A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH VIJAY IYER


When considering Amiri Baraka is an ardent supporter, Vijay Iyer is a voice worthy of being heard. With two new releases on Pi Recordings and Artists House about to hit shelves at a record store near you, perhaps Baraka's praise is being heard. Fieldwork's (a trio project that Iyer is involved with) Your Life Flashes recording garnered more critical buzz than any in recent memory. So is Iyer "on the rise?" Before the bandwagon gets full, food for thought - perhaps he is already there. Folks, Vijay Iyer, unedited and in his own words.

FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

VIJAY IYER: I actually started playing classical violin when I was three and my sister, who is a few years older, she started playing piano at the same time, so we were having lessons in parallel. The way I was taught violin was first by ear, so you get a really good ear training as a child and end up having an intuitive connection to melody. So then when I was about six or seven, I started fooling around on my sister's piano and that sort of started it all.


FJ: Why piano?

VIJAY IYER: The thing about piano to me was, initially, there was no one really telling me what to do on the piano. It was just following my nose really. I was trying to pick up songs that I knew on the radio or whatever I could think of. That is really how it began and over the course of the next ten years, I became maybe a little bit more proficient. I wasn't really serious on piano. I was serious on violin. I actually played it for fifteen years.


FJ: You hung in there longer than I did with the violin.

VIJAY IYER: I was in orchestras in high school and I think that is what began to make it worthwhile for me, was playing with other people. I wasn't really into being a soloist or the neuroses that accompany individual classical music instruction. But making music with other people was really enjoyable and I was concertmaster of my school orchestra. I was doing that until my sophomore year in college, but I was also playing piano and keyboards on the side. In high school, I actually was in a rock band and joined the school jazz ensemble and that is what actually led me seriously into jazz, getting turned onto stuff through that and just checking out records at the library and stuff. I took some theory and harmony courses and learned a little bit about jazz theory, but mainly, I was self-taught on piano. That just built over time. When I was in college, I started leading my own groups playing some of my own compositions and standards and it just built from there. There was nothing imposed on me with piano, but I had this rigorous training from violin that I could bring that knowledge to playing piano. Piano, for me, was always deeply intuitive and kind of personal thing. When I was playing initially, I wasn't even intending on doing for anybody else. It was really just for me. That is very different from the mentality that you are set up with when you take classical lessons. So I guess I got the best of it in both senses. I wasn't caged in by classical training on piano. No one was telling me what to do on the piano and so it set me free. I was free to do whatever I wanted, but at the same time, I had this background and foundation of musical training that helped me find my way on the instrument.


FJ: A uniquely original approach.

VIJAY IYER: Well, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't really know anything about jazz. I was improvising based on what I did know, which was more conventional pop harmony and classical kind of stuff. I was improvising off of songs on the radio. It was very rudimentary. I ended up taking two or three lessons and he showed me voicings. He showed me some tunes and turned me onto some pianists to listen to. I remember he lent me a Red Garland Trio record, which was called Bright and Breezy. He also gave me some Keith Jarrett records, which I was sort of into, but sort of not into. Then, based on that, the bare bones information he gave me, I just started to explore stuff on my own and checking out records from the local library and just figuring it out. I also had a group of peers who were starting jazz around the same time and we happened to form the instrumentation of a quartet with saxophone, piano, bass, and drums. So we would just get together and hack through whatever. We were kind of collectively engaged in this individual quest.


FJ: And the quest continues.

VIJAY IYER: Yeah, I am learning and trying to figure out how to play the piano.


FJ: What sources did you draw early inspiration from?

VIJAY IYER: Probably foremost, Thelonious Monk, I think more than anybody else, in so many ways, rhythmically, harmonically, and sound wise and his whole spontaneity, everything about him really. Duke Ellington also and also Coltrane, he was the first person to bring Indian music to jazz, ideas from Indian music into American improvised music. He sort of set the standard for that. He laid the foundations for so much of what is being done today. In terms of piano players, Andrew Hill is a huge influence, Randy Weston also. I think, specially, the thing about Randy Weston is how he drew from his ancestry and his heritage and brought it all into the piano. He has such a clarity in the way he does that and is so playful with it and yet, so dead serious, which is really powerful to me.


FJ: Why did you leave the Bay Area for Manhattan?

