Vijay Iyer - Biography

Biography

Born in Albany, New York in 1971 and raised in Rochester, New York, Vijay Iyer is the son of Indian Tamil immigrants to the US. He received 15 years of Western classical training on violin beginning at the age of 3. He began playing the piano by ear in his childhood, and is mostly self-taught on that instrument. Vijay was also exposed to some Carnatic classical and religious music in his youth. His high school years saw a growing interest in jazz. After completing an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics at Yale University when he was 20, Iyer then went to the University of California, Berkeley initially to pursue a doctorate in physics. Iyer continued to pursue his musical interests, serving as the house pianist in jam sessions at the Bird Kage (a club in North Oakland) and playing in ensembles led by drummers E. W. Wainwright and Donald Bailey. In 1994 he started working with Steve Coleman and George E. Lewis and became associated with the musicians' collective Asian Improv. In 1995 he left the physics department and assembled an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Technology and the Arts, focusing on music cognition. His 1998 dissertation, titled Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics, applied the dual frameworks of embodied cognition and situated cognition to music.

Now an acclaimed New York-based jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, and producer, he performs around the world with his ensembles and collaborations, including his Grammy-nominated trio with Stephan Crump and Marcus Gilmore; the experimental collective Fieldwork, featuring Steve Lehman and Tyshawn Sorey; the new South Asian chamber trio Tirtha, featuring guitarist Prasanna and tabla player Nitin Mitta; his large-scale works with poet-performer Mike Ladd; and Raw Materials, his longstanding duo with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. His trio album Historicity was nominated for a 2010 Grammy for Best Instrumental Jazz Album, and was named #1 album of the year in many publications, including the Downbeat Magazine International Critics Poll, the Village Voice Annual Jazz Critics Poll, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Metro Times, PopMatters, and others. His trio won the 2010 Jazz Echo Award (aka the "German Grammy") for best international ensemble. Iyer was named the 2010 Musician of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association.

Building off of his work in the jazz world, Iyer has been active as a composer in other settings. In 2003, Iyer premiered his first collaboration with poet-producer-performer Mike Ladd, titled In What Language?, a song cycle about airports, fear and surveillance before and after 9/11, commissioned by Asia Society in New York and released as an award-winning cd on Pi Recordings. Iyer's next project with Ladd, Still Life with Commentator, a satirical oratorio about 24-hour news culture in a time of war, was co-commissioned by UNC-Chapel Hill and by Brooklyn Academy of Music for its 2006 Next Wave Festival, and was released on cd by Savoy Jazz. Their third major collaboration, Holding it Down, 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.

Iyer's composition Mutations I-X was commissioned and premiered by Ethel (string quartet) in 2005. His orchestral work Interventions was commissioned and premiered in 2007 by the American Composers Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Iyer co-created the award-winning score for Teza (2009), by the celebrated filmmaker Haile Gerima, and also collaborated with filmmaker Bill Morrison on the award-winning short film and audiovisual installation Release, commissioned by Eastern State Penitentiary (2009). In 2011 he created Mozart Effects, commissioned by Brentano String Quartet as a response to an unfinished fragment by Mozart, and 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.

Iyer received the 2003 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2006 Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts, and commissioning grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Capital, the Cary Charitable Trust, 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 the 2012 Greenfield Prize for Music.

Iyer has worked with Amiri Baraka, Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, dead prez, Amina Claudine Myers, Butch Morris, George E. Lewis, Miya Masaoka, Trichy Sankaran, Pamela Z, Burnt Sugar, Karsh Kale, Tyshawn Sorey, Oliver Lake, DJ Spooky, Das Racist, Ethel, Imani Winds, and many others. Iyer is a faculty member at Manhattan School of Music, New York University, The New School, and the School for Improvisational Music. His writings appear in Music Perception, Current Musicology, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Journal of the Society for American Music, JazzTimes, and the anthologies Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, Arcana IV, and The Best Writing on Mathematics 2010. He is a Steinway artist.