Vijay Iyer

All Music Guide:

Born in 1971 to parents who emigrated from India to the U.S. in the 1960s, Bay Area-based composer and pianist Vijay Iyer has led several distinct combos, including Spirit Complex, the Poisonous Prophets, and the Vijay Iyer Trio. All three groups appeared on the musician's 1995 debut on Asian Improv, Memorophilia, a collection fusing jazz forms with the rhythms of South Asian music. In addition to working to create interactive software for improvised musical performance, Iyer worked frequently with alto saxophonist and M-Base pioneer Steve Coleman in his groups the Mystic Rhythm Society and the Secret Doctrine, and occasionally sat in with the Five Elements. By the time of Panoptic Modes' release in late 2001, Iyer had a working quartet with alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, bassist Stephan Crump, and drummer Derrek Phillips. Phillips gave way to Tyshawn Sorey, and the quartet released Blood Sutra in 2003. At the same time, Iyer was working with hip-hop's Mike Ladd on In What Language?, an examination of the often dehumanizing world of international travel in a post 9/11 world, also released in 2003. He continued working with Mahanthappa and Ladd, appearing on Mahanthappa's Mother Tongue in 2004 and Ladd's Negrophilia: The Album in 2005 before releasing his own Reimagining, also in 2005. He was back with Mahanthappa for 2006's Raw Materials and Ladd for 2007's Still Life with Commentator. Tragicomic appeared in 2008.

During this same time period, Iyer was also composing for orchestra ("Interventions," 2007, with the American Composers Orchestra) and string quartet ("Mutations I-X," 2005, for the string quartet Ethel) as well as for theater (Betrothed, 2007) and film (Teza, 2008). He also performed regularly on piano and synth with Greg Tate's Burnt Sugar. Iyer's 2009 release, Historicity, was chosen as the number one Jazz Album of the Year by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Metro Times, National Public Radio, the Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll, and the Down Beat International Critics Poll, and was nominated for a 2010 Grammy for Best Instrumental Jazz Album (Iyer's first nomination and the first for an Indian-American in that category). The Vijay Iyer Trio (with Marcus Gilmore now in the drummer chair) won the 2010 Echo Award (Germany's Grammy equivalent) for best international ensemble and the 2010 Down Beat Critics Poll for best small ensemble. In 2010 he also released his first solo album (Solo) and was named the 2010 Musician of the Year at the Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards. Iyer kicked off 2011 with a new band called Tirtha, a trio with electric guitarist Prasanna and virtuoso tabla player Nitin Mitta. The group released a self-titled album on ACT early in the year and toured globally in support of it. The album appeared on many jazz critics' year-end lists. Iyer's piano trio with Gilmore and Crump returned to recording later in the year; they released Accelerando in March of 2012.

Wikipedia:

Vijay Iyer is a jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, producer, electronic musician, and writer based in New York City, USA.

Biography [edit]

Born in Albany, New York in 1971 and raised in Rochester, New York, Vijay Iyer is the son of Indian Tamil immigrants to the US. 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. Vijay was also exposed to some Carnatic classical and religious music in his youth. His high school years saw a growing interest in jazz. After completing an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics at Yale University when he was 20, Iyer then went to the University of California, Berkeley initially to pursue a doctorate in physics. Iyer continued to pursue his musical interests, serving as the house pianist in jam sessions at the Bird Kage (a club in North Oakland) and playing in ensembles led by drummers E. W. Wainwright and Donald Bailey. In 1994 he started working with Steve Coleman and George E. Lewis and became associated with the musicians' collective Asian Improv. In 1995 he left the 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, applied the dual frameworks of embodied cognition and situated cognition to music.

Now an acclaimed New York-based jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, and producer, he performs around the world with his ensembles and collaborations, including his Grammy-nominated trio with Stephan Crump and Marcus Gilmore; the experimental collective Fieldwork, featuring Steve Lehman and Tyshawn Sorey; the new South Asian chamber trio Tirtha, featuring guitarist Prasanna and tabla player Nitin Mitta; his large-scale works with poet-performer Mike Ladd; and Raw Materials, his longstanding duo with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. His trio album Historicity was nominated for a 2010 Grammy for Best Instrumental Jazz Album, and was named #1 album of the year in many publications, including the Downbeat Magazine International Critics Poll, the Village Voice Annual Jazz Critics Poll, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Metro Times, PopMatters, and others. His trio won the 2010 Jazz Echo Award (aka the "German Grammy") for best international ensemble. Iyer was named the 2010 Musician of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association.

Building off of his work in the jazz world, Iyer has been active as a composer in other settings. 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 in New York and released as an award-winning cd on Pi Recordings. 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.

Iyer's composition Mutations I-X was commissioned and premiered by Ethel (string quartet) in 2005. His orchestral work Interventions was commissioned and premiered in 2007 by the American Composers Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Iyer co-created the award-winning score for Teza (2009), by the celebrated filmmaker Haile Gerima, and also collaborated with filmmaker Bill Morrison on the award-winning 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.

Iyer received the 2003 Alpert Award 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 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 the 2012 Greenfield Prize for Music.

Iyer has worked with Amiri Baraka, Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, dead prez, Amina Claudine Myers, Butch Morris, George E. Lewis, Miya Masaoka, Trichy Sankaran, Pamela Z, Burnt Sugar, Karsh Kale, Tyshawn Sorey, Oliver Lake, DJ Spooky, Das Racist, Ethel, Imani Winds, and many others. Iyer is a faculty member at Manhattan School of Music, New York University, The New School, and the School for Improvisational Music. His writings appear in Music Perception, Current Musicology, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Journal of the Society for American Music, JazzTimes, and the anthologies Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, Arcana IV, and The Best Writing on Mathematics 2010. He is a Steinway artist.