A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Vijay Iyer (b. October 26, 1971): Outstanding and innovative pianist, composer, arranger, music theorist, ensemble leader, teacher and critic
SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER TWO
THELONIOUS MONK
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of: ESPERANZA SPALDING January 31-February 6
On
their new album together, Stephan Crump, Vijay Iyer, and Marcus Gilmore
(L-R) meditate on the drum breaks that make up so much modern music.
(Photo: Juan Hitters)
By Brandon Roos
While jazz is often intent on exploring the excellent mistakes made
when improvising in the moment, Harvard professor and renowned pianist
Vijay Iyer takes an unorthodox approach to that concept with his latest
album. On Break Stuff, the Vijay Iyer Trio’s first release on ECM Records, Iyer chooses to explore those moments not in the solos, but in the breaks.
If the trio’s playing on Break Stuff seems stuck at times,
that’s the point: the album was created out of the desire to focus on
the break — the drum breaks in funk and soul records that provided the
soundtrack to Bronx block parties in the ’70s when DJs like Kool Herc
pioneered beat-juggling, much to the audience’s pleasure. Iyer also
references the importance of the drum break (the famous “Amen Break,”
in particular) as the stylistic centerpiece for the electronic style of
jungle, better known now as drum ‘n’ bass. By honing in on repeated
phrases, the group focuses on maintaining a groove as a whole rather
than shifting focus from solo to solo.
The concept follows Iyer’s pattern of reimagining unorthodox music
within a jazz framework. Much like past explorations on Michael
Jackson’s “Human Nature” or M.I.A.’s “Galang,” he and his trio provide a
nod toward their vast array of influences on “Hood,” a tribute to
Detroit techno heavyweight Robert Hood. Their acoustic take, which inhabits and inverts the Hood track “Minus,”
is a great example of the group’s tight sense of rhythm. With the
original melodies subscribing to different time signatures, the
recording can be disorienting even with just its handful of elements. In
Iyer’s hands, the track shines between beats. Five and a half minutes
in, the track builds to a satisfying crescendo, aided by an added
tension of exploring the nuances in the seemingly simple composition.
Not that Iyer is blind to jazz history, mind you. In addition, the
album features compositions by John Coltrane (“Countdown”), Thelonious
Monk (“Work”) and Billy Strayhorn (“Blood Count”).
Vijay Iyer Trio’s performance this week at the SFJAZZ Center — their
debut at the venue — comes as part of ECM Fest, a four-night series of
performances from the celebrated jazz label founded in 1969 by German
producer Manfred Eicher. In addition to Iyer’s performance, the series
features shows with Chris Potter’s Underground Orchestra, Egberto
Gismonti, and Tomasz Stanko.
The Grammy nominated composer-pianist Vijay Iyer (pronounced “VID-jay EYE-yer”) has been
described by Pitchfork as “one of the most interesting and vital young
pianists in jazz today,” by The New Yorker as one of “today’s most
important pianists… extravagantly gifted… brilliantly eclectic,” and by
the Los Angeles Weekly as “a boundless and deeply important young star.”
His critical accolades continue in the form of awards and chart topping
recognition, having received an unprecedented “quintuple crown” in the
DownBeat International Critics Poll (winning Jazz Artist of the Year,
Pianist of the Year, Jazz Album of the Year, Jazz Group of the Year, and
Rising Star Composer categories); four top awards in the JazzTimes
Critics Poll (Artist of the Year, Pianist of the Year, Composer of the
Year and Best Acoustic/Mainstream Group of the Year for the Vijay Iyer
Trio); as well as the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and the
Greenfield Prize; all in 2012 alone. He was named one of the “50 Most
Influential Global Indians” by GQ India, and was voted Musician of the
Year (2010) and Pianist of the Year (2012 & 2013) by the Jazz
Journalists Association. He recently received a 2013 Echo Award (the
“German Grammy”) for International Pianist of the Year.
Iyer has
released sixteen albums as a leader; his most recent, Accelerando (2012)
is the widely acclaimed follow-up to the multiple award-winning
Historicity (2009), both featuring the Vijay Iyer Trio (Iyer, piano;
Marcus Gilmore, drums; Stephan Crump, bass), recently described by
PopMatters as “the best band in jazz.” Accelerando was voted #1 Jazz
Album of the Year for 2012 in three separate critics polls surveying
hundreds of critics worldwide, hosted by DownBeat, JazzTimes, and
Rhapsody, respectively, and also was chosen as jazz album of the year by
NPR, the Los Angeles Times, PopMatters, and Amazon.com. Historicity
was a 2010 Grammy Nominee for Best Instrumental Jazz Album, and was
named #1 Jazz Album of 2009 in The New York Times, The Los Angeles
Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Metro Times, National Public
Radio, PopMatters.com, the Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll, and the
DownBeat International Critics Poll. The trio won the 2010 Echo Award
for Best International Ensemble and the 2012 DownBeat Critics Poll for
Jazz Group of the Year. Iyer’s many other honors include the Alpert
Award in the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and
numerous composer commissions.
Iyer’s many collaborators include
his generation’s fellow forward-thinkers Rudresh Mahanthappa, Rez
Abbasi, Craig Taborn, Ambrose Akinmusire, Liberty Ellman, Steve Lehman
and Tyshawn Sorey; elder creative music pioneers such as Steve Coleman,
Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Butch Morris, George Lewis, and Amina
Claudine Myers; new-music experimenters Miya Masaoka, Pamela Z, and
John Zorn; hip-hop innovators Dead Prez, Das Racist, DJ Spooky, and High
Priest of Antipop Consortium; South Asian percussionist-producers Karsh
Kale, Suphala, and Talvin Singh; filmmakers Haile Gerima, Prashant
Bhargava, and Bill Morrison; choreographer Karole Armitage; and poets
Mike Ladd, Amiri Baraka, Charles Simic, and Robert Pinsky. His
compositions have been commissioned and performed by The Silk Road
Ensemble, Ethel, Brentano String Quartet, JACK Quartet, American
Composers Orchestra, Hermès Ensemble, International Contemporary
Ensemble, and Imani Winds.