VIJAY IYER: It was time to leave. It was time to come here to New York. I think I sort of exhausted the possibilities for me in the Bay Area. That is not to knock the Bay Area, because it was such a pivotal time to be there, but I think for me and the kind of music I make, the kind of hopes I had as a performer and recording artist, I just felt that coming to New York would help me progress to the next stage and it seems like that was the correct decision. The thing about being in New York is that the world is watching. On the one hand, you can't hide, but on the other hand, there is more places to go in New York. You can go farther being based here.


FJ: And these days being a musician carries with it the burden of marketing yourself and this idea of contemporary self-promotion.

VIJAY IYER: Yeah, I spend more time than I care to admit just sitting in front of my computer and dealing with email or trying to get gigs or trying to get records together. It is very extra-musical.


FJ: You have had a close association with Liberty Ellman.

VIJAY IYER: We were in the Bay Area together for several years. We moved here at the same time. In fact, we shared a moving truck. We have had a close association going on nine or ten years now. I met him in '94. It was around the time that Steve Coleman did his first Bay Area residency. Liberty was doing some different kind of music that had a strong rhythmic foundation and that was really fresh. We connected and we clicked. At some point, we were in probably six bands together because I was in his band and I had a project that he was in and any number of other things. So Liberty started this label, Red Giant, to mainly just put out his own records. So then when I put out my second album, Architextures, we made it a joint release on Asian Improv and Red Giant. The idea was forming our own collective to be a home for the kind of music we were making, as well as acknowledging my debt to Asian Improv for having provided such a clear example of how to proceed and also nurturing me and providing a home for my work. We've been close for that long and tomorrow is his birthday. We are all having dinner with him tomorrow. Since we have been in New York, we haven't played together quite as much as we used to, but we've been in constant communication. My third record Panoptic Modes was out on Red Giant as well. He's worked his way up in the music world as well.


FJ: He no longer is need of a day gig.

VIJAY IYER: So you knew him from Blue Note. Yeah, I think working at Blue Note was a great opportunity for him to learn the ways of the industry here and he shared that knowledge with us. It has helped him out in his own career. More importantly, he is an amazing guitarists. He can back it all up with his guitar playing. He has a new album that is coming out this fall on Pi.


FJ: And Rudresh Mahanthappa?

VIJAY IYER: I had been working with Rudresh Mahanthappa, this phenomenal alto player, we met through Steve Coleman in '95. Steve was teaching at Stanford University and I was on the scene to do a workshop and Rudresh had come to study with Steve. Steve introduced us and we kind of clicked and have worked together ever since. We would find ways to work together, even though at the time, he lived in Chicago and I lived in Oakland. I flew him out to play the CD release for Architextures and we had some other gigs as a quartet and I just heard this sound that reminded me of Monk and Coltrane. There was just something about the sound and the way that it all came together that reminded me of those landmark recordings with Monk and Coltrane. It rang in my ears the same way. We have been together since then.


FJ: And you guys have a new record coming out on Artists House.

VIJAY IYER: This new music was created as part of a commission from the New York State Council for the Arts, which I got early last year. We finally recorded it earlier this year and it will be out in September on Artists House. It is an interesting label. John Snyder has this label called Artists House, twenty, twenty-five years ago that he started with Ornette Coleman. Artists House was the name of Ornette's loft in New York. Back then, he put out landmark recordings like Tales of Captain Black, James Blood Ulmer and an Andrew Hill solo record, a bunch of great stuff. Last year, he got funding to resurrect this label and so that is what we're doing. This album is going to be released as an SACD, so it will have a CD component, but also, if you have an SACD player or a compatible DVD player, then you can listen to these other versions of this album in high definition stereo.


FJ: And another record is due out in the fall on Pi. Writers are bound to refer to it as you vocal project.

