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February 2022 saw the release of Every Note is True on Blue Note Records, an album of original work featuring Larry Grenadier and Jack DeJohnette.
First Look! Don Was talks to Iverson in this short and fun YouTube video.
Martin Johnson positions Iverson career at this moment for Tidal.
“He’s gone from being arguably jazz and improvised music’s leading popularizer to its leading wonk….But Iverson’s star may be on the rise again.”
The very words of Iverson’s opening track is in the title of Morgan Enos’s this fine overview of the label for Grammy.com. “We Pass the Ball to Other Ages: Inside Blue Note’s Creative Resurgence In The 2020s.”
“As he cooked breakfast, Iverson’s plucky virtual choir ‘just made me burst out in tears, man,’ [Don] Was tells GRAMMY.com. ‘It’s one of the most beautiful summations of the eternal nature of music and the musicians who make it.’
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Nate Chinen selected “She Won’t Forget Me” for his Valentine’s Day Take Five at WBGO:
“Every Note Is True, the new Blue Note debut by Ethan Iverson, rings with a sense of at-homeness — not home itself, per se, but a mix of fondness, familiarity and assurance.”
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Tony Badran wrote a delightfully ambitious overview of the Iverson world in Tablet.
“Iverson’s respect for and engagement with the jazz tradition imbues his music with a real warmth while avoiding the traps of musty pretentiousness.”
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Willard Jenkins featured Iverson in an extended Q&A on Open Sky: “Ethan Iverson, Jazz Renaissance Man.”
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Karl W. Nehring in Classical Candor:
“There are echoes of Bach, but yet it is clearly jazz. As the program proceeds, the interplay among the three musicians is fascinating. None of them is showing off, but each of them is exhibiting mastery. Gradually, the influence of baroque and classical gradually shifts until by the time we get to the final track, ‘At the Bells and Motley,’ we are in blues territory.
Adding to the appeal of the album is the top-notch engineering. It was recorded by Andreas K. Meyer with the assistance of Shubham Mondal at the Clubhouse in Rhinebeck, NY, and is simply one of the finest-sounding trio recordings I have ever auditioned. I have argued before that jazz can be thought of as a form of chamber music; this album is a prime example.”
Short basic bio:
Pianist, composer, and writer Ethan Iverson was a founding member of The Bad Plus, a game-changing collective with Reid Anderson and David King. The New York Times called TBP “Better than anyone at melding the sensibilities of post-60’s jazz and indie rock.” During his 17-year tenure, TBP performed in venues as diverse as the Village Vanguard, Carnegie Hall, and Bonnaroo; collaborated with Joshua Redman, Bill Frisell, and the Mark Morris Dance Group; and created a faithful arrangement of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and a radical reinvention of Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction.
Since leaving TBP, Iverson has kept busy. 2017: Co-curated a major centennial celebration of Thelonious Monk at Duke University and premiered the evening-length Pepperland with the Mark Morris Dance Group. 2018: premiered an original piano concerto with the American Composers Orchestra and released a duo album of new compositions with Mark Turner on ECM. 2019: Common Practice with Tom Harrell (ECM), standards tracked live at the Village Vanguard. 2021: Bud Powell in the 21st Century, a vigorous reconsideration of the bebop master, is featured on the March cover of DownBeat. 2022: The current release is Every Note is True on Blue Note records, an album of original work in trio with Larry Grenadier and Jack DeJohnette.
Iverson also has been in the critically-acclaimed Billy Hart quartet for well over a decade and occasionally performs with elder statesmen like Albert “Tootie” Heath or Ron Carter or collaborates with noted classical musicians like Miranda Cuckson and Mark Padmore. For almost 20 years, Iverson’s website Do the Math has been a repository of musician-to-musician interviews and analysis. Time Out New York selected Iverson as one of 25 essential New York jazz icons: “Perhaps NYC’s most thoughtful and passionate student of jazz tradition—the most admirable sort of artist-scholar.” Iverson has also published articles about music in the New Yorker, NPR, The Nation, and JazzTimes. Iverson resides in Park Slope with his wife Sarah Deming.
Previous major articles:
Dan Ouellette wrote a helpful profile for DownBeat in 2018, “A Dynamo at the Crossroads.”
Shaun Brady in JazzTimes explains the Iverson internet: A Decade of Do the Math.
Since 2016, Iverson has been on the jazz piano faculty at New England Conservatory. Joan Anderman covered Iverson’s NEC appointment in the Boston Globe,” A jazz pianist’s spot at the corner of history and what’s new.”
