Vijay Iyer

Born in Albany and raised in Fairport, New York (a suburb of Rochester, New York),[5] Iyer is the son of Indian Tamil immigrants to the United States.[6] He received 15 years of Western classical training on violin beginning at the age of three. He began playing the piano by ear in his childhood and is mostly self-taught on that instrument.[6]

After completing an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics at Yale University, Iyer attended the University of California, Berkeley, initially to pursue a doctorate in physics. He continued to pursue his musical interests, playing in ensembles led by drummers E. W. Wainwright and Donald Bailey. In 1994 he started working with Steve Coleman and George E. Lewis.

In 1995, concurrently with his composing, recording and touring, he left the Berkeley physics department and assembled an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Technology and the Arts, focusing on music cognition. His 1998 dissertation, Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics,[7] applied the dual frameworks of embodied cognition and situated cognition to music. His graduate advisor was music perception and computer music researcher David Wessel, with further guidance from Olly Wilson, George E. Lewis, Donald Glaser, and Erv Hafter.

Vijay Iyer at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay CA 4/29/18

Iyer performs around the world with his various ensembles and in collaborations. Best known among these is his award-winning trio with Stephan Crump and Marcus Gilmore, featured on three albums: Break Stuff (2015, ECM), Accelerando (2012, ACT) and Historicity (2009, ACT); his sextet with Graham Haynes, Steve Lehman, Mark Shim, Crump, and Tyshawn Sorey, featured on Far From Over (2017, ECM); and his duo project with Wadada Leo Smith, documented on A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (2016, ECM). He has collaborated with Amiri Baraka, Teju Cole, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Oliver Lake, Henry Threadgill, Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille, Amina Claudine Myers, Butch Morris, George E. Lewis, Craig Taborn, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Kassa Overall, Linda May Han Oh, Liberty Ellman, Robert Stewart, Yosvany Terry, Okkyung Lee, Miya Masaoka, Francis Wong, Hafez Modirzadeh, Amir ElSaffar, Matana Roberts, Trichy Sankaran, L. Subramaniam, Zakir Hussain, Aruna Sairam, Pamela Z, Burnt Sugar, Karsh Kale, Mike Ladd, DJ Spooky, dead prez, HPrizm, Das Racist, Himanshu Suri, Will Power, Karole Armitage, the Brentano Quartet, the Imani Winds, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Parker Quartet, Matt Haimovitz, Claire Chase, Jennifer Koh, Miranda Cuckson, Prashant Bhargava, and Haile Gerima.

In 2003, Iyer premiered his first collaboration with poet-producer-performer Mike Ladd, In What Language?, a song cycle about airports, fear, and surveillance before and after 9/11, commissioned by the Asia Society and released in 2004 on Pi Recordings. Iyer's next project with Ladd, Still Life with Commentator, a satirical oratorio about 24-hour news culture in wartime, was co-commissioned by UNC-Chapel Hill and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for its 2006 Next Wave Festival. It was released on CD by Savoy Jazz. Their third major collaboration, Holding it Down: The Veterans' Dreams Project, 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. It was released on CD by Pi Recordings in 2013.[8]

In 1996, Iyer began collaborating with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, resulting in five albums under Iyer's name (Architextures (1998), Panoptic Modes (2001), Blood Sutra (2003), Reimagining (2005), and Tragicomic (2008)), three under Mahanthappa's name (Black Water, Mother Tongue, Code Book), and a duo album, Raw Materials (2004).

Iyer has been active as a composer of concert music. His composition Mutations I-X was commissioned and premiered by the string quartet Ethel in 2005. It was released on CD by ECM Records in 2014. His orchestral work Interventions was commissioned and premiered in 2007 by the American Composers Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Iyer co-created the score for Teza (2009), by the filmmaker Haile Gerima. He collaborated with filmmaker Bill Morrison on the short film and audiovisual installation Release, commissioned by the Eastern State Penitentiary (2009) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is now operated as an historic site.

