schedules—Threadgill, Iyer, and Prieto made a point of reconvening annually for performances preceded by solid rehearsals. “We weren’t out there trying to build a working ensemble all the time, because I didn’t have time for that, and they probably didn’t either,” Threadgill says. But by 2017, Iyer reports, the rapport the three shared was undeniable—and solid enough to survive pandemic-necessitated separation.

By the time they set out to document their collaboration on Fifteen, the trio had played more dates at the Jazz Gallery, as well as high-profile engagements at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art and the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. From the shared repertoire they’d developed over their years together, they selected three compositions apiece from Threadgill and Iyer, plus two by Prieto.

Threadgill’s contributions include “Where Coconuts Fall,” the roiling Make a Move ballad the trio played in its very first engagement, plus two more recent originals, “Trio Piece” and “Last Night.” Asked how he approaches writing for Iyer and Prieto, Threadgill says he wants to nudge these seasoned, versatile players in new directions. “People have certain things they can do that they’re really good at, you know?” he explains. “And so then you have to ask the question: ‘Well, what’s the opposite of that? What is something else that they don’t do?’ So I just try to think of things that I don’t hear them doing.”

Iyer’s pieces reflect his fascination with working in the gray zone between compositional rigor and improvisational freedom. The sanctified chords and pulsating groove of “I Wanted a Map” bring to mind the sound world of Iyer’s hypnotically transporting working trio, but with Threadgill and Prieto illuminating fresh details. The contemplative “Perfect Victims” is through-composed, Iyer says, yet Threadgill endows the music with an air of spontaneous creation. “Fire City,” inspired by poet Eve L. Ewing’s 1919, a book-length contemplation of the Chicago Race Riot of that year, is a smoldering homage to Chicago—and by extension Threadgill, the distinguished Chicagoan.

With “Gently Trapped,” an airy showcase for Threadgill’s pealing flute and Iyer’s most lyrical persona, Prieto set out to evoke a sense of hanging onto hope even when you’re pinned down by expectation and obligation. The album’s buoyant closer, “On the Way,” is an older composition Prieto had recorded previously on his Grammy-nominated 2020 sextet album, Transparency. Prieto describes the piece as a journey, from tentative first steps to affirmative arrival—qualities that this lean, transparent new rendition captures resoundingly.

That sensation of arrival, Prieto says, is ideal for the maiden voyage by this new ensemble, whose chemistry the drummer was hungry to document on record. “We have a very strong character and point of view in the music that comes out very naturally, without forcing,” he says. “And it comes out in a way that is honest and transparent. We’re not trying to do anything; we are actually doing it.”

By Steve Smith