ArtsThursdays - Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith: Defiant Life

"Powerfully transfixing...brings ideas of resistance and liberation into primary focus. It's a manifestation of core convictions for Smith and Iyer, arriving at a charged and turbulent moment." - NPR Music

“Sublime, meditative…a calming masterpiece.” - Glide

Two of creative music’s most heralded luminaries, each feted with prizes and critical accolades from across the globe, composer-pianist Vijay Iyer and composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith construct powerful, uncategorizable duets full of subtle emotion, mystery, and spiritual intensity. Their music reveals the improvisational magic of the duo, the expressive individuality of the participants, and the ways that they can – as Smith says – “merge as a single wave, or a single voice.”

Referring to Smith as his “hero, friend and teacher,” Iyer played in the AACM icon’s “Golden Quartet” from 2005 through 2012. Their duo, first formed in the crucible of that band, received sweeping praise for their 2016 album A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM). Nine years later, with Smith now an octogenarian, the duo returned with their spellbinding 2025 release Defiant Life (ECM). As Iyer writes in the liner notes to Defiant Life, “This recording session was shaped by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility.” Defiant Life was named one of the best albums of 2025 in various publications, including The Wire, Stereogum, Magnet, The Boston Globe, The ArtsFuse, and the San Diego Union-Tribune, whose critic called it "one of the most contemplative, understated and moving albums of the year."

“What follows might be a two-figure play in which the exchanges involve mortality or impermanence or divinity. The musicians seem to trade remarks and sometimes talk with one another … The discourses are both cultivated and passionate.” As The New Yorker so poetically described, the visionary collaborations of Smith and Iyer express the rigor, care, and strength of a deep human connection spanning generations and nurtured over decades.

About the Artists:

Composer, trumpeter and author Wadada Leo Smith is one of the creative music world’s most heralded artists. Born December 18, 1941 in Leland, MS, he grew up steeped in the musical traditions of the South performing in Delta Blues and other traditional bands, eventually moving to Chicago where he joined the legendary AACM collective. Smith defines his music as “Creative Music,” and his diverse discography reveals a recorded history of music centered in the idea of spiritual harmony and the unification of social and cultural issues of his world. Among his major recordings are Ten Freedom Summers, America’s National Parks and String Quartets Nos. 1-12. A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Smith has received numerous other awards and honors including a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hammer Museum's 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement "honoring brilliance and resilience,” the UCLA Medal, the University’s highest honor, and the 2022 Vision Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among many others. He was selected as a 2021 United States Artists’ USA Fellow and named a 2022 Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration. In 2023 he was selected for induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

An esteemed educator, from 1994–2013 Smith was on the faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts, where he served as director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. He continues to give workshops and master classes worldwide and recently served as the Spring 2024 Fromm Foundation Visiting Lecturer on Music at Harvard University.

Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active and revered across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last three decades, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, three Grammy nominations, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. His newest albums are Defiant Life (ECM, 2025), his second suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith; Compassion (ECM, 2024), featuring his celebrated trio with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; Thereupon (Pi Recordings, 2025), the long-awaited return of an all-star collective comprising Iyer, Sorey, and saxophonist Steve Lehman; Trouble (BMOP/sound, 2024), a composer portrait album comprising three of his orchestral works, including the titular violin concerto performed by Jennifer Koh; and Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), his Grammy-nominated collaboration with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. The New York Times observed, “Iyer’s music has always been both intelligent and unpretentious, complex without being opaque; [he] ponders a phrase with obsessive rumination, unveiling layers of shifting, subtle emotion, before letting it fly with joyous abandon.” He is a professor at Harvard University.

This event is part of , a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).

Photo by @ogata_photo

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Harvard University Music Department