Vijay Iyer

Holding It Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project is the latest astonishing album to emerge from the longtime collaboration of Grammy-nominated pianist / composer Vijay Iyer and poet / performer / librettist / emcee Mike Ladd. Three years in the making, the new work focuses on veterans of color from the last decade’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.Holding It Down is a thought-provoking, sometimes frightening, and ultimately exhilarating combination of music, poetry and song, created from the actual dreams of young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The new album continues in the groundbreaking, politically searing, stylistically omnivorous fashion of their previous works (the award-winning In What Language? (Pi 2004), based on interviews with people of color in airports, and the acclaimed Still Life with Commentator (2007), an oratorio about 24-hour news culture). These earlier projects were described by The Boston Globe as “a triumph of a genre that doesn’t exist,” hailed by JazzTimes as “unfailingly imaginative and significant,” and praised for their “powerful narrative invention and ravishing trance-jazz… an eloquent tribute to the stubborn, regenerative powers of the human spirit” in Rolling Stone. Together with the earlier Iyer-Ladd creations, Holding It Down rounds out a wide-ranging trilogy about American life over a decade of war.
 

Vijay Iyer - piano, Fender Rhodes
Mike Ladd - lyrics, vocals, analog synth
Guillermo E. Brown - vocals and efects
Maurice Decaul - lyrics, vocals
Pamela Z - vocals
Liberty Ellman - guitar
Lynn Hill - lyrics, vocals
Okkyung Lee - cello
Kassa Overall - drums
 

Track List
1. Here
2. Derelict Poetry
3. Capacity
4. Walking with the Duppy
5. There is a Man Slouching in the Stairway
6. My Fire
7. On Patrol
8. Dream of an Ex-Ranger
9. Name
10. Costume
11. Tormented Star of Morning
12. Patton
13. Shush
14. REM Killer
15. Requiem for an Insomniac
16. Dreams in Color