here’s something flat out wonderful about it, really—that our school, an outpost in rural New Hampshire, has managed to do what it’s done in the past year and a half. Since the fall of 2007, we’ve seen performances by Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, and Chick Corea—three of the most influential jazz pianists of our time. Who would have thought? And now, we can add to that list (perhaps most remarkably) Vijay Iyer. I can’t help but think that the person who oversees the Hop’s programming is going straight to heaven.

Iyer appeared with his trio on January 29th, alongside a group led by drummer Dafnis Prieto. The scheduling was a striking divergence from recent jazz programming, which has seemed to balance bawdy showboating (did anyone else retch through Arturo Sandoval’s performance, or for that matter, Omar Sosa’s?) with more conventional forms. What was unique about Iyer’s performance, though, was its notable divergence from the mainstream. ClichÉd though the line is, it’s worth invoking: the music created by the pianist, joined by Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, was not for the faint of heart.

Iyer, who at late thirty-something is still relatively young, occupies what some critics describe as the periphery and others as the heart of modern jazz. His angular harmonic sense is a hybrid of the styles of prominent but iconoclastic players like Thelonious Monk, Andrew Hill, and Cecil Taylor, and his rhythmic sense… well, that is distinctly Iyer’s, whatever its stylistic or cultural origins. It’s a unique feature of the pianist’s music that it twists, turns, and is often alien to the western ear’s ability to identify common rhythm. Many of his pieces are in odd time signatures like 7/4, or 13/8, and make use of juxtaposed patterns that Iyer described as “the rhythmic equivalent of voice leading.”

As such, reviewing a performance such as Iyer’s requires that one navigate a fine line between pretension and vulgarity. The avant-garde, a category into which much of the pianist’s recorded output arguably falls (relative, at least, to his contemporaries), is perpetually poorly-mapped and therefore polarizing territory—one inclined to draw sermonizing of the best and worst kinds. That Iyer’s trio began its performance with its most challenging piece, a frenetic whirl of piano, bass, and drums with no obvious rhythmic or melodic hook, didn’t help in establishing a rapport with the Hop’s audience. Neither did a set comprised mostly of originals that were similarly challenging.

Yet there was an incredible magnetism to Iyer’s playing that made it great, despite a veneer of inaccessibility. The pianist was at his best when manipulating rhythm, distorting and reshaping it across a roiling sonic landscape, opening dissonant voids in the music that would resolve in fantastic syncopated collisions. Taken against his recent recorded output as a leader, Iyer’s playing and, in particular, improvising, seemed more thematically and structurally coherent. At times his right hand lines skittered across the piano as through they were transcriptions of a Jason Moran solo, while at other timess the trio slipped similarly into the lilting, ambiguous lyricism of Robert Glasper’s playing. There were even moments during the performance when Iyer, Crump, and Gilmore assumed the insouciant, if not bombastic, in-the-pocket stride of a personality heavy trio like the Bad Plus. Such flexibility spoke to the depth of mastery achieved not only by the trio’s individual musicians, but also to the strength of their chemistry.

It took the night’s double bill, however, to drive this point home. After all, Iyer and his trio were essentially an opening act for Cuban-born drummer Dafnis Prieto’s sextet, which proceeded to play a lively set. But for all its obvious technical mastery and engagingness, Prieto’s playing offered a stark example of the sort of convention, characterized largely by rigidly defined solos, minimal group interplay, and static compositions, that Iyer had just so clearly defied and reconstructed. It was enough to leave this observer fast asleep in the first row of Spaulding Auditorium—not for lack of interest in or appreciation for Prieto, but simply having been exhilarated by what had come before.