A polymath whose career has spanned
the sciences, the humanities and the arts, Iyer received an
interdisciplinary Ph.D. in the cognitive science of music from the
University of California, Berkeley. He has published in Journal of
Consciousness Studies, Wire, Music Perception, JazzTimes, Journal of the
Society for American Music, Critical Studies in Improvisation, in the
anthologies Arcana IV, Sound Unbound, Uptown Conversation, The Best
Writing on Mathematics: 2010, and in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of
Critical Improvisation Studies. Iyer is on faculty at Manhattan School
of Music, New York University, and the New School, and is the Director
of The Banff Centre’s International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music,
an annual 3-week program in Alberta, Canada founded by Oscar Peterson.
“Presto! Here is the great new jazz piano trio.”
- The New York Times
“One of the world’s most inventive new-generation jazz pianists”
– Guardian (UK)
“Vijay Iyer, an American treasure”
– Minnesota Public Radio
“The Vijay Iyer Trio has the potential to alter the scope, ambition and language of jazz piano forever.”
Pianist and composer Vijay Iyer has won numerous awards for his work, including a MacArthur Fellowship or “genius grant.”
He has also collaborated with artists in other fields, including
writer and novelist Teju Cole, poet Robert Pinsky and hip-hop artist DJ
Spooky.
The Vijay Iyer Trio – composed of Vijay Iyer, bassist Stephan Crump
and drummer Marcus Gilmore – has just released a new album, “Break Stuff.”
“For me, it’s about the stuff that happens in the breaks, in the
moments when nothing is supposed to happen. That’s when the most
interesting stuff happens,” Iyer told Here & Now’s Robin Young.
Songs In This Segment
Vijay Iyer, “Break Stuff” performed by The Vijay Iyer Trio
Vijay Iyer, “Chorale” performed by The Vijay Iyer Trio
Thelonius Monk, “I Surrender Dear”
Thelonius Monk, “Work”
Thelonius Monk, “Work” performed by The Vijay Iyer Trio
Vijay Iyer, “Starlings” performed by The Vijay Iyer Trio
Vijay Iyer, “Geese” performed by The Vijay Iyer Trio
Billy Strayhorn, “Blood Count” performed by Vijay Iyer
Vijay Iyer, “Hood” performed by The Vijay Iyer Trio
Vijay Iyer, “Taking Flight” performed by The Vijay Iyer Trio
The Vijay Iyer Trio is Stephen Crump, Marcus Gilmore and Vijay Iyer. (Barbara Rigon via Facebook)
Guest
Vijay Iyer,
Grammy-nominated jazz pianist and composer. He’s also a writer and a
professor in the Harvard University Department of Music. He tweets @vijayiyer.
Where is jazz headed in a new century? With the pianist Vijay Iyer as
guide, newly tenured as a professor at Harvard, it tends toward the
experimental, with drummers, young musicians and slam poets. If it
doesn’t always swing, it’s surprising and takes you in new directions.
Will jazz be forgotten or just re-shaped by new, emerging artists like
Vijay Iyer?
Here’s a short sample of the show. Vijay Iyer brings you inside the
head of a jazz improviser and describes the expressive give and take
conversation musicians are having with each other. Click on the black
bar at the top of the page to listen to the whole show.
Pianist Vijay Iyer gives us a master class in the science of rhythm.
By Kevin Berger
Vijay Iyer doesn’t like the
term “genius” and the jazz pianist is on a roll explaining why. “The ‘G
word’ is often used to shut down conversation or inquiry into a
particular artist, into his or her community and connection to others,”
Iyer says. “No music happens in a vacuum.” What’s more, the label
undercuts an artist’s ambition and drive. “Artists seek not just to be
themselves but to transform themselves, to actually become something
else,” Iyer says. That’s the force that revolutionizes their culture and
ours.
“My Favorite Things” Iyer plays the unforgettable pop tune from The Sound of Music in the “radical” style of John Coltrane. “It transformed our understanding of music,” Iyer says. Consider 1960 when saxophonist John Coltrane recorded “My Favorite Things,” the beloved pop tune from The Sound of Music.
“When we listen to Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’ now, we don’t think
this is pop culture,” Iyer says. “We think of it as a cataclysmic event
in the history of music that transformed our understanding of music. It
brought something new to the table, structurally and emotionally. It
wasn’t dealing with harmony and form in the usual way. It reached new
extremes.”
Iyer is sitting at a piano on the bottom floor of his
split-level apartment in Harlem. He plays “My Favorite Things” as
Coltrane reimagined it, carving spacious modes into the
verse-verse-verse-chorus, stepping up the tempo and going to town on the
melody. Playing by memory, conjuring the notes as he goes, Iyer punches
out the song’s rhythms with a jovial touch. Iyer may not utter the “G
word” himself, but he beautifully demonstrates the nature of Coltrane’s
genius.
“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ”
“Rhythm is the seat of music,” Iyer says. “It maps your own pulse.”
Iyer breaks down the groove in the opening song on Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The
usual debate over genius—is it nature or nurture?—feels played out.
Clearly it’s a combination of genes and the clubs you snuck into as a
kid. A less traveled path of inquiry runs not through the lives of
geniuses but through works themselves. Science explains how the world
works. Perhaps we can explain how genius works by analyzing a technical
form we love, like music. What are the notes and chords, melodies and
harmonies—created by artists in their times—that changed music for all
time?
Iyer, 42, is an ideal guide. A 2013 recipient of a
MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, he is versed in seeing the world
through the lens of science. Iyer’s Yale undergraduate degree in math
and physics paved the way to his Ph.D. in technology and the arts at the
University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation explores how our
minds and bodies beat in sync with the rhythms of West African and
African-American musics.
Thelonious Monk’s Genius
Iyer shows us the sharps, flats, and harmonies that only Monk seemed to
hear, which soon “became part of the language of American music.” The
pianist, who has recorded over 15 albums of jazz, ranging into raga and
hip-hop, has applied science to his own compositions. He rescored the
beats of the ’70s soul tune “Mystic Brew” to the Fibonacci Sequence,
the series in which each number is the sum of the preceding two
(1,1,2,3,5,8…). The ratio of any two successive Fibonacci numbers, the
“golden ratio,” is seen in nature, from atoms to sunflowers, and has
inspired artists such as Da Vinci and Debussy. (Iyer’s Guardian essay on his music and the golden ratio was reprinted in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2010.)
