CS LEWIS FAMOUSLY WROTE THAT ‘FRIENDSHIP IS BORN AT THE MOMENT WHEN ONE MAN SAYS TO ANOTHER “WHAT! YOU TOO?”
USUALLY WHEN WE THINK OF MUSICIANS FORMING GROUPS AND TOURING, IT’S BASED ON A MUSICAL AFFINITY.WE ALL HAVE VISIONS OF JOHN COLTRANE DISCUSSING HIS MUSICAL IDEAS WITH MCCOY TYNER, OR CHARLES MINGUS EXPLAINING HIS VISION TO ERIC DOLPHY.
PIANIST/COMPOSER VIJAY IYER DISPELS THAT MYTH.WHILE THE MUSIC FROM HIS LATEST FEW ALBUMS IS INTRICATE AND COMPLEX, HIS VIEW ON LIFE IS QUITE SIMPLE AND BASIC, BASED ON RELATIONSHIPS.
RECENTLY, IYER AND POET MIKE LADD HAVE REVISITED THE MUSIC TO THEIR 2003 ALBUM IN WHAT LANGUAGE WITH AN ISSUE OF OF PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED MATERIAL, PROPERLY TITLED INWHATINSTRUMENTALS. IT STILL CARRIES A WALLOP IN TERMS OF ADDRESSING THE ISSUE OF RACIAL PROFILING AT AIRPORTS AS WELL AS THE WHOLE CATEGORIZATION OF PEOPLE BASED ON SHADES OF MELANIN.
HAVING SEEN IYER IN CONCERT, I WAS IMPRESSED BY BOTH THE SERIOUSNESS THAT HE TOOK NOT ONLY HIS MUSIC, BUT THE FERVENT MESSAGE BEHIND EACH SONG, AS AT THE END OF THE CONCERT HE GAVE A PLEA FOR PEOPLE TO ACCEPT ONE ANOTHER REGARDLESS OF RACE, COLOR OR CREED.
IYER WAS GRACIOUS ENOUGH TO GIVE US SOME BACKGROUND TO HIS MUSICAL AND PERSONAL WORD VIEW VIA A PHONE CONVERSATION.
YOUR EARLY EDUCATION WAS IN PHYSICS AND MATH. DID THAT EQUIP YOU IN ANY WAY FOR YOUR MUSIC CAREER?
I quit physics in 1994, and it hasn’t been a big part of my life at all.
I got a Masters, which is what they hand to you when you don’t get a phd. I left physics behind a long time ago.
My knowledge of music comes from my experience my experience in music, my working with musicians across the whole spectrum, across generations, musical systems and approaches.
I can also say that I was nurtured by a lot of elder musicians, particularly by elder African-American creative musicians.
After I left physics, I was able to develop my own course of study, which had to do with music cognition, but not a straight-up traditional dissertation, but rather a critique of it. What I encountered was that my research in the literature on those perspectives of music did not jibe with my experience in music.
I started in music when I was three, and then 20 years later I was reading this stuff that I felt was missing something about what it is to do and live with music 327 and experience it among people, to feel it in your body.
Even the framing of music cognition sort of looks at it above the eyebrows (laughs). I guess that’s what I felt was missing. My thesis was developing a perspective of embodied music cognition, and that’s what I did. It didn’t have anything to do with physics.
WHO WERE THE MUSICIANS THAT HAD A BIG IMPACT ON YOU?
Thelonious Monk, and a lot of people who directly mentored me like Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Coleman, Amiri Baraka and Butch Morris.
WHAT WERE THE BIGGEST THINGS THAT YOU GLEANED FROM THESE ARTISTS THAT YOU’VE KEPT TO THE FOREFRONT OF YOUR THOUGHTS?
I could say so much about each one of them.
What it all boils down to is that they all thought for themselves. They were connected to a community and a tradition, but they thought for themselves and invented on their own terms. They still do, in fact.
They all have a sense of agency that they have the right to create music on their own terms, which isn’t ****to say that you are abandoning others in terms of your audience or community. You can carry people along with you on that journey. That’s how I would encapsulate it.
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“What it all boils down to is that they all thought for themselves. They were connected to a community and a tradition, but they thought for themselves and invented on their own terms. They still do, in fact”
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YOUR CAREER HAS BEEN INTERESTING IN THE FACT THAT BACK IN THE DAY, A JAZZ PIANIST WOULD USUALLY START AS A SIDEMAN OR BUILD UP A REPRETOIRE IN A TRIO SETTING. YET YOU HAVE CREATED A CATALOGUE QUITE WIDE RANGING IN TERMS OF GROUP SETTINGS, SIZES AND INSTRUMENT COLORS. IS THAT WHAT YOU MEAN BY MAKING MUSIC ON YOUR OWN TERMS?
I think I mean more the approach to music making, the ingredients and priorities and goals of the music can be up to you; they can be yours rather than trying to conform to existing expectations and formats. Anything in your imagination that you can put forward is valid and important; that’s the ethos.