2017 highlights:
Commission: Iverson premiered the score “Pepperland” for the Mark Morris Dance Group. This hit production has had over 70 performances. Mark Morris told Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Ethan thinks in a way that nobody else does — there’s not a lot of received wisdom there.” Mark Swed reviewed in the LA Times, Mark Morris mines the Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ for an irresistible ‘Pepperland.” The other musicians in the Pepperland Band include Clinton Curtis, Colin Fowler, Rob Schwimmer, Sam Newsome, Jacob Garchik, and Vinnie Sperrazza.
Curation: Alongside Aaron Greenwald, Iverson co-curated a major centennial celebration of Thelonious Monk at Duke University, featuring Melissa Aldana, Ravi Coltrane, Joshua Redman, Houston Person, Chris Potter, David Williams, Victor Lewis, and many others.
Commission: Dance Heginbotham toured “Easy Win,” Iverson’s solo piano score. In 2015, Brian Seibert reviewed the New York premiere in the New York Times, “Dance Heginbotham Shows Off Its Eccentric Style at the Joyce.”
2018:
Commission: Iverson premiered Concerto to Scale with the American Composers Orchestra. The work is in three movements for piano, bass drum, and strings. Seth Colter Walls reviewed the premiere in the New York Times, “American Composers Orchestra brings Jazz to Classical, effortlessly.”
A duo album with Mark Turner on ECM, Temporary Kings, was released on ECM. The Iverson/Turner duo toured widely. Turner told Dan Ouellette in DownBeat, “Ethan is iconic. There’s no one like him. He’s a true individual. The main thing he has is his touch, and I like his comping, especially with his note choices and voicings.” In a rave review in the Wall Street Journal, Martin Johnson wrote, “[Iverson] has gone from one of jazz’s leading popularizers to one of its leading geeks.”
An interview with Kevin Sun documents a brief moment where Iverson’s quartet with Dayna Stephens, Thomas Morgan, and Eric McPherson did a few gigs.
With violin virtuoso Miranda Cuckson, Iverson performed sonatas of Louise Talma and George Walker. Anthony Tommasini reviewed in the New York Times, “A Tiny Garage Explodes in Pianistic Madness.”
The Billy Hart quartet with Josh Redman, Ben Street and Iverson toured Europe extensively in the summer. Hart told Ouellette in the aforementioned DownBeat article, “It’s Ethan’s positive vision that he brings to everything. He has a way to make these visions materialize. He has an instinct that is extremely unique. Even in my band, he puts things into motion. He’s an arranger of the highest order, and an innovator who is on a quest.”
As part of the Hart summer tour, Iverson played an informal solo concert at the Umbria Jazz Festival. Josef Woodard wrote in his DownBeat review, “Best of all, another noontime treat spotlighted pianist Ethan Iverson—recently left to his own various creative devices after leaving the Bad Plus. He delivered a rare and riveting solo set, demonstrating a witty and mischievous virtuosity, deconstructed standards finding fresh pathways amid the realm of his solo practice. ‘Laura’ and ‘Misty,’ for example, were subjected to radical, postmodernist reinventions, while somehow respecting the sanctity of the originals.”
Curation: “Ethan Iverson in London” for the London Jazz Festival included Raising Hell with Henry Purcell, Ethan and the British Composers, and Ethan’s Last Rent Party. (Guardian review.)
Commission: “Bud Powell in the 21st Century” w. Ingrid Jensen, Dayna Stephens, Ben Street, Lewis Nash, and the Umbria Jazz Orchestra in Orvieto. This concert will eventually see CD release in 2021.
2019:
A collective trio with Joe Sanders and Jorge Rossy toured Europe twice.
The quartet album Common Practice featuring Tom Harrell, Ben Street, and Eric McPherson was released on ECM. In DownBeat, Bill Milkowski wrote, “The star here is Harrell, and the man behind the curtain is Iverson.”
Chamber music performance with composer/clarinetist Derek Bermel, including works by Bermel, Leonard Bernstein (Clarinet sonata) and Iverson.
Curation: Iverson was artistic director of the Jazz te Gast festival in Holland in collaboration with Marike van Dijk. Premiere of Iverson’s orchestral piece, “Solve for X.”
New Year’s gig featuring Marcy Harriell singing Burt Bacharach at Zinc Bar.