Iyer’s 2014 album, Mutations,
was sparked by “the noise in our genes,” he writes in the album’s
linear notes. Evolution is not a “goal-directed process of absolute
‘betterment’ of a species,” it results from an interplay between a
species and its fluctuating environment—an “ecosystem-wide
improvisation.” The album’s music, for piano and string quartet, unfolds
like a lattice of proteins, producing startling harmonies and tender
lines.
“Ruby, My Dear”
Iyer takes us inside “the physics” of the signature Monk ballad. The
“right wrong notes” make the piano vibrate like “a physical experience.”
In conversation Iyer can sound more
formal than free-form, thinking through hisanswers before letting them
go. He speaks like he plays, each sentence, like each chord, charged
with sentience, designed to evoke. Despite his analytical bent, he is
naturally genial. An instinctive teacher—he became a professor of music
at Harvard in 2014—Iyer quickly warmed to the premise of our interview
and clearly enjoyed playing key passages in Coltrane, Thelonious Monk,
and Michael Jackson. You can watch his detailed explanations and
demonstrations in the video clips throughout the article.
Content
he has stated his piece about the limitations of the term genius, Iyer
admits there is one artist “we can use the ‘G word’ with,” and that is
New York jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, who lived from 1917
to 1982, and wrote the now jazz standards “ ’Round Midnight” and
“Straight, No Chaser.” To Iyer, Monk lived on the frontier of human
perception. “He heard something others hadn’t yet accessed,” Iyer says.
“Things we take for granted in the jazz like the flatted fifth, the
sharp eleventh, or ways of voicing chords, are there because of him.”
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”
A masterful artist absorbs and transforms tradition. Iyer shows us how
Monk puts his own “stamp and identity” on the Duke Ellington classic. Monk
figures in Iyer’s Ph.D. dissertation, based on embodied cognition, the
idea that the brain’s motor and cognitive systems, stirred by culture,
perpetually influence one another. I dance, therefore I am.
Musicians tap that inner pulse, and none more deeply than Monk. “There’s
a persistent and unified perspective on sound and rhythm in every
corner of Monk’s music,” Iyer says. “You can hear him challenging
himself or challenging the ear, reaching for something that has a
certain kind of roughness or pungency, something both familiar and
unfamiliar.”
An instrument disappears in the hands of a masterful
musician. He is playing the notes in his imagination rather than on the
piece of technology in his hands. Monk went further. The piano itself,
its resonance, the act of playing it, constitute his sound. “You hear
his hands at work,” Iyer says. “It’s not about transcending the
relationship between the hands and the instrument; it’s about featuring
that process, that interaction with the instrument as a body. There is a
sort of physics going on here. He’s going for a vibratory exhortation
with the instrument.”
Sidebar: Vijay Iyer plays “Remembrance” on 9/11.
As
Iyer breaks down the signature musical elements of the artists he
loves, and plays them with vibrancy, his philosophy of music is
apparent: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
“Rhythm
is the seat of music,” Iyer says. “Before we even notice that it’s
music, its rhythmic character gets inside of us. Music starts with the
sense of a body doing something, a sense of pulse that might map onto
our own sense of pulse. It might come from our embodied experience of
walking or breathing or a heartbeat. To me, this experience we call
music comes from the sound of another body moving in time, and that
reminds of us the way we move in time.” And what rhythm sparks
his own pulse? The jazz artist answers: “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ”
by Michael Jackson. Iyer demonstrates the song’s killer groove, built on
layers of rhythm. He plays the bass notes with his left hand and taps
his right index finger on top of the piano. “All these interlocking
parts have a slightly different profile, some points of connection, some
points of relief against each other,” he explains. “They have this
magnificent power and feeling that the beat could go on forever, and it
would be OK if it did. You don’t want it to end. You just want to feel
like it would still be there when I come back.” Iyer grins after
working out the Jackson tune. Genius is in the groove. “I’m pretty
certain,” he says, “that is what music is for: creating this unifying
rhythmic experience that binds us together.”
Composer, pianist, electronic music producer and 2013 MacArthur Fellow Vijay Iyer
has built a career of making connections in music... literally.
Increasingly recognized as one of the most inventive musicians working
today, he received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in music cognition at U.C.
Berkley, released three albums with poet and hip-hop artist Mike Ladd,
and blended traditional Indian and jazz styles with the
critically-acclaimed trio Tirtha. He’s also collaborated with the New
York City rap outfit Dead Prez, free-jazz icon Roscoe Mitchell and Yo-Yo
Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. In January, he joined the faculty of Harvard
University’s Department of Music.
Last month, he released Mutations,
his 18th album as a bandleader. Scored for strings, piano and
electronics, the record melds touches of jazz with electronic music and
unraveling minimalism.
For the second episode of Q2 Spaces:
Season Two, we visited the East Harlem apartment where Iyer has lived
for the last two years with his wife and daughter. His piano is set up
on the first floor in a room lined mostly with books about neuroscience,
music and listening. On a small table are carved Indian deities – his
parents moved to the United States 50 years ago – and leaning against
the wall is a poster of his hero Thelonious Monk.
Iyer tells about his first memorable musical experience improvising
with his sister on the family's spinet piano, the constant inspiration
of Harlem's rich cultural heritage, his love of South Indian Carnatic
music and the single biggest influence on his music: the history of
jazz.
There is immense power and careful logic in the music of Thelonious Sphere Monk. But you might have such a good time listening to it that you might not even notice. That, of course, would be your problem, not his.
Monk was an architect of feeling. His tunes were slick, inhabitable little rooms that warmed the heart with their odd angles and bright colors. Somehow he knew exactly how to make you feel good—and I mean exactly, as if it were medicine, or gastronomy, or massage, or feng shui. The idea that music that feels good might require craft, discipline and hard work runs contrary to prevailing wisdom about Monk. Many people still harbor a false and uncharitable image of an untutored, unpolished, intuitive savant. But close attention to Monk’s music reveals the result of decades of purposeful experimentation, discovery and refinement.
The groove was paramount: “When you’re swinging, swing some more,” he’d say. For this very reason, his critically maligned Columbia years are actually my favorite; the groove is so deep, anything seems possible. Monk’s sense of time alone was legendary. He could play with or against the beat but his inner pulse was always strong and centered. The complex dialogue between his two hands on the stride-piano selections demonstrates this, as do his microexpressive treatments of standards. And the rhythmic permutations of “Straight, No Chaser” or “Evidence” or “Criss Cross” or even “Jackie-Ing” reveal a mischievous rigor, grounded in a lifetime of polyrhythmic experience.
