Nashville Scene
November 6, 2015
Jazz pianist Vijay Iyer brings his multi-disciplinary, multimedia art form to Nashville
By John Pitcher
You’ve probably heard the old assertion that analytical people are left-brained and artistic people are right-brained. Well, that’s a topic best not broached with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer.
“That whole thing about people being either left-brained or right-brained is complete nonsense,” says Iyer, who’s in town this weekend to perform at OZ Arts Nashville. “History’s greatest scientists have all been intuitive, and their theories and formulas can best be described as elegant.”
A noted jazz pianist, MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and all-purpose, card-carrying polymath, Iyer knows a thing or two about the intersection of art and science. He got his start in the sciences, studying physics as an undergraduate at Yale University. Later at the University of California at Berkeley, he earned a Ph.D. in an interdisciplinary program that combined technology and art. (His dissertation, if you’re curious, boasted the abstruse titleMicrostructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Music.)
“Science and art have a lot more in common than most people think,” says Iyer. “To excel in both art and science, you must have what I refer to as a research mentality. Both disciplines require experimentation and investigation.”
Science came naturally to Iyer. Born in 1971, he grew up in the suburbs of Rochester, N.Y., the son of Indian Tamil immigrants to the United States. “My father was a research chemist, so the life of a scientist always made sense to me,” he says. “For the longest time, I didn’t even know how to be an artist in America.”
And yet Iyer has always been a musician. He studied classical violin for 15 years, starting with a Suzuki program at age 3. He also taught himself to improvise on piano, and during high school he performed with the student jazz orchestra and jammed with local rock bands.
“My musical life always ran parallel to my academic life. I didn’t know that an artistic life would be available to me, so I studied physics at college. On weekends I was at the jazz clubs, performing as a sideman.”
The catalyst that prompted Iyer to pursue music full time was a chance encounter with the saxophonist Steve Coleman in 1994. “Steve took me under his wing and became my mentor,” says Iyer. “He showed me the way to become a musician.”
As a jazz pianist, bandleader, electronic musician and producer, Iyer has seen his star rise in recent years. His 2012 album Accelerando, recorded with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore, was named the best jazz album of the year by just about every media outlet of note, including Down Beat, Jazz Times, NPR and Los Angeles Times, among others. The MacArthur fellowship soon followed, along with an appointment to the music faculty at Harvard University.
Iyer will appear this weekend at OZ in his less well-known role as a composer of chamber music and film. His program will include Mutations I-X, a work for piano, string quartet and electronics that melds jazz improvisation with classical notation. OZ will also screen “Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi,” a collaboration with filmmaker Prashant Bhargava that commemorated the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring last year.
Composed a decade ago for the string quartet Ethel (which appeared last season at OZ),Mutations was Iyer’s first foray into chamber music. The 10-movement suite, released last month on the ECM label, explores Iyer’s fascination with process, with the subtle ways musical cells and fragments evolve, even mutate, over the course of an extended composition. “Most of the music is through-composed for the strings, but I’m playing mostly off the page,” says Iyer. “I also supply the electronic sounds.”
“I was asked to create a piece that would comment on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but the problem was I didn’t feel any need to comment on that piece,” says Iyer of “Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi,” which was commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts. “But I was interested in creating a work that celebrated a contemporary rite of spring, so I chose the Hindu Holi festival. Stravinsky’s rite was a fantasy, but the Holi festival is a real event, where humans get the chance to commune with the divine.”
The International Contemporary Ensemble will perform Iyer’s score, which will accompany Bhargava’s film depicting the Holi festival in Mathura, located in Uttar Pradesh, India. “The film shows a vivid, colorful, truly spectacular ritual,” says Iyer.
When he’ not on the road, Iyer can now be found in various classrooms at Harvard, where he teaches (what else?) interdisciplinary courses on music. “The undergraduates are all fine musicians,” Iyer says, “and graduate are scholars who read 300 pages of super-dense, complicated text a week.”
What does Iyer want to accomplish with these students?
“I want to teach these musician-scholars what it means to be an artist in the real world,” he says. “The most important thing is to have a point of view about their music. Without a point of view, an opinion, real creativity is not possible.”