But that can all be done in a way that is community-minded.
So I can say that all of these projects that you referred to are all born of my relationships with people. It emerges from a relationship I’ll have with someone and say “you want to try something together” and we do it. Regardless of how, or on what terms or with whom or where-it might take years and years for it to finally bloom develop. We may even record something and when we perform it, it becomes fresher and richer and renewed in a way that the recording is just a kind of beginning.
All of these projects come from long-standing relationships with my friends, colleagues and fellow artists
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“All of these projects come from long-standing relationships with my friends, colleagues and fellow artists”
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SO, IT SOUNDS LIKE THE INSTRUMENTATION IS NOT AS IMPORTANT AS THE PEOPLE THAT YOU’RE PLAYING WITH
I have made recordings in “classic” jazz formats, like a trio, quartet, solo and sextet. Those are pretty “normal” in terms of the instrumentation.
But I would say that collaborations couldn’t have been with just anybody. In this approach or world of creative music making, if you replace somebody the music will sound different because everyone brings in their own identity to the table and they put their stamp on the music. They extend it beyond what it was originally designed so that it will be somehow grown and acquire its own life. That will happen because of the input of each person. So it matters who is in it.
I’m very particular about the drummers that I play with, the bass players, tenor sax players and horn players. They have to have a certain kind of understanding. We have to learn how to really listen and build together deeply, and that takes time.
So when you have something that works, it gives back to you in a relationship in a way that you want to keep nurturing it.
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“(Drummers) have to have a certain kind of understanding. We have to learn how to really listen and build together deeply, and that takes time”
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SO, WHEN YOU DO SOMETHING LIKE TRANSITORY POEMS WITH FELLOW PIANIST CRAIG TABORN, DO YOU SET OUT AHEAD OF TIME WHAT YOU WANT TO DO TOGETHER, OR DOES IT JUST WORK ITSELF OUT?
As an example, that duo with Craig Taborn started in the early 2000s; we started working together in Roscoe Mitchell’s band with two piano players, two bassists and two drummers with Mitchell. It was like working on that music together, it’s not often that two pianists get to work together so we had that opportunity.
Roscoe’s music is so challenging we tried to rehearse it together. In the course of that we started expanding on it and discovering some possibilities. That was back in 2001 or 02.
It then developed incrementally all of those years in terms of creating duo music in the moment, building on it over time.
It’s something that he also does solo, so working on his approach helped with what we could do ****together. With two pianos, we were not so concerned with displays of virtuosity or trading choruses or playing tunes. It was more like “can we build from scratch from what we know?”.
Since we’ve known each other for 20 years now and in close contact we have a lot of influences in common. We’re part of the same musical community. We talk about music a lot and experiment a lot. We’ve played dozens of these duo concerts, like maybe 50-60 together in that format 1426.
It’s been a lot over the years, but each one is new in its own way, but it’s also recognizably “us” because we’ve formed some dynamics by working together, by how we synchronize and what our priorities are.
WHAT DO YOU LISTEN FOR WHEN YOU WATCH A PIANO PLAYER PERFORM?
I don’t mean it flippantly, but sound. The expressive capacity with tone, timbre, touch and the nuance of sound; how they get the instrument vibrating and whether that vibration reaches me. 1515
I mentioned Monk earlier; Duke Ellington is another.
Rhythm is the other side of it; can they produce a feeling in me that is alive? Can they communicate a pulse that is infectious?
I’d also like to add something about creativity with those elements and with the building blocks of music.
DO YOU HAVE A PET PEEVE ABOUT PIANISTS OR DRUMMERS?
(chuckles) If I hear people just borrowing a musical language, or building their entire approach on the musical language of others; trying to steal licks from one person or another.
*****I’d rather hear people find their own voice, even if it’s a struggle, rather than just copy someone from 50 or 60 years ago.
ANY MUSICIAN, LIVING OR DEAD, THAT YOU’D PAY $1000 TO PERFORM?
I’d pay any amount of money to see Duke Ellington, particularly playing solo. Also Billie Holiday.
COULD YOU GIVE A LIST OF 2-3 BOOKS YOU’D RECOMMEND EVERYONE TO READ? 1833
Sure; Blues People by LeRoi Jones, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis and A Power Stronger Than Itself by George Lewis. Those are books about music.
Other than that, I’d just recommend novels and stuff. I like Short Stories by Jorge Luis Borges, particularly the short story Labyrinths. Some things that I like are pretty esoteric.
I SAW YOU IN CONCERT LAST YEAR, AND YOU SAID SOMETHING AT THE END OF IT THAT IS ALSO REFERRED TO IN THE NOTES OF YOUR ALBUMS “INWHATLANGUAGE” AND “INWHATINSTRUMENTALS”. YOU SEEM VERY IN TOUCH WITH RELATIONSHIPS AND DISCRIMINATION OF VARIOUS CULTURE GROUPS AND YOU USE IT AS A MOTIVATING FACTOR IN YOUR MUSIC
****Music is made by people and for people.
I was born and raised in the US to immigrants of color from outside the US. I’ve experienced a certain amount of reality as a brown person in America. Also, this form of music that was created and developed by black people in America, particularly in American cities where they still are not safe. It’s like this music was created in conditions of danger and dire oppression.