And you can’t ignore his shocking sonorities, the economy and clarity of his melodies, the specificity and care lavished on every last detail. His was an elemental approach to composition: He worked not with pre-given notions of melody, rhythm and harmony, but with the fundamentals of sound, time and perception.
Everyone knows that Monk composed brilliant, beloved songs, but less noticed is how well Monk could orchestrate and arrange. “Deceptively simple,” goes one accurate description of how shrewdly he would guide your ear. Never resorting to obvious ensemble strategies, he found a surprising variety of timbres and combinations within the small-group format to keep the listener engaged.
Even in a quartet or quintet, he would trick you into hearing a continuous melody from a hocketed composite of multiple instruments. Sometimes he’d flip things around and the horns would comp for the piano. Or he would use a second horn for fleeting, subtle shading of a melody—“so smooth you probably missed it,” to borrow an old Q-Tip lyric.
At the piano, Monk had his favorite sounds—to call them mere “voicings” or “chords” misses the point. Every one is a discovery, a hard-won jewel, found deep in some terrain where no one else was looking. With every sound he took a stand, defying you with its funk, throwing down the gauntlet with each astonishing, pungent invention. You wonder why more people don’t make discoveries like this, until you realize how difficult it is.
These chord-jewels of his were palpable, physical objects. By this I mean that they took advantage of the physics of sound; they were resonant. Sympathetic vibrations could fill in the space that a lesser pianist would stuff with more notes. Spreading out voices in a chord across multiple octaves allows each pitch to resound.
Cecil Taylor once spoke in reverential tones of Monk’s “different combinations of notes in different registers,” as if that quality were somehow the key to it all. And indeed, this is how sound works: Overtones of a low fundamental start out sparsely in the lower octaves, and become gradually denser as you climb up to the high register. Monk displayed intimate knowledge of this physical law, and he put it to the test.
The minor seventh and the flatted fifth, two of Monk’s most often-used extensions, are the piano’s versions of the seventh and eleventh partials of the harmonic series, respectively. (Remember, the ubiquity of the flatted fifth in jazz could arguably be attributed to Monk himself.) He would also combine the minor and major seventh of a chord (a.k.a. the seventh and fifteenth partials), the natural and flat ninths (i.e., the ninth and seventeenth partials) and other “forbidden” combinations that actually sound good and make physical sense.
A close study of Monk’s playing reveals this spectral quality of his chords, this clear perception of higher harmonics in the sound of the piano. In order to activate these higher partials, he had to play with a little more force than the average pianist, to get the instrument ringing and shaking. In this sense harmony and tone were integrated concepts. This is why I call them “sounds” rather than “chords”; they are not theoretical constructs but vibratory experiences—actual, specific sensations—and they feel good.
When Monk played someone else’s music, he would recast it in this sonic language. His versions were the result of painstaking labor. Each harmony was seemingly rebuilt from scratch, chosen with care and worked over, and every ornament, filigree, run and fill carefully considered. And yet the playing was also full of risk. You can’t help but notice the liveness of it, the sense of possibility and discovery, the chances taken and the rewards reaped.
That risk lies somewhere in the dialogue between rhythm and improvisation—in the sustained buoyancy of pulse that is his signature, and in the real-time melodic invention that forms a counterpoint to it. Monk’s heroic balancing act of groove and self-expression—the sheer human drama of it—is, for me, his most profound legacy.
But in truth there is an endless amount to learn from Monk. I always keep his music close by, and I think about him every day. I hope you will, too.
Vijay Iyer is a pianist and composer based in New York. His most recent album is Historicity (ACT). Visit him online at www.vijay-iyer.com.
"I keep finding more people unreasonably eager to circumvent the word 'jazz', its associations and the entire history that it represents."
By Vijay Iyer
For me, this month brings an unusual confluence of several disparate projects and encounters. On March 6th, I celebrate the release of a new album, Still Life with Commentator, created in collaboration with poet/hiphop artist Mike Ladd and a stellar electroacoustic ensemble, which we will bring to UCLA on the 9th. Immediately afterward, I'm going to Germany and Austria for a week to take part in some rare performances of Roscoe Mitchell's nine-piece group, The Note Factory. The day after I return, I play piano in a night of duets at Merkin Hall with my longtime collaborator, saxophonist-composer Rudresh Mahanthappa, tabla player-producer Suphala and AACM pianist-composer Amina Claudine Myers. Following this, I join the American Composers Orchestra for several days for the premiere performances of my first orchestra piece, Interventions. I end the month by jumping into rehearsals with theater director Rachel Dickstein's company Ripe Time for a new work, Betrothed, which I am scoring.
I lay all this out neither to boast nor to advertise, but to demonstrate a simple truth: most of us on the jazz 'scene' actually inhabit multiple scenes, with varying relationships to what is called jazz. Yes, this particular month turns out to be abnormally intense for me in its variety of activities, but I don't think that its scope makes me a particularly unusual member of New York's musical landscape. Increasingly, I find that players who are nominally associated with jazz usually have aesthetics and affiliations that pull them into other areas of music and even other disciplines of the arts. This reality leads me to ask what "jazz still is, since musicians associated with jazz are responsible for endless creative manifestations that defy categorization.
Not long ago, I went through a phase when I was ready to jettison the term entirely. I'd heard none other than Abbey Lincoln remark, "A lot of musicians on the scene now think they're playing jazz. But there's no such thing, really. (cf. Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003, Univ. of Minnesota Press), p. 22-23) I found myself entertaining that very possibility and said so in public. But after receiving some sharp feedback from certain individuals whom I hold in high regard, I began to realize what the stakes were and was led to rethink my rejection of the word.
Eventually I understood Ms. Lincoln's statement not as a dismissal, but as a strategic oppositional stance. Needless to say, there is a vast legacy of knowledge associated with jazz, which we in this community understand and cherish more than anyone else; and meanwhile, jazz history is entwined with American race politics, a fact that gets whitewashed in the music textbooks (as if there were "no such thing ), but is vividly conveyed through oral histories (see, eg, Art Taylor's Notes and Tones (1982/1993), Da Capo Press). Ms. Lincoln's utterance captures the tension at the heart of jazz' legacy.
