Break Stuff is the first ECM album by the Vijay Iyer Trio, with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore. By 2014 the group had been together for eleven years. Its title comes from the idea of the break, which Iyer calls "a span of time in which to act". Many of the twelve pieces are reductions of larger Iyer works, recast for piano trio, alongside tunes by Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Billy Strayhorn.
The album was recorded in June 2014 at Avatar Studios in New York, with James Farber as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer, and released by ECM in January 2015. It was Iyer's third release on the label, after the chamber recording Mutations and the film-and-music project Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi. Some of the material comes from a Break Stuff suite premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, some from Open City, a large-ensemble collaboration with the writer Teju Cole. The three bird pieces, Starlings, Geese and Wrens, belong to that project. Iyer also names Ahmad Jamal, Andrew Hill and James Brown's rhythm section among the trio's references.
Hood is a tribute to the Detroit minimal techno producer Robert Hood, whose music of "different rhythms unfolding through each other" the trio tries to capture with acoustic instruments. Piano and drums play repeating metric patterns that keep shifting, while Crump holds a short ostinato underneath. Mystery Woman is built on compound pulses taken from a mridangam rhythm shown to Iyer by Rajna Swaminathan, who is credited on the track. At the centre of the album Iyer plays Blood Count, the last piece Strayhorn wrote, alone. Coltrane's Countdown is set inside a rhythmic frame drawn from West African drumming, and Monk's Work is played with only small changes to its form.
In DownBeat, which gave the record five stars, Jim Macnie called it "the trio's most compelling date so far". Ben Ratliff of The New York Times described it as "the fifth and best record of Mr. Iyer's trio", adding that the band's language "makes sense of whatever material it plays". BBC Music Magazine also gave it five stars.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2420, first released in 2015.