The way I’ve seen it and learned it in this musical community is that you can’t make music in a vacuum. ***You have to honor those realities, and treat people with respect, dignity and compassion. That’s where it all comes from.
Once you take that sensibility and play it out, you find that you find yourself in a web of ethical relations among people. I think that’s what you’re referring to.
YOU’VE PLAYED WITH MUSICIANS WITH A CENTRAL ASIAN BACKGROUND LIKE RUDRESH MAHANTHAPPA AND REZ ABASSI. HAVE YOU DISCUSSED WITH THEM IF THEY EXPERIENCED THAT AS WELL IN AMERICA OR OTHER COUNTRIES?
It’s not just at the level of what it feels like on the street, especially since we’re all artists in public. It’s about how people talk about us and frame us in a conversation.
For example, people will say that I’m cerebral, which is like saying that I’m mathematical. Yet everything that I’ve been talking about has been about human beings and relationships. People fail to read me as an emotional person, and that is kind of an effect of reducing someone to their ethnicity. It’s a pattern that I’ve noticed over 25 years, so I’m obviously not making it up.
****That may seem not like a big deal, but it does effect the opportunities that are given to you, so we’ve found that we’ve just had to try harder to be taken seriously. Especially in the beginning when Rudresh and I worked together a lot in the late 90s until 2008-10.
We made a whole bunch of albums together in those years, toured a lot together and were out in the world a lot together and were putting our work out into the world with albums and our compositions. We had to navigate that challenging terrain where we were these unfamiliar creatures who were…not flat out discriminated against…but more “reduced” to types.
One thing Rudresh and I have talked a lot about is we were pitted against each other when we were together, in the sense that like a mother that had to choose just one of us. It was like “We just gave him a gig, so we can’t give the other one a gig”. Two would be too many of us (laughs). We couldn’t be judged on our own merits or our appeal to audiences; it had something to do with a weird sense of optics.
IT’S LIKE WHEN THE DODGERS PASSED ON PUTTING ROBERTO CLEMENTE ON THEIR ROSTER BECAUSE THEY “ALREADY HAD ENOUGH” LATIN PLAYERS ON THE TEAM AT THE TIME.
Yeah! You can’t have too many of them; you never know what might happen! (laughs)
THAT’S WHAT I FOUND SO INTERESTING ABOUT THE VOCAL AND INSTRUMENTAL IMPETUS FOR THE 2003 INWHATLANGUAGE ALBUMS, AS IT’S ABOUT SITUATIONS FOR CERTAING ETHNIC GROUPS AT AIRPORTS. IT WAS A VERY CREATIVE IDEA.
(chuckles) It may seem that way now, but at the time it seemed like a bad idea (laughs).
****We actually had the idea before 9-11 to try it, but after 9-11, with the way all of our lives changed, the airport kind of became a nucleus for it. That’s where it was all concentrated with a pile up of surveillance and fear, with an invasive kind of bullying. There was also this very hierarchical class system in that there was this global brown and black working class that worked all of the sites at the airport, handling baggage and mopping floors. That population was the same community that was being surveilled, so there was this weird and uneasy tension, which is mentioned in the lyrics of the first album.
Mike (Ladd) put it in the opening lines of the first piece (“The Color of My Circumference”) “The delicate distance of brown; the uneasy proximity of tan”. We’re all thrown into this predicament together because we’re all brown and black. Yet, there’s also this weird distance among us because of the differences of class.
THAT’S WHY ONE OF MY FAVORITE SAYINGS IS “THE PROBLEM ISN’T SKIN; THE PROBLEM IS SIN”. WE NEED TO HAVE OUR HEARTS CHANGED.
***We always find ways to gang up on each other. It’s part of the will to dominate.
There’s something about the human specie how we endanger one another with it.
WHAT DO YOU THINK THE SOLUTION IS?
Education and compassion, listening to each other.
I might say that one of the core problems is capitalism. It makes us think that these divisions are real; that certain people are worth more than others. That’s even playing out right now, where there’s this calculus with how much human lives are worth with respect to the American economy.
YOU BRING UP IMPORTANT ISSUES. WHAT DO YOU WANT YOUR LEGACY TO BE?
I hope that my music doesn’t disappear when I do (chuckles)
****This recording of the instrumentals, InWhatInstrumentals was made 17 years ago, and yet they have meaning today. We just hope that whatever we make, we can send them downstream into the future and hope that they will mean something to somebody later on, and matter to them and play a role somehow in their life.
That does happen; I find that an album that I’ve made ten years ago had played a role in someone helping them get through the day.
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED ABOUT YOURSELF DURING THE SHUTDOWN FROM COVID 19?
I still have a lot of work to do in order to get to where I’d like to be. As a person; not in an ambitious sense, but as a human being