I keep finding more people unreasonably eager to circumvent the word "jazz , its associations and the entire history that it represents. Young musicians with jazz-school pedigrees proudly label their work as punk, emo, soul, classical, experimental, electronica, funk, hiphop, shoegaze, screamo—anything but jazz. Established venues, labels and publications grow resistant to the genre and refuse to touch it. Suddenly jazz starts to feel like a bad word. When and how did this music become something to get beyond, around or away from?
You could see it as a backlash against the decades-long pull of neotraditionalism and you wouldn't be half wrong. But you might also notice a fresh tinge of desperation in the sound of everyone running away and you'd still be right. To quote Bill Clinton's 1992 catch phrase: "It's the economy, stupid.
With the annual explosion of young, highly trained jazz graduates onto the streets of New York, the economic pressure continues to mount. It's hard to blame young musicians for distancing themselves from jazz—it's a career move. In recent years, the most promising artists had little to aspire to besides peer validation. Meanwhile, mainstream jazz labels made safe, unchallenging choices for years and the music, its popularity, its relevance and ultimately its economics all suffered.
At the moment, this landscape is in a hopeful flux. The high-pressure, high-density situation is fomenting pockets of innovation, which are evident in today's renaissance of activity. I see new collaborations straddling disparate musical communities; surprising levels of virtuosity in technique, form, method and sound; self-sufficient creative musicians with their own successful record labels and their own followings; musicians forming collaborative ventures to cross-promote their work; and a greater number of active, productive musicians than anyone can remember ever existing.
But I also hear something missing.
I am generally unable to listen to music as "pure sound (I don't actually believe that this is possible). I listen instead for a certain narrativity in the music, a sense that it came to us from somewhere, along some interesting and perhaps arduous path - audible traces of an authentic life on earth.
Once, the split tone at the crest of Coltrane's solo on "Transition seemed to tell such a story; today that same technique is neatly tucked into every saxophonist's arsenal, signifying nothing in particular. Once, young musicians developed through apprenticeships, on-the-job training and an inner drive for originality, excellence and uniqueness at whatever cost. Today, virtuosity appears in abundance, but with little vestige of the life-or-death stakes that once animated this music.
I'm not very old, and I don't mean to fetishize true hardship, but I do remember when the scene felt different. Now that the scene is defined by music-school graduates, I feel nostalgic for the days when musical expertise was a hard-won trait. When I hear mastery without risk, I feel ripped off.
This is why, in my own work, I constantly seek out situations that take me outside of what I know as a musician. Whether it's an elaborate compositional technique or a specific collaborative situation, I'm interested in finding something not just different, but shocking. In my collaborations with Mr. Ladd or with Mr. Mitchell, I have been shaken to find that many of my musical values were simply irrelevant to the situation; I have been forced repeatedly to rethink my sense of what music is and what it is for.
And that's closest to what jazz is for me: an expressive and critical take on reality, at once tough and fragile, culturally and historically grounded yet perilously unstable, miraculously existing in the most unlikely circumstance and simply devastating in its effect on one's worldview. The kind of musical experience I crave is the kind that makes me wonder if I even know what music is.
So, while I still have the megaphone, I'd like to put the call out to my fellow musicians: let us all vow to put ourselves at maximum creative risk whenever possible. In this climate, what do we really have to lose? If the experience enables us to say something authentic or to be more fully present in the world, then it will have been worth it—for ourselves and for others who are listening.
THE MUSIC OF VIJAY IYER: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. IYER:
Vijay Iyer: piano Stephan Crump: double bass Marcus Gilmore: drums
“Break
Stuff” is what happens after formal elements have been addressed. Vijay
Iyer calls the break “a span of time in which to act. It’s the basis
for breakdowns, breakbeats, and break dancing... it can be the moment
when everything comes to life.” A number of the pieces here are
breakdowns of other Iyer constructions. Some are from a suite premiered
at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, some derive from Open City, a
collaboration with novelist Teju Cole and large ensemble. The trio
energetically recasts everything it touches. “Hood” is a tribute to
Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood. On “Work”, Vijay pays homage to his
“number one hero”, Thelonious Monk. “Countdown” reconsiders the classic
Coltrane tune inside a rhythmic framework inspired by West African
music. “Mystery Woman” is driven by compound pulses which owe a debt to
South Indian drumming. Fast moving and quick-witted, the group has
developed a strong musical identity of its own, with an emphasis on what
Iyer calls “co-constructing”, exploring all the dynamics of playing
together. Yet the three players also get abundant solo space and, in a
reflective moment at the album’s centre, Iyer plays a moving version of
Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count” alone. Break Stuff, recorded in June
2014 at New York’s Avatar Studio and produced by Manfred Eicher, is the
third ECM release from Vijay Iyer.
Vijay Iyer - piano Stephen Crumb - bass Marcus Gilmore - drums
Große Konzertscheue, Jazzbaltica, Salzau, Germany, July 2, 2011
"Human Nature" - Vijay Iyer Trio Live at KPLU:
2011
Grammy nominated Vijay Iyer Trio visited the KPLU studios on February
8, 2011 and gave an amazing live performance, which included this
arrangement of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature."
Vijay Iyer Trio - "Accelerando"
EPK (Electronic Press Kit) with interview and performance footage,
documenting the 2012 record release of "Accelerando" on ACT Music +
Vision.
September
30, 2014 - Two exceptional jazz pianists—both of them MacArthur
Fellows—together. With Vijay Iyer now at Harvard University as Franklin
D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts, and Jason Moran
teaching New England Conservatory, it was only a matter of time before
the two came together. This video documents their conversation as well
as the work they did with NEC students.
Vijay Iyer Sextet - live @ Jazz Middelheim 2014:
live @ Jazz Middelheim, Antwerpen, Belgium. 14.08.14
Vijay Iyer (piano & Fender Rhodes), Steve Lehman (soprano- & alto
saxophone), Mark Shim (tenor saxophone), Harish Raghavan (contrabass)
Graham Haynes (cornet & bugle), Tyshawn Sorey (drums)
Vijay Iyer Improvises on Coltrane's "Giant Steps" and Discusses his Approach to Playing:
One of two pieces Vijay Iyer performed at "Music & the Mind: The
Magical Power of Sound" featuring Steve Paulson, Jamshed Bharucha,
Concetta Tomaino, Charles Limb, and Vijay Iyer.
