India Ink

Notes on the World's Largest Democracy

A Conversation With: Jazz Pianist Vijay

Iyer
By Visi Tilak

October 31, 2013 3:37 am

Vijay Iyer, 42, is an Indian-American jazz pianist and composer. His

albums incorporate a mixture of traditional jazz, Indian classical fusion, and
various other eclectic musical styles. Apart from producing music, Mr. Iyer
also has a Ph.D in cognitive science of music and has written extensively on the
relationship between music and society. Mr. Iyer was recently awarded the
MacArthur Genius grant and appointed a professor in the department of
music at Harvard University.
India Ink spoke to Mr. Iyer about his music, his collaborations and his
journey.
Q.

You had formal violin training. But the piano?

A.

I taught myself the piano because there was one in our house that belonged
to my older sister. I had 15 years of formal education in violin, I started when I
was about 3, and later on I was performing in organized settings. I had a lot of
help. However this was not teaching me to be very creative and was teaching me
to perform western classical music in the way it was supposed to be performed.
My high school violin teacher helped me with a more creative perspective.
Q.

When did you get into jazz?

A.

I skipped grades to graduate high school at 16. At this time I started

exploring jazz. I was listening to a lot of John Coltrane and others, and I was
also listening to a lot of Indian classical music that I grew up with. I was
composing my own music at this point, and getting ready for college as well.

Q.

Where was college, and what happened there?

A.

I got a B.S. in mathematics and physics from Yale College, and a masters in
physics and an interdisciplinary Ph.D from the University of California in
Berkeley. When I enrolled in the Ph.D program to study math and physics, I was
performing jazz piano professionally more and more. I was being presented in
music festivals and invited to perform at clubs and concerts.
In 1995, I was coming out with my first solo album, I was putting together
music. Because of the opportunities presenting themselves, I decided to switch
from a Ph.D in math and physics to one in the cognitive science of music from
the University of California at Berkeley. I took the leap. Somehow I managed to
pull it all together.
Q.

In an essay, New York Stories, you wrote, We dont play in a genre; we

play in the context of others, and we find ways to play with each other. Can you
describe how you have broken out of your genre?
A.

Its exactly that mentality. All the choices I make as an artist are inspired by
the history of this music and this musical community that Im a part of. And if
you look at that history you see that it was always very smooth in terms of
stylistic attributes and what was common was this collaborative orientation and
a community orientation. It was something that contained a lot of
experimentation and a lot of discipline, a lot of knowledge, and it sort of formed
at the intersection of a lot of different extremes of knowledge.
People think of it as a genre but for the community of artists theres really
no such a thing. Thats sort of been my experience working with elders from that
heritage and from that history. But its always been a space for collaboration and
creation that is irrespective of marketplace notions of genre. That comes from a
place of invention and collaboration and so then its not really about, it was
never about obeying some externally imposed boundary or something like that.
I just see myself in that same continuum doing those same kinds of things.
Q.

What do you find most interesting about integrating Indian music with
Western classical, as in your 2011 album, Tirtha, where you collaborated with

electric guitarist and composer Prasanna and Tabla-player Nitin Mitta?

A.

Ive been trying to learn about aspects of Carnatic and Hindustani music for
20 years. Not to become a practitioner of it but to just learn about it so I can
work with it, work with the elements in it and so that I can collaborate with
Indian musicians. When I sat with other artists, we found points of contact and
a large set of possibilities were immediately apparent. The fact is that all three of
us, in the Tirtha group, are kind of cosmopolitan global citizens. Its really more
about that than it is about someone mixing jazz with Indian music.
Q.

You got your Ph.D in the cognitive science of music and have written
extensively about embodied cognition in music. How do we understand it?
A.

When I was doing my graduate research in that field I just felt that what I
was reading and hearing from my peers and elders simply did not jibe with my
lifetime of experience in music. So I was just interested in trying to supplement
what they were doing with some other kind of framework that made more sense
to me and that had more to do with the living experience of music. So thats
where I started bringing in this idea of embodied cognition.
The idea of embodied cognition was a new but existing idea in the field of
cognitive science, which was that re-grounding of the mind and the brain. It
comes from the experience of processing sensory information. So that comes
from having a body in a place and moving around in that place and experiencing
the world. That idea had to be brought into the field of music cognition. I was
one of several people who brought that idea in to how we think about music in
terms of the body, in terms of physical experience in the world so music is not
viewed as some abstraction but really as action, as something that we do and
that we hear other people doing.
Researchers were trying to theorize about whats universal about music,
what is it that all music has, but they were doing this without really checking out
a lot of different kinds of music. In fact most of what they were talking about
was western classical music of the 19th century. So they didnt really even have a
contemporary perspective on things like non-Western or global perspective of
things. It was very particular and provincial actually. You cant really generalize
from such a provincial example. You really have to look at everything. Thats

what I was trying to do.

Q.

How would you like people to perceive your music, or do you want each of
your listeners to perceive it uniquely?
A.

One thing that happens in a live context is that we arent in isolation. Were
all experiencing it together. There is something inherently interpersonal about
musical experience. It isnt just an object to be received in isolation. Its
something that again is made in the context of it and is conceived in the context
of it and thats heard in the context of it.
What I hope I can remind people of is the embodied nature of it, that it
really comes from action. It comes from people. And thats where this emotional
content emerges in a sense of empathy, but comes out of this process of
understanding that a person did this. That this is the mark of a hand or this is a
gesture or a breath. That it was an embodied action.
Q.

What is it about poetry or lyrical prose and music, especially jazz, that
makes them seem like they were made for each other?
A.

It comes from the same place! Poetry when performed its sort of like a
heightened form of speech that is performative and is rhythmic. And so if you
find relationships between the rhythms of poetry and the rhythms of music,
they can be indirect relationships or kind of complicated relationships. Its not
just about every syllable matching a beat or something like that. It can be much
more organic. I like the natural rhythms of speech bouncing off or cutting
against the regular rhythms of music so you hear a juxtaposition of cyclical or
pattern-based stuff and more irregular kind of speech-based rhythms.
I just like that sound. Its a human sound. Its humans interacting with
forms.
Q.

Holding It Down: The Veterans Dreams Project, your latest with Mike
Ladd, features lyrics culled from interviews you conducted with Iraq and
Afghanistan vets, with your music?
A.

Holding it Down is a pretty important project to me and Im very proud of

it, and its something were trying to keep going particularly to make sure that
people in the veterans community can hear it and also connect to the veterans
that we worked with. That project actually had its own kind of healing force that
was beyond what we expected and thats really why we did it but it worked even
better than we anticipated.
Q.

You have spoken and written about the relationship between music and
cities. Do you think the structure and essence of a city is crucial in what kind of
music is made?
A.

Cities are many things but they first are aggregates of people and most
people have a certain relationship to the rest of the world and carry with them
certain understandings or cultural aesthetics.
In a place like New York you have a similar kind of autonomous black
culture in Harlem and then you also have economically and culturally or
geographically and culturally more isolated communities in the Bronx and
Queens and Brooklyn. And then you have in Manhattan and especially in
downtown Manhattan all this capital thats kind of flying around and wealthy
people enabling certain social and creative and structural initiatives in the
cultural landscape. So a lot of different things happen in a place that have to do
with socioeconomic forces around it and thats carried by the people in these
places or the way that people fill up space or find certain opportunities in a
space or in a place that is shaped by the other forces. So thats really what I
mean.
(The interview was lightly edited and condensed.)
Visi Tilak is a freelance journalist based in Massachusetts.

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