VIJAY IYER: (Laughing) It is quite a departure from a lot of stuff I've done. This was another commission that the Asian Society in New York facilitated. Part of the intention of working with me was that it would be more about the Asian-American experience and for me, I wanted to use that as a point of entry about what it means to be brown skinned in the world. I had seen Mike Ladd perform and once I did a double bill with him. We had been in contact before. I wanted to do this project about people of color negotiating globalization. I connected with Mike and we stumbled upon this story of an incident that took place in the spring of 2001, pre-9-11. This Iranian filmmaker named Jafar Panahi that made this great film called The Circle among other films. That film made it around the world and was highly acclaimed in the US, so at the time, he was actually traveling with his film between international film festivals. So he was flying from Hong Kong through JFK to Buenos Aires. When he reached JFK, he ended up being detained for no good reason. They told him that he needed a transit visa and he was told that he didn't need one. They wanted to fingerprint him and ultimately, he was shackled to a bench for ten hours in this cell with thirty other people that were being detained at JFK. Ultimately, he was sent back to Hong Kong in handcuffs, a twenty-hour flight. So he wrote about his experience because the irony of it was that he was accepting an award for freedom of expression from the American Film Institute. This was his experience in America. So he wrote a letter to the American Film Institute describing his whole experience. In that letter, he is describing the experience of flying in handcuffs with people wondering who he was and he says, "I wanted to tell them that I am not a murderer. I am not a thief. I'm just an Iranian. I'm just a filmmaker, but how could I tell them this? In what language?" It was on the surface, just about the language barrier, but on a deeper level, it was more about how this kind of plight of having to assert your humanity in the face of oppression and ignorance. That was our starting point for this whole project.


FJ: In the aftermath of 9-11, has your awareness that you are brown skinned increased?

VIJAY IYER: I have nothing to compare it to. It has been my perspective since birth. I guess the thing about being in America is race frames every human interaction that you have. It effects how people see you and people rush to judgment based on very surface characterizations. I wouldn't say that I have had it hard by any means. My parents had it hard. They were pioneers. They came here in the Sixties and were on the front end of the wave of people from South Asia coming here because the immigration laws had changed. A lot of technically trained people from India and Pakistan came here in search better opportunities. They raised me in a way to shield me from as much hardship as possible. My awareness has been there from the start, but it plays more of a role now, for example, in airports, the "random" checks that I undergo time and time again. You can't pretend that we are all equal. That is so blatantly not the case. I remember one moment shortly after 9-11 when I was touring with Amiri Baraka and I just remember that this was one of the most well-known revolutionary activists of all time and so we are getting on the plane and he gets waved through and I get taken aside to have my bags checked. It was so ironic to me. Do you know who that is? Also, the guy who was searching me was Indian. He was doing his job. He pulled me aside because I fit a certain profile that he was hired to search for. We were both laughing quietly about it. I think ultimately, it is not just about my experience being brown, but this project is more about the repercussions of globalization and what it means for human migration and people moving around in the world. It is about something larger than myself.


FJ: Having worked with Coleman, you know that Coleman is really a guru of sorts for a generation of musicians, a kind of Henry Threadgill or Muhal Richard Abrams if you will.

VIJAY IYER: (Laughing) Yeah, Steve is deeply influential. He has definitely impacted the face of creative music today. Certainly, everybody in my generation or younger is working in some variance of the concepts he has initiated. I was fortunate enough to kind of fall in with him in '94 and he was the first person to take me on the road really. He was the first person to even tell me that I could play. I really had no idea where I stood in the world of music and whether I had a snowball's chance in hell of surviving as a musician. I was playing, but I as a grad student in physics at the time. So when I met him, I didn't really think I had any business being a professional musician. I didn't really know how far it would go. He could have gotten any piano player he wanted, but for him to pluck me out of my humble grad student existence to go on the road with him and make these live records in Paris, well, it messed with my head. I came to realize that he appreciated the hunger for knowledge and information that I had. He approaches his music with such a high amount of rigor and discipline. He saw that I was somebody who could benefit from that kind of mentality. Working with him, the first thing I learned, was that I had no groove whatsoever and I had to kind of learn and work on my rhythmic precision and skill. I learned to think of everything in terms of rhythm. That helped me decide how I was going to approach my own music as a composer and as a bandleader. He just set the standard for what you can achieve with just small group improvisation, having that level of freedom, but also that level of precision and discipline. When you see that, you realize that you have been half-stepping all this time. With every project I do now, I try to push myself into something that I didn't know and wasn't able to do before.


FJ: Fieldwork's Your Life Flashes was well received.

VIJAY IYER: Yeah, we got lucky with some of these critics. Yeah, especially, it seemed like it did really well in the UK. We got some great press over there. We got the "best of the year" in Wire.


FJ: You could have had a fiscally easier life as a physicist.

VIJAY IYER: The thing is, I am doing exactly what I want to do and not doing anything I don't want to do. It became clear to me pretty quickly that being a physicist wasn't going to work for me because it wasn't where my heart was. It was so obvious to me. I'm really lucky. I still can't believe we get paid to do this. Not that we're getting paid well, but we really are having a good time being creative and doing what comes naturally. I am just really fortunate.


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and is Wang Chunging tonight. Comments? Email Him