The New York Academy of Sciences Wednesday, December 12, 2012
The Mutations of Vijay Iyer
Vijay Iyer: jazz pianist, classical violinist, interdisciplinary PhD in
the cognitive science of music. This unlikely blend has helped Iyer
navigate the intersection of contemporary and avant-garde jazz with
generosity and verve. On the heels of his latest album, "Mutations,"
join him for a lively session in music theory and practice. Monica
Hairston O'Connell, the executive director of the Center for Black Music
Research at Columbia College Chicago, joins him for a conversation.
This program is presented in partnership with the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.
This program was recorded on October 26, 2014 as part of the 25th Anniversary Chicago Humanities Festival, Journeys: http://chf.to/2014Journeys
Q2
Spaces is produced by Q2 Music, New York Public Radio's online music
station devoted to contemporary classical music and dynamic live
webcasts from leading new-music venues.
Vijay Iyer and the Brentano String Quartet: Portions of Time, Place Action:
Composer-pianist
Vijay Iyer continues to galvanize the music world, creating works that
embrace jazz, classical and electronic music and are "at once
provocative and accessible, intellectually substantive and sensually
attractive"
George
Lewis collaborates in concert with Vijay Iyer, one of the most exciting
jazz pianists in the contemporary scene. Lewis and Iyer perform with
Lewis's "Voyager" system, a digital improvising device capable of
listening and responding to human improvisatory performers.
Grammy-nominated
composer-pianist VIJAY IYER was described by Pitchfork as "one of the
most interesting and vital young pianists in jazz today," by The New
Yorker as one of "today's most important pianists... extravagantly
gifted... brilliantly eclectic," and by the Los Angeles Weekly as "a
boundless and deeply important young star." He was voted the 2010
Musician of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association and named one
of the "50 Most Influential Global Indians" by GQ India. Iyer has
released fifteen albums as a leader, most recently Tirtha (2011), Solo
(2010), and the multiple-award-winning Historicity (2009), which
features the Vijay Iyer Trio (Iyer, piano; Marcus Gilmore, drums;
Stephan Crump, bass). Historicity was a 2010 Grammy Nominee for Best
Instrumental Jazz Album, and was named #1 Jazz Album of the Year in The
New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit
Metro Times, National Public Radio, PopMatters.com, the Village Voice
Jazz Critics Poll, and the Downbeat International Critics Poll. The trio
won the 2010 Echo Award (the "German Grammy") for best international
ensemble and the Downbeat Critics Poll for rising star small ensemble of
the year. Iyer's many awards also include the Alpert Award in the Arts,
the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and numerous composer
commissions.
A polymath whose career has spanned the sciences,
the humanities and the arts, Iyer holds a B.S. in Mathematics and
Physics from Yale University, plus a Masters in Physics and a Ph.D. in
Technology and the Arts from the University of California, Berkeley. He
has published articles in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Wire, Music
Perception, JazzTimes, and The Best Writing on Mathematics: 2010.
Vijay Iyer Trio - Bode/Historicity/Dogon A.D./Hood (live in het Bimhuis, April 25 2012)
Vijay Iyer - piano Stephen Crump - bas Marcus Gilmore - drums
Vijay
Iyer Trio recording Galang (trio riot version) from Historicity album
at Systems Two Studios Brooklyn NY March 2009. Vijay Iyer: Piano, Marcus
Gilmore: Drums, Stephan Crump: Bass. Filmed by Daragh McCarthy
Trio 3 with guest Vijay Iyer, NYC Winter Jazzfest 2015, Set Opener Part 1
Trio 3: Oliver Lake (Alto saxophone), Reggie Workman (Bass), Andrew Cyrille (Drums), with special guest
Vijay Iyer (Piano). Recorded at the 2015 NYC Winter Jazzfest on 1/9/2015 the
Minetta Lane Theater.
On Tuesday December 4, 2012, incomparable
pianist and composer Vijay Iyer and hip hop artist Mike Ladd conducted a
masterclass on the diverse disciplinary cross-sections that define
their longtime creative partnership. Through select performances from
their shared oeuvr, Iyer and Ladd explore some of the more unexpected
ways in which the culture of jazz attends to contemporary sonic
innovation and defines the nature of their collaborative ethos.
Vijay Iyer is a jazz pianist and composer based in New York. In the
2012 60th Annual DownBeat Magazine Critics Poll, he won an unprecedented
five categories: Jazz Artist of the Year, Best Jazz Album, Best
Pianist, Best Jazz Group, and Rising Star Composer. He has collaborated
with Amiri Baraka, Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, dead prez, Amina
Claudine Myers, Butch Morris, George E. Lewis, Burnt Sugar, Tyshawn
Sorey, Oliver Lake, DJ Spooky, Das Racist, and Mike Ladd.
An Interview with Steve Coleman Conducted By Vijay Iyer
Vijay Iyer: What goals did you have in mind when starting the M-Base Collective and how close have you come to actualizing them?
Steve Coleman: My goal was, and is to express the
relationship of mankind, myself in particular to everything else,
through music (or some sort of organized sound). Since I do not live in
this universe alone I feel that this is best done by more than one
person at a time, or groups of people. I’ve always wanted to be around
other creative individuals so that is why I hook up with others. If it
is called a collective or not really is not the point for me, it’s the
work that gets done and trying to stay on this path of creative
expression. I feel that being on the path is the important thing and in
that sense the goals have been actualized. In other words, to be on the
path is in itself success.
VI: How did this collective form? Was M-Base
essentially your brainchild, or did others have similar goals? Did you
often have to push things along yourself?
SC: Getting together with the other people who have
been considered in the past as being a part of the M-Base collective
just happened as a result of me expressing myself and others doing the
same. I hooked up with each person one by one but I really feel that it
was creative energy that initially brought us together. This energy acts
to attract other like energy so I really only responded to that.
I did create the name M-Base but the energy was and will always be
here, I had nothing to do with that except to allow it to work through
me. The name’s not important.
It is my nature to push things along (or I should say that’s the
nature of the energy working through me) so I would have done that
collective or no collective. In fact I have done that at times when
there were no other people to work with.
