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| Vol. 2, Issue 09 September 2010 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Profile |
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His Personal World of Sound
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| For jazz musician Vijay Iyer, it’s not about being overtly Indian. It’s about working from the inside |
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By AKSHAY AHUJA
Published : 1 May 2010 |
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© LAYLAH AMATULLAH BARRAYN FOR THE CARAVAN |
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| Musicians like Iyer are in the process of convincing anyone with ears to listen that jazz is still an art form with vital and exciting things to say.
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IJAY IYER LIKES TO THROW listeners a little off balance. The ingredients on Iyer’s latest album, Historicity (2009), are basic—a piano, bass and drums—but the music refuses to settle into familiar grooves. Melodies from famous songs are entirely transformed; bursts of percussive sound come from unexpected parts of the piano; the bassist creates eerie |
slow slides on the strings; and the beats never quite fall where you think they will.
Stay inside the music for a while, though, and the melodies begin to emerge, the pulse is felt beneath the shifting rhythms. Each piece keeps developing, explaining itself. A listener’s freedom to lose the thread and then, with attention, find it again is part of the appeal and excitement of Iyer’s music, and jazz in general.
Historicity is a collection of such discoveries, both in Iyer’s own compositions and his radical reworkings of other artists’ songs. After six previous albums, all well-received, along with six collaborations, this one is bringing him a new level of acclaim and the attention of a wider audience. The Los Angeles Times—which along with several other publications named Historicity the best jazz album of the year—wrote that “no record defined the jazz landscape in 2009 quite like this release on a German label from a New York-based piano trio led by the son of Indian immigrants.”
When I talk to Iyer on the phone, he is at home in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, keeping an eye on his five-year-old daughter, who is recovering from laryngitis. He takes occasional breaks to check on her. “She’s fine,” he says, laughing. “She’s just hiding behind a chair.” Iyer is about to leave for a European tour with Raw Materials, his longtime partnership with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. This is only one of Iyer’s many collaborations—with poets, with visual artists, with carnatic classical musicians—all part of an impulse to seek out situations that take him outside his existing knowledge and destabilise his certainties.
In addition to creating and performing his own music, Iyer composes pieces for Western classical orchestras, teaches aspiring musicians at two New York universities, and writes programme notes for a variety of concerts. “I’m always late with something or another,” he says, but he sounds cheerful rather than overwhelmed. After all, he gets to create music for a living and this, as he admits, might easily not have been the case.
“It could have just not worked out,” Iyer says. “I guess I was a bit hardheaded.”
At 23, he had spent years on track to become a physicist. After studying at Yale and completing a Masters in physics from the University of California at Berkeley, he was considering “abandoning all of that” and devoting himself to jazz.
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HAT WAS NOT AN EASY CHOICE TO MAKE," he says. “It wasn’t easy news to break to my parents.” |
Iyer’s parents, both Tamil, were among the first Indians to arrive in Rochester in the late 1960s, all pioneers, as Iyer describes them, “improvising their way through upstate New York.”
Born in 1971, music was part of his life from early childhood. Iyer’s first instrument was the violin, and he grew up playing Western classical while listening to the same music as most other American kids: Michael Jackson, Prince and early hip-hop—Run DMC, Afrika Bambaataa, and A Tribe Called Quest. His sister was the one who took piano lessons, and Iyer would bang out accompaniment on the lower notes of the family’s spinet.
| © LAYLAH AMATULLAH BARRAYN FOR THE CARAVAN |
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FROM L TO R: Vijay, Paul D Miller/DJ Spooky and Rudresh Mahanthappa. |
Somewhere in the background, as well, was carnatic classical music, which Iyer encountered at Indian community functions in Rochester. “I grew up more passively with it,” Iyer says. “It was around, but I was no expert on it.”
In high school, Iyer began playing keyboard in rock bands, but was drawn more and more to jazz, inspired by recordings from artists like Thelonious Monk and, during his undergraduate days, performances by saxophonists like Julius Hemphill and Roscoe Mitchell.
