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Vijay Iyer & Mike Ladd: In What Language?
-- Nilanjana Bhattacharjya
As I listened to In What Language?, I immediately recalled a scene from the German film Wings of Desire (1987,) directed by Wim Wenders. In that scene, the camera pans over the faces of crowded figures in a Berlin subway car; although they sit as a group within the car, in their silence, they are disconnected and trapped in profound states of isolation. As the camera begins to linger momentarily on each of their faces, we are gradually privy to their desolate, mundane, and at times even irrational train of thoughts. As we eavesdrop on their internal monologues, the silent figures that inhabit the most impersonal of spaces suddenly acquire a sense of personal identity, and thus, a sense of humanity.
“In What Language?” accomplishes a similar feat, and with even more power. The recording offers its listeners glimpses into the diverse multitude of people who pass through JFK International Airport each day; it shines its light onto those everyday figures who assume near invisibility as we pass by them everyday—those everyday figures who never appear on the evening news to offer their perspective on stringent security procedures, air fare wars, or the war in Iraq. In this recording, spoken word artist Mike Ladd and contemporary jazz pianist Vijay Iyer unite as librettist and composer, respectively, to produce a spoken word song cycle that channels these often forgotten identities and brings their joys, pains, hopes, and frustrations to the forefront.
In their introduction, Ladd and Iyer describe their initial inspiration—a widely circulated story on the Internet that revealed the injustice suffered by an Iranian filmmaker, Jafar Panahi, in spring 2001. En route to Beunos Aires, Argentina from Hong Kong, Panahi had passed through JFK International Airport in New York in transit. Although he was only in transit, he was then detained by the INS, “shackled to a bench in a crowded cell for several hours, and ultimately sent back to Hong Kong in handcuffs.” He wanted to explain himself in what appeared to be a sense of mistaken identity: “I’m not a thief! I’m not a murderer! … I am just an Iranian, a filmmaker. But how could I tell this, in what language?” It was this last question that establishd the title of Ladd and Iyer’s piece.
“In What Language?” was originally commissioned and produced by the New York-based Asia Society in May, 2003; its live performance received abundant praise from critics and audiences alike, but was inaccessible to those outside the New York area until it was re-recorded and released on Pi Recordings some months later. As a song cycle, “In What Language” consists of 17 poems, penned by Mike Ladd and brought to life the form of spoken-word by a gifted cast including Ladd himself, Latasha Diggs, Allison Easter, and Ajay Naidu. Those poems are accompanied by an equally talented group of live musicians that includes most notably Ladd on electronics, Iyer on keyboards and electronics, Ambrose Akinmusire, Rudresh Mahanthappa on alto saxophone, Libery Ellman on guitar, Stephen Crump on bass, Trevor Holder on drums, and Dana Leon on cello and trombone.
The musicians as en ensemble possess the talent to stand on their own, but in this piece, they provide mostly a soundtrack that intensifies the atmosphere and tone of the poems. They make overtures toward jazz, funk, and hip-hop, but they never eclipse the lyrics-- although at times, they crescendo and approach levels of density, cacophony, and frenzy sufficient to suggest competition. They create a different sound world for each character that incorporates drones, jazzy and funk-laced grooves, soaring melodic phrases, ambient electronic sounds, and many other textures. The poems however serve as the emotional core of the piece, and to the composer’s and musicians’ credit, the poems retain that status throughout.
Similarly, Ladd’s lyrics and the worlds they evoke are also more than capable of standing on their own; however, Ladd and Iyer’s collaboration produces an entirely different feel, one that demands to be taken seriously as a work that will stand the passage of time. The poems linger on different personalities just long enough for us to recognize how arrogant we are to assume that we can even begin to understand these people’s everyday lives when we pass by them. Each of the seventeen poems focuses on a different facet of these peoples’ existence. The lyrics to the poems articulate the voices of a wide array of people—from travelers, to airport workers, to those who watch airplanes pass by from their rooftops. Ladd and Iyer in their introduction describe their attempt in the following words”
The airport is not a neutral place… It serves as a contact zone for those empowered or subjugated by globalization… This album is our commentary on the non-neutrality of transit. It is not a collection of travelers’ tales, but also a series of views on history and human migration.
As a result, we hear not only the voices of “Tariq,” an Iraqi businessman who used to work for the World Bank, but also the voice of an African American bus traveler who glances out the window on his way to JFK and reflects on the history of migration, slavery, and struggle that culminate in his “shaded” existence as a legitimate American citizen. We also hear the voice of “Karen from Trinidad,” who as the “gatekeeper” monitors the passage of travelers through the security checkpoint; armed with the detector, she holds “the detector/That exposes your fears/ The steel in your secrets and keys” almost crushed by boredom; to survive, she recalls the “tricky odor of mango leaves” that she left behind to settle in the United States. Another voice struggles to connect the dots between a jumble of Chinese food, green cards, jive and television. Though we have just heard another eloquent voice survey episodes of violent conquest that span a thousand years, he has not heard that voice. He struggles to make sense of the cultural collisions before him. In the end, he admits that he cannot translate their logic, but he does sense the heaviness of its associated history bearing upon him.
Another figure, “Rehan,” originally from Mumbai, drums “da ge na thun na” compulsively on his steering wheel as he draws the boundaries of his new life— as a taxi cab driver in a “420 Country” on the “River Styx Beltway.” As he adopts the glib delivery of a radio announcer with relentless speed, he offers a biting commentary that is alternately hilarious and heartbreaking. “Rishu,” another character originally from Calcutta, reflects on the irony of being patted down and groped by security agents before he boards a plane; he is a “porn walla” who knows “where hands go.” He claims that he is as much a cop as they, and perhaps more qualified: “I can police shoplifts/ In four different languages/ Can they?”
We are offered these vivid glimpses into many other perspectives before the cycle concludes with the title track, which takes after Jafar Panahi himself. The speaker in this final poem remarks, “It should be no surprise/ I’m handcuffed in a vessel that cheats day/ While speeding West to East we swallow night.” These lines speak to the fact that within these profoundly disorienting sites of transit, conventional logic no longer holds; characters are left to their own devices to construct meaning from the ruins around them, and they do so with varying levels of success. “In What Language?” enables its cast of characters to locate (quite literally) the particularity of their experiences; as they observe and recall the mundane physical details that surround them, they highlight the fact that those details – so often repressed– are one of the few ways that we can make sense of the workings of the globalized economy, and our own roles within it. |