VI: Do you feel that M-Base is still a true
“collective” today? What problems do you see facing the notion of a
music collective today?
SC: I will always be working with people and since I
call the frame of mind that I and the people that I work with are
generally in “M-Base” (and not the music itself), then maybe you could
say that M-Base is a collective. But when I use the term “collective”
I’m really not using it in the same sense as I think you are. For me the
M-Base collective is the group of people who have contributed to a way
of thinking about creating this music. It is not a group of people who
make a certain style of music. So for me Muhal Richard Abrams is part of
the M-Base collective, even if he would not say so. I don’t think that
the collectives that most people talk about last very long in this
country today because of western mentality and commercial pressures but
that does not effect the kind of collective I mentioned above because
creative energy always will find a way to manifest itself through
individuals and groups of individuals. So the so called ‘problems’ are
really an illusion.
VI: How have the earlier African-American music
collectives influenced you? How do you view their importance? You’ve
said before that the collective approach to learning is fundamentally a
non-Western concept — can you elaborate? SC: Again are we using my definition of a
collective? If so the answer is obvious. What we are doing today would
not be possible without the work of others who got together and created
in the past. So from that standpoint the influence and importance is too
great to be measured.
By learning with others you can get instant feedback from other
creative minds (each bringing to the table different experiences and
insights) DURING the learning process. This enables a kind of collective
experience that can be drawn upon when internalizing information the
first time. Individual learning does not have this advantage (although
it does have its own advantages, but you can always learn on an
individual level. You have to reach out and interact with others to
learn collectively). I don’t believe collective learning is stressed in
the west. Performing music in a creative group is collective learning as
is playing in a big band of some sort but I’m speaking now of
collective learning in the more general and traditional concept of
studying and conceptualizing together with others.
VI: With your newer projects like Mystic Rhythm
Society, Metrics, and the Secret Doctrine, which bring younger
musicians, lyricists, and other non-Western musicians into the fold. Do
you hope to enhance and further the collective atmosphere? Do you feel
that the musicians are learning from each other?
SC: Of course the musicians are learning from each
other. I started these different groups to provide some way to allow me
to work with others in a creative environment.
You see when I was working with Cassandra Wilson, Greg Osby, Geri
Allen etc.. we made it a point to try and have a group that did not have
a musical leader (or a business leader). I was one of the pushier
people in the group in terms of trying to advance our musical way of
thinking. When the press began to write about us as a group they (the
press) decided to make someone in the group the leader. In every
interview that I’ve ever done and when I talked to anyone I made it a
point to tell them that I was not the leader of M-Base and that there
was no leader. This made no difference to western thinking journalist
who insisted that there was a leader, and normally it was written that I
started (or was the leader of) M-Base.
This led to problems as others wanted to be looked at by people
outside of this process (critics, writers, record company people) as
doing more things of a leadership nature, they wanted to be looked at as
leaders. Eventually egos came into play and this is one of the reasons
why this particular group of people are not really working together that
much today. Everybody wanted to be looked at as a leader and as a
result all of these people (and some others too) have got their own
groups today. The nature of the music industry today is such that
individual musicians are immediately looking to form their own groups
and get their own recording contracts, even before they get any real
experience out in the field. This is due in large part to the commercial
pressures of the music industry (and the west in general). Many times
musicians deviate from their original purpose of creating music because
of commercial pressures. Combined with the nature of the western educational institutions,
which stress pedagogy over creativity ,spirit and culture, this is one
of the reasons why so many musicians (who see themselves as playing
“jazz” music) do not really have a personal (or individual) sound to
their music.
So I decided to just start the groups myself and lead in a more
obvious way (business wise and musically) so there would be no argument
and therefore no ego battles. I think this works out better in this
culture, although I wish it were different because I have to do a lot of
things that really have nothing to do with creating music, just to make
the music happen at all. Because I’ve called myself the leader, Five
Elements has been around since 1980. It cannot break up unless I break
up, unless I end it. And I see no reason to do that. On the other hand
if I start The Mystic Rhythm Society (instead of Steve Coleman and The
Mystic Rhythm Society) then you have the kind of situation that existed
with Weather Report or The Jackson Five, where any aggressive dissenting
member of the group can break up the whole thing, because of the way
this society is. When this happens then of course the press jumps on it
and announces the thing “dead”. I have seen many articles that have
announced that M-Base is dead but these writers do not understand the
nature of what there are talking about. M-Base is only a name, and names
do die in a way. But what M-Base represents will never die, it will
only be called something else in the future, just like it was called by
other names in the past.
Mystic, Metrics, Elements and Secret Doctrine are just groups formed
to express various elements or perspectives of this same M-Base
conception (or mentality). As an accomplished musician it is easy for
you to see the connection between all of these groups. I am only the
catalyst and portal through which the energy (that is holding this
particular incarnation of creative relationships together) is working.
But other individuals respond to these vibrations by opening themselves
to these creative energies and this is what makes it a collective on
this plane of existence.
Vijay Iyer (born October 26, 1971) is a jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, producer, electronic musician, and writer based in New York City, USA. He became Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University in early 2014.[1]
Born in Albany, New York, and raised in Fairport, New York,[2] Vijay Iyer is the son of Indian Tamil immigrants to the US.[3]
He received 15 years of Western classical training on violin beginning
at the age of 3. He began playing the piano by ear in his childhood and
is mostly self-taught on that instrument.[3]
Later life and career
After completing an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics at Yale University, Iyer attended the University of California, Berkeley,
initially to pursue a doctorate in physics. Iyer continued to pursue
his musical interests, playing in ensembles led by drummers E. W.
Wainwright and Donald Bailey. In 1994 he started working with Steve Coleman and George E. Lewis.
In 1995, concurrent to his composing, recording and touring activities,
he left the Berkeley physics department and assembled an
interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Technology and the Arts, focusing on music cognition. His 1998 dissertation, titled Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics,[4] applied the dual frameworks of embodied cognition and situated cognition to music. His graduate advisor was music perception and computer music researcher David Wessel, with further guidance from Olly Wilson, George E. Lewis, Donald Glaser, and Erv Hafter.