His musical education took another, more crucial turn when he arrived in San Francisco. Even though he was technically there to get his Masters, Iyer began playing in jazz clubs. Surrounded by the Bay Area’s thriving Indian community, he also started listening seriously to carnatic music for the first time. After discovering pianist Randy Weston, who drew heavily on African music to produce his own distinctive, modern compositions, he began trying to find a way to put “the piano in dialogue with some rhythmic elements of Indian music and building a kind of musical language around that.”
With so much around him that fired his sense of artistic possibilities, Iyer realised that a career in academia was simply not for him.
“Music is what I love,” he says, describing his thought process at that time. “And it’s starting to turn into something for me. So if I don’t give it this chance now, I’ll always regret it.”
He knew that he was trading a stable career for a profoundly uncertain one. The decision, he says, was never based on financial prospects. “It wasn’t even that I thought, ‘Okay, this has to be my career.’ It was more, ‘This has to be my life.’”
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F ALL THE WESTERN CLASSICAL INSTRUMENTS, the piano is the most suited to exploring the intersection between rhythm and melody. Its designation as a percussion instrument becomes more apparent at the extremes of its range—the lower keys that Iyer used to pound as he played with his sister, and the higher keys, which don’t sing like |
the upper range of a violin, but have a duller, more wooden resonance.
These are still the ranges that Iyer loves to explore, along with the intervals that the ear hears as dissonances, what Iyer describes as the forbidden harmonies, which draw attention to the chord as a rhythmic as well as melodic element. As he searched for his own voice, Iyer was continually drawn to musicians who pushed against the boundaries of conventional methods of expression—utilising more adventurous harmonies, more polyrhythmic complexity, always trying to create a personal world of sound.
“All of those artists that I’ve worked with are sort of radical individualists,” Iyer says. “They think for themselves, and they give you ideas about how you can think for yourself. So I don’t ever think, ‘Oh, I should copy that.’ It’s more, ‘What if I brought my own sensibility in contact with the same information?’”
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YER DID NOT END UP LEAVING HIGHER EDUCATION. Even after he knew he would not become a physicist, he found a few like-minded professors at Berkeley who helped him design an interdisciplinary PhD that would serve his musical interests. “I was really a full-time artist, performer, composer, who was using graduate school to focus some of my ideas,” Iyer says. In |
particular, his ideas about rhythm.
Working with a master drummer from Ghana, he started to get a sense of the philosophy behind African music. “The intricacy of the layering of the compositional elements,” Iyer says, “the polyrhythms and the motifs that are superimposed and placed in dialogue with each other. All of that stuff has influenced so much music—not just mine, but basically all of American music has that sensibility that carried over in the Middle Passage,” referring to the route by which African slaves were brought over the Atlantic to the Americas, which eventually produced, among other things, the blues, jazz, rock and roll, and rap.
Gradually, in Berkeley’s jazz clubs, Iyer began to craft a unique sound. It took some time for people to catch on. Part of the reason was that, when Iyer’s first album, Memorophilia, appeared in 1995, there was no precedent for an Indian musician working in the jazz tradition.
Both Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa, who were trying to enter the scene around the same time, describe being seen as outsiders, and not being asked to play with certain musicians. As Mahanthappa said in a conversation with Iyer from several years ago, neither of them “fit into any preconceived notion of what a jazz musician is supposed to be.”
When Architextures, Iyer’s second album, came out in 1998, he felt compelled to write that it “represents my perspective as a member of the South Asian diaspora, but also as a human being with a mind, body, and soul.”
“You know,” he continued, “it ought not to have been necessary to say that. But frankly, at the time it was necessary—in a way that maybe it isn’t today—to use the opportunity to say, ‘I am a fact. Look at me as a fact, as part of reality, not as part of your fantasy or your dreams about the East; just try to deal with me on my terms.’
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