In 2011 he created Mozart Effects, commissioned by the Brentano String Quartet as a response to an unfinished fragment by Mozart. 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, which appears on their 2013 album A Playlist Without Borders. In 2013 the International Contemporary Ensemble premiered his composition Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, a large-scale collaboration with filmmaker Prashant Bhargava commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts in commemoration of the centenary of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. In 2013 Brooklyn Rider premiered and recorded his string quartet "Dig the Say". In 2014 Iyer premiered Time, Place, Action, a piano quintet he performed with the Brentano Quartet, and "Bruits", a sextet for Imani Winds and pianist Cory Smythe. Later that year the moving images by Bhargava, combined with Iyer's music, were released on ECM Records.[9] In 2015 Iyer had pieces premiered by cellist Matt Haimovitz ("Run" for solo cello, an overture to Bach's Cello Suite No. 3) and violinist Jennifer Koh ("Bridgetower Fantasy," a companion piece to Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata).[10] In 2016 he premiered Emergence for trio and orchestra, with his trio with Stephan Crump and Tyshawn Sorey plus the Leopoldinum Chamber Orchestra in Wrocław, Poland. In 2017 he composed Trouble for violin and orchestra, premiered by Jennifer Koh and International Contemporary Ensemble at Ojai Music Festival, Asunder commissioned by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and The Law of Returns for piano quartet. In 2019 he composed Crisis Modes for strings and percussion, co-commissioned by LA Phil, Kölner Philharmonie, and Wigmore Hall, Hallucination Party commissioned by Mishka Rushdie Momen and recorded on her album Variations, and Song for Flint for viola solo, commissioned by Miller Theatre at Columbia University and premiered in Iyer's Portrait Concert there on October 24, 2019. Iyer was the Composer-in-Residence at Wigmore Hall in London, England for their 2019-20 season.

In 2014 Iyer joined the senior faculty in the Department of Music at Harvard University as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts. In 2018 he received a joint appointment with Harvard's Department of African and African American Studies.

Previously Iyer was a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music, New York University, The New School, and the School for Improvisational Music.[6] His writings appear in various journals and anthologies. He is a Steinway artist and uses Ableton Live software.[11] He was the 2015–16 Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[12]

The jazz album Break Stuff received five stars (highest rating) in the March 2015 issue of Down Beat magazine, was listed as one of the best albums of 2015 in Time,[13] NPR,[14] Slate,[15] The New York Times,[16] the Los Angeles Times,[17] the Boston Globe,[18] Allmusic,[19] and PopMatters,[20] and won the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (the German Record Critics' prize) of the year.

Iyer received the 2003 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2006 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and commissioning grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Capital, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the 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 a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the 2012 Greenfield Prize for Music, and an unprecedented "triple crown" in the 2012 DownBeat International Jazz Critics Poll, in which he was voted Artist of the Year, Pianist of the Year, Small Group of the Year (for the Vijay Iyer Trio), Album of the Year (for Accelerando), and Rising Star Composer of the Year. He received a 2013 MacArthur fellowship,[21] a 2013 Trailblazer Award by the Association of South Asians in Media, Marketing and Entertainment (SAMMA), and a 2013 ECHO Award for Best Jazz Pianist (International). He was voted 2014 Pianist of the Year and 2015 Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat International Jazz Critics Poll. He was critics' Jazz Artist of the Year again in 2016 and in 2018, and his sextet was voted 2018 Jazz Group of the Year.[22] He was also voted Artist of the Year in JazzTimes's 2017 Critics' Poll and the 2017 Readers' Poll.

In 2017, Iyer was named Music Director of the 2017 Ojai Music Festival.[23]

An asterisk (*) indicates that the year is that of release.

• Wilkinson, Alec (February 1, 2016). "Time is a ghost : Vijay Iyer's jazz vision". Onward and Upward with the Arts. The New Yorker. 91 (46): 22–28.

• Official website