With recent ECM albums including last year’s duet with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, and 2015’s Break Stuff with bassist Stephan Crump and rhythmically mind-bending drummer Tyshawn Sorey, pianist/composer Vijay Iyer has maintained his exciting and exacting standards for small ensembles. Now comes this terrific session for the Iyer Sextet that augments his trio with trumpeter Graham Haynes, and saxophonists Steve Lehman and Mark Shim. An object lesson in music for the heart, the head and the feet, Far from Over often sounds like vivacious folk music or displaced blues, reflects the hipness of Miles Davis’s 1960s postbop bands and 70s electronic ones or the contemporaneity of slow-burn Bad Plus buildups, and yet is consistently spine-tingling in improvisations that sound simultaneously inside and outside the harmonies. The bullishly fast-moving title track typifies the whole set’s verve, the funky Nope audaciously splices disjointed grooves, the bumpily jazzy Good on the Ground manipulates south Indian rhythms, while Wake is a reflective, softly calling tone poem. As a contemporary jazz set, Far from Over has just about everything.