2020:
The pandemic closed most everything down, but there were two good pieces of socially-distanced art-making, “Tempo Guisto” for Miranda Cuckson (supported by American Composers Orchestra) and Grand Pa, with choreographer John Heginbotham, dancer Gus Solomons Jr, and video editor Maile Okamura.
Streaming concerts: The Billy Hart quartet was the first group ever to stream from the Village Vanguard, and celebrated Hart’s 80’s birthday at Dizzy’s. Iverson presented a set of original music with Ben Street and Nasheet Waits from Smalls, and a set of Count Basie and Duke Ellington duo with Thomas Morgan at Mezzrow. In his review of the latter in The New York City Jazz Record, Andrey Henkin called Iverson and Morgan “ultramodernists,” which is now the working title of a future Iverson/Morgan duo recording: The Ultramodernists.
2021:
Release of Bud Powell in the 21st Century with Ingrid Jensen, Dayna Stephens, Ben Street, Lewis Nash, and the Umbria Jazz Orchestra on Sunnyside Records. Iverson was on the cover of the March issue of DownBeat; the associated article was written by Ed Enright. Iverson says, “It’s the easiest thing in the world when you’re writing for all those instruments to make it very thick all the time. It becomes a real etude at some point. So when I talk about Bud Powell’s vocal quality—that’s what we need. We need the blues, we need vocal quality, we need simplicity. I once heard Ornette Coleman talking about his ideal orchestra: that you could hear every single person in the band while they were playing…that’s much more my world.”
Relevant interview conducted by Tryan Grillo.
Score Study video from Brian Krock, an “explainer” about the Iverson aesthetic.
Iverson has been in the critically-acclaimed Billy Hart quartet for well over a decade and occasionally performs with an elder statesman like Albert “Tootie” Heath or Ron Carter. In a DownBeat blindfold test, Ralph Peterson Jr. commented favorably on one the Heath/Iverson recordings:
Record reviews:
Andy Hamilton reviews Common Practice.
Larry Blumenfeld reviews Common Practice.
Matt Collar reviews Common Practice.
Bill Milkowski reviews Common Practice.
Chris Richards reviewed Temporary Kings in the Washington Post. Richards also tweeted a photo of the print edition:
James Hale reviews Temporary Kings
Filipe Freitas reviews Temporary Kings
Derek Taylor reviews Temporary Kings
Martin Johnson reviews Temporary Kings
Links to Iverson’s writing outside DTM:
Stanley Crouch obit (NPR)
Review of Pixar’s Soul (The Nation)
Iverson’s writings at the Culture Desk of the New Yorker (Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Vince Guaraldi, Vicky Chow, Michael Gordon, Carla Bley, Wayne Shorter, Don Shirley)
NewMusicBox: A Conversation with Ethan Iverson and The Syncopated Stylings of Charles Wuorinen
“Artist’s Choice” ECM streaming playlist
Andre Guess: Jazz and Race with Wynton Marsalis and Ethan Iverson
Jazztimes “Chronologies”:
- James Newton
- John Scofield, Steve Swallow, Adam Nussbaum
- Mary Lou Williams
- Don Cherry
- Charli Persip (RIP)
- Shirley Horn
- Harold Mabern, Larry Willis, and Richard Wyands
- Bertha Hope
- Gary Peacock (RIP)
- Jimmy Lyons
- Wynton Kelly at Left Bank
- Paul Desmond
- Old and New Dreams
- Larry Young and Woody Shaw
- Jacob Garchik and Andrew D’Angelo
- Meredith D’Ambrosio
- Eubie Blake
- McCoy Tyner as sideman
- Ron Carter in the early 80s
- Pete La Roca (as told by Steve Swallow)
- Ralph Peterson with Geri Allen
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A Few More Details:
Born February 11, 1973 in Menomonie, Wisconsin – moved to New York City in 1991 and played dance classes, comedy sports, theatre pits, and in the New York Tango Trio with Raul Jaurena and Pablo Aslan – studied with Fred Hersch, then Sophia Rosoff, – became music director of Mark Morris Dance Group in 1998 – was part of late-’90s indie jazz scene along with Bill McHenry, Jeff Williams, Reid Anderson and others, mainly documented on Fresh Sound New Talent, thanks to Jorge Rossy – worked as a sideman with Kurt Rosenwinkel and Mark Turner in 2000/2001.
The Bad Plus with Anderson and Dave King formed in 2001, the Billy Hart Quartet with Turner and Ben Street formed in 2003, Do the Math debuted in 2005. His most recent piano studies have been with John Bloomfield of the Dorothy Taubman tradition.
DO THE M@TH 