Vijay Iyer interview: “Just the simple fact of being is some form of resistance, a form of battle”

Many significant bands undergo personnel changes over time, and in improvised music the ‘dep’, who covers for an unavailable player, is a well-established modus operandi. In fact, a new group might comprise players who are not new to one another, unlike a pop scenario of assembly by audition. Vijay Iyer’s current trio with double bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey is a case in point, as each had actually been playing with the pianist in a wide variety of contexts on the American jazz scene for some 10 and 20 years, respectively.

But it was really the gigs performed by the three at The International Workshop in Banff, Canada, where all are faculty members, that cemented a burgeoning musical relationship.

“We ended up playing with each other year after year, not with the aspiration of becoming a band, but working together on something else, putting on a faculty concert or working with students,” Iyer says via a Zoom call to his home in Harlem, New York. “It was through that that we realised that we had a sort of group identity that had its own energy.”

“This is the thing about trio music – it can kind of come out of nowhere, and then it’s sort of being made in the moment… we’re able to move together without concern, without having to reinforce things. We move together to a pulse”

Iyer is keen to make it clear that the musicians who previously played bass and drums in his trio are by no means out of the picture entirely.

“I don’t see it as a replacement, it’s like these people are also part of the family,” he continues. “Marcus and Stephan are still dear friends.”

He is referring to double bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore, with whom he recorded three albums, Accelerando, Historicity and Break Stuff between 2009 and 2015, that drew astutely on the vocabulary of many eras of jazz and contemporary pop, while bringing forth Iyer’s very personal ideas on how to structure composition and arrangement beyond a mandatory hierarchy of leader and soloist.

Linda May Han Oh, Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey

The band played original pieces, and also reprised works by artists as disparate as Julius Hemphill, Ronnie Foster, Stevie Wonder and MIA.

Which all reflects a multi-faceted personality with broad horizons. Iyer is drawn to the work of African-American pioneers, from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk to James Brown and Michael Jackson, and also has an avowed interest in South Indian carnatic music, with its advanced rhythmic concepts, that is part of his Indian heritage.

Indeed, much of Iyer’s work has been distinguished by metric ingenuity in which time is fluid rather than fixed, but he has also been able to effectively alternate lyricism and dance sensibilities. He can write languidly sweeping themes such as ‘Take Flight’, and terse, stark, compressed syncopations, such as the vigorous ‘Hood’. Interestingly, Iyer has performed those pieces as a segue with another premium trio featuring double bassist Nick Dunston and drummer Jeremy Dutton, highly talented players who also depped in his acclaimed sextet.

Iyer’s output to date says much of a mind curious for musical encounters and exchanges that take him into a vast range of sonic territories, often at the crossroads of music, cinema, visual art and spoken word. That has led to duos with alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and fellow pianist Craig Taborn, as well as a score for the movie Radhe Radhe (Rites Of Holi) and a project with the excellent writer and photographer Teju Cole.

In any case the Banff gig with Oh and Sorey gave Iyer the kind of stimulus that was hard to restrict to a one-off session. “There was just something about that feeling...electricity, real excitement,” he recalls.

“It felt like something special that I wanted to stay with. Right after the set I said hey you guys, wanna make a record? They were excited.”

Entitled Uneasy, the album has very diverse material, including two covers: Cole Porter’s swooning romantic anthem, ‘Night And Day’, and ‘Drummer’s Song’, a swish percussive rhapsody by the late Geri Allen, whom Iyer greatly admired. As for the original compositions they provide something of an overview of Iyer’s work in the past two decades. ‘Configurations’ dates from 1999 and ‘Touba’ from the early 2000s, while ‘Uneasy’ is from 2011 and ‘Combat Breathing’ from 2014. ‘Retrofit’ and ‘Children Of Flint’ are recently penned pieces.

All of the above are inseparable from Iyer’s consistent engagement with pressing socio-cultural and political issues. Albums such as In What Language?, a compelling 2003 collaboration with poet Mike Ladd, posed essential questions on American foreign policy, the status of non-Western immigrants in Western countries and the dilemma of being trapped in transit, as airports become the scene of severe racial divide. Iyer’s work is not short of comment on what he sees around him.

Recording aside, Iyer teaches at Harvard in the departments of Music and African and African-American studies, and his academic work could be seen as a natural progression from graduate and post-graduate studies at University Of California at Berkeley, which awarded him a PhD in Technology and the Arts.

An avid reader, he has always been thought-provoking with his titles, from the concise ‘Action Speaks’, which begs the question of how, by and to whom, to the sardonic ‘Macaca, Please’, which nails the abhorrent racial slur used by Republican Senator George Allen to describe an Indian-American he saw during a 2006 election campaign. The wordplay was the weaponry.

Uneasy was originally a ballet written by Iyer and choreographed by Karole Armitage in 2011 that reflected the times. “That’s how American life felt. It was a decade after 9/11 in the sort of peak Obama era,” Iyer says slowly and earnestly. “Tens of millions of people are now given free healthcare. On the other hand, there are mass deportations, drone warfare… but there are gays in the military. What you see is white people losing their minds because they can’t abide the fact that there is a black president. It was a moment of prosperity, but also a moment of proximity to something deeply ugly.”

