FOR two decades, the pianist Vijay Iyer, born in Albany, New York State the son of Indian immigrants, has been a constant insurgent force in US jazz. His early albums like Your Life Flashes (2002), In What Language (2003) and Bloodsutra (2003) empathised with and expressed the alienation of migrant peoples across the nation, creating a kind of arrivant blues which reached the rootless souls of millions.

Now he is in cosmopolitan East London, where his musical yearning finds a brotherly connection with thousands of people who walk the streets outside this venue. In this sense Dalston is the true life-territory of his music, and chimes with many other English urban neighbourhoods too.

Alone at the piano in Cafe Oto, he begins with slow, chiming notes as if he were searching for sound and finding it with lucid improvised melodies, almost as if his piano artistry were thought in sound, timbral consciousness in formation, with each note a bell: the bells of Dalston.

These become a cataract of raw, tumbling cadences, gradually dwindling to a mere splattering of rain drops as his phrases turned Monkish corners, as if his fingers were finding their ways out of a maze. It was a long, long solo piece that lasted a full half-hour and sounded like a musical treatise of the freedom of unlocking keys as he sauntered into the echoes of the great Thelonius Monk’s Friday the 13th.

Iyer’s second piece began with a marching, quasi-military ambiance, for this was Trump’s era of war, and sudden reflections of worrisome and menacing words of minions like Hegseth and Rubio sounded like warnings of imperial rampage pounding from the gut of the Cafe Oto grand.

Iyer has been an active campaigner for Palestinian freedom for many years, and his 2024 nocturnes for piano and violin, What Isn’t Hard to See, is dedicated to the Palestinian people, particularly the writer Refaat Alareer, killed by an Israeli air strike over Gaza in December 2023.

His 2024 album Compassion (ECM Records), with the Malaysia-born bassist Linda May Han Oh and New Jersey drummer Tyshawn Sorey, stretches its solidarity to South Africa with the track Arch, dedicated to Desmond Tutu, and to the life cut short of the 14-year-old Jim Crow martyr, Emmett Till, murdered by racists in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. As he describes in his sleeve notes, Iyer based the track It Goes On on a poem by Chicagoan Eve L. Ewing: “It imagines Emmett Till as an elder still among us, enjoying the ordinary life that should have been his.” Iyer quotes Ewing’s words, adopting them as his own piano intentions: “I am interested in critically examining the world in which we live, asking questions about why it functions the way it does, and using imaginative work as a way of thinking through how it could be otherwise.”

Prime words for a musical artist, and the album expresses them with a powerful beauty and consciousness, provoked by themes from Stevie Wonder, wondrous saxophonists like John Stubblefield and Roscoe Mitchell and the late Detroit pianist Geri Allen. Sorey’s cymbals and drums are everywhere on the album’s title tune, with Iyer’s permanent inventiveness unifying the soft clamour of Sorey and Oh’s compulsive bass undercurrents.

Vijay’s very new album is simply called Fifteen, marking the number of years that Iyer, 82-year-old Chicago saxophonist and flautist Henry Threadgill and Cuban percussionist (born in Santa Clara in 1974) Dafnis Prieto have been playing together.

The richness of the musical syncretism of this trio, that shines through tracks like I Wanted a Map, with Threadgill’s melodic theme and flying improvised notes, Iyer’s orchestral piano and Prieto’s Caribbean drums, creating the sound of the world in social motion in a mere four and a half minutes. Brilliant! The map is in the music.

Compassion is released by ECM Records; FIFTEEN will be released by Nonesuch Records on August 21