Iyer performs around the world with ensembles, most frequently in his
trio with Stephan Crump and Marcus Gilmore, featured on three albums:
"Break Stuff" (2015, ECM), Accelerando (2012, ACT) and Historicity (2009, ACT). "Break Stuff" received five stars (highest rating) in the March 2015 issue of "Down Beat"
magazine. "Accelerando" was voted No. 1 Jazz Album of the Year for 2012
in three critics' polls surveying hundreds of critics worldwide, hosted
by Down Beat,
Jazz Times, and Rhapsody, and also was chosen as jazz album of the year
by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, PopMatters, and Amazon.com. Historicity was a 2010 Grammy
Nominee for Best Instrumental Jazz Album, and was named No. 1 Jazz
Album of 2009 in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago
Tribune, the Detroit Metro Times, National Public Radio, PopMatters.com,
the Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll, and the Down Beat International Critics Poll. The trio won the 2010 Jazz Echo Award for best international ensemble and the 2012 Down Beat
Critics Poll for jazz group of the year. On the strength of these
recordings, Iyer was named the 2010 Musician of the Year and 2012
Pianist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association.
Iyer in 2013
Iyer is also known for sustained multi-year collaborations. In 2003,
Iyer premiered his first collaboration with poet-producer-performer Mike Ladd, titled In What Language?, a song cycle about airports, fear and surveillance before and after 9/11, commissioned by Asia Society. Iyer's next project with Ladd, Still Life with Commentator, a satirical oratorio about 24-hour news culture in a time of war, was co-commissioned by UNC-Chapel Hill and by Brooklyn Academy of Music for its 2006 Next Wave Festival, and was released on cd by Savoy Jazz. Their third major collaboration, Holding it Down, focuses on the dreams of young American veterans from the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was commissioned by Harlem Stage to premiere in 2012. It was released on cd by Pi Recordings in 2013.
Iyer began collaborating with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa in 1996, resulting in five albums under Iyer's name (Architextures (1998), Panoptic Modes (2001), Blood Sutra (2003), Reimagining (2005), and Tragicomic (2008)), three under Mahanthappa's name (Black Water, Mother Tongue, Code Book), and their duo album Raw Materials (2004).
Iyer has also been active as a composer of chamber music. His composition Mutations I-X was commissioned and premiered by the string quartet Ethel in 2005, and released on cd by ECM Records in 2014. His orchestral work Interventions was commissioned and premiered in 2007 by the American Composers Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Iyer co-created the score for Teza (2009), by the filmmaker Haile Gerima, and also collaborated with filmmaker Bill Morrison on the short film and audiovisual installation Release, commissioned by Eastern State Penitentiary (2009). In 2011 he created Mozart Effects, commissioned by Brentano String Quartet as a response to an unfinished fragment by Mozart, and he also created and performed the score to UnEasy, a ballet choreographed by Karole Armitage and commissioned by Central Park Summerstage. In 2012 the Silk Road Ensemble debuted his commissioned piece, Playlist for an Extreme Occasion. In 2013 International Contemporary Ensemble premiered his composition Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, a large-scale collaboration with filmmaker Prashant Bhargava commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts in commemoration of the centenary of Igor Stravinsky's work The Rite of Spring. In 2013 Brooklyn Rider
premiered and recorded his string quartet "Dig the Say". In 2014 Iyer
premiered "Time, Place, Action", a piano quintet which he performed with
Brentano Quartet, and "Bruits", a sextet for Imani Winds and pianist Cory Smythe. Later that year the moving images by Bhargava combined with Iyer's music was released on ECM Records.[5]
Iyer received the 2003 Alpert Awards in the Arts, a 2006 Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts, and commissioning grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Capital, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, American Composers Forum, Chamber Music America, and Meet The Composer. He was named one of the "50 most influential global Indians" by GQ India, and he received the 2010 India Abroad Publisher's Award for Special Excellence. He was awarded a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the 2012 Greenfield Prize for Music, and an unprecedented "triple crown" in the 2012 Down Beat
International Jazz Critics Poll, in which he was voted Artist of the
Year, Pianist of the Year, Small Group of the Year (for the Vijay Iyer
Trio), Album of the Year (for Accelerando), and Rising Star Composer of the Year. He received a 2013 MacArthur fellowship,[6] a 2013 Trailblazer Award by the Association of South Asians in Media, Marketing and Entertainment (SAMMA), and a 2013 ECHO Award for Best Jazz Pianist (International). He was voted 2014 Pianist of the Year in the Down Beat International Jazz Critics Poll.
"We
are so very pleased to announce that Vijay Iyer has accepted our offer
to join the Department of Music in January 2014. Vijay will be the
Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts." Harvard
Music Department Facebook page, 12 July 2013.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Composer and pianist Vijay Iyer in his Harlem home.
George Lewis and Vijay Iyer in Concert
WELLESLEY COLLEGE PRESENTS:
George Lewis and Vijay Iyer in Concert
George Lewis collaborates in concert with Vijay Iyer, one of the most exciting jazz pianists in the contemporary scene. Lewis and Iyer perform with Lewis's "Voyager" system, a digital improvising device capable of listening and responding to human improvisatory performers.
Grammy-nominated composer-pianist VIJAY IYER was described by Pitchfork as "one of the most interesting and vital young pianists in jazz today," by The New Yorker as one of "today's most important pianists... extravagantly gifted... brilliantly eclectic," and by the Los Angeles Weekly as "a boundless and deeply important young star." He was voted the 2010 Musician of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association and named one of the "50 Most Influential Global Indians" by GQ India. Iyer has released fifteen albums as a leader, most recently Tirtha (2011), Solo (2010), and the multiple-award-winning Historicity (2009), which features the Vijay Iyer Trio (Iyer, piano; Marcus Gilmore, drums; Stephan Crump, bass). Historicity was a 2010 Grammy Nominee for Best Instrumental Jazz Album, and was named #1 Jazz Album of the Year in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Metro Times, National Public Radio, PopMatters.com, the Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll, and the Downbeat International Critics Poll. The trio won the 2010 Echo Award (the "German Grammy") for best international ensemble and the Downbeat Critics Poll for rising star small ensemble of the year. Iyer's many awards also include the Alpert Award in the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and numerous composer commissions.
A polymath whose career has spanned the sciences, the humanities and the arts, Iyer holds a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from Yale University, plus a Masters in Physics and a Ph.D. in Technology and the Arts from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published articles in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Wire, Music Perception, JazzTimes, and The Best Writing on Mathematics: 2010.