The Law Of Returns: Muhal Richard Abrams and Vijay Iyer in Conversation

"On September 5, 2012, I had the chance to interview Abrams for a podcast for the occasion of his receipt of an award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. We sat together for an hour in a bare boardroom at the offices of Chamber Music America. In our exchange you hear him caring about words and their impact, contrasting my word choices with his, and always unpacking the resonant, significant musicalities of each utterance. He knows what they can do, not just their sounds and their senses but their timing and their formal relationships, their emphases, energetic contours, and patternings. What he seems to aim to do with his words, as he did for a lifetime with his music, is activate more growth, more individuation, more forms of human life."