To a large extent the past few years of the pandemic have not only exposed the extreme vulnerability of the human race but the demoralising fault lines in America and the world, so that the era of the mask being put on has also become the time when the mask of social progress slipped off. Black Lives Matter gained new momentum in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the image of African-Americans gasping for air as robocops bore down on them dovetailed with the scandal of overwhelmed understaffed hospitals deprived of ventilators.

‘Combat Breathing’ could not be a more apposite song for this wholly distressing chain of events. The words are actually not Iyer’s though.

“The quote comes from Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism,” he explains shifting forward in his seat, casually dressed in a plain grey shirt, his demeanour relaxed yet nonetheless focused. Martinique-born writer and theorist Fanon, the author of Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched Of The Earth greatly advanced the understanding of racism in the ambit of European rule in Africa and the black diaspora.

“It’s talking about what it is to live under occupation, what colonialism feels like. There’s an observed breathing, there’s an occupied breathing, there’s a combat breathing. In other words even just the simple fact of being is some form of resistance, a form of battle.”

There is a momentary pause before Iyer puts things into a wider context. “In 2014 we were doing a series of performances at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music, that’s the year Michael Brown was killed, it’s the year that Eric Garner was killed, it’s the year that Tamir Rice was killed, it was the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“There were a lot of protests happening at the time, including ‘die-ins’. We were partnered with the choreographer Paloma McGregor (who is the founder of the adventurous company Dancing While Black).

“We had a ‘die-in’ on stage. We knew that the audience at BAM would be 98 per cent white, so it would be a moment of confrontation. This piece ‘Combat Breathing’ was made as a basic template to accompany this action, It’s a tribute to those victims, particularly Eric Garner, and the 11 measures (of the opening) has to do with his 11 final utterances.”

Symbolism of this kind is resonant when one considers the far-reaching history of artists homing in on the pivotal details of an event that reveals the full extent of brutality visited upon individuals or an entire community. A brief roll call of key moments includes Abbey Lincoln’s blood-fire screams to evoke the horror of rape on a plantation, Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Miles’ relentlessly pummeled rhythm to bring to life the death rattle of a machine gun during the Vietnam war at the Fillmore East in 1969, and Bruce Springsteen singing ‘41 Shots’ as a requiem for Amadou Diallo, the unarmed Guinean migrant who was shot 41 times by New York police.

“There’s an observed breathing, there’s an occupied breathing, there’s a combat breathing. In other words even just the simple fact of being is some form of resistance, a form of battle”

Choosing a specific number of bars in a composition in order to reflect the violence endured by African-Americans, which was endemic long before the advent of Black Lives Matter, is consistent with Iyer’s priorities and convictions. ‘Combat Breathing’, in addition to its role as commentary, is a summary of the musicianship of Iyer’s trio, certainly its ability to nudge and prod at an arrangement so as to make it unfold in almost ethereal way rather than negotiate the solid ground of pre-meditation. There was relatively little information in the way of notes and tones sprinkled on the stave when Iyer gave the piece to Oh and Sorey and that sense of the unknown is something he holds dear.

“It’s not bound up in patterns so much,” he says coming closer to the computer screen. The sunlight behind him is a reminder that it is mid afternoon in New York, a contrast to the early evening darkness of London. “Things just keep evolving, keep opening. What’s written is 11 measures plus another vamp measure. It’s a half page of music, those measures don’t have anything in them except harmonic progressions. There’s no written melody, just the idea of joining this river of action.”

The ideal of the interactive, conversational group able to compose spontaneously has been pursued by countless exponents of improvised music over the years. Despite his experience of playing in all kinds of contexts, from solo right through to orchestra, Iyer has a particular liking for the trio because of its overall mutability and the speed of response that is possible between the band members. Uneasy is a valuable document of his investment in the notion of letting the music somehow take its own course according to the ideas and impulses of his partners in real time as well as his own distinct vision as leader.

“This is the thing about trio music in general… it can kind of come out of nowhere, and then it’s sort of being made in the moment. Even if you’re playing a song it’s still that it’s very much being made as you hear it, or joining some kind of form that’s just going and going. There’s an action that takes place that has an ease to it because we’re able to move together without concern…. without having to reinforce things. It’s not like a lot of whacking on downbeats, there’s just this kind of impulse that’s propelling things. We move together to a pulse.”

Many artists have been instructive to Iyer throughout his development. Looming large are players who laid foundations in jazz piano such as Ellington, Monk and Bud Powell, and those who audaciously pushed the course of black music in the mid 1960s towards what became known as the avant-garde, such as Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill and Muhal Richard Abrams. Because of their stylistic verve – epitomised by the ‘streams’ of ideas that made Taylor’s work a fully immersive experience and Hill’s groove-in-flux- it is not unreasonable to place Iyer in that lineage. He has always been forthcoming about these enduring influences.

That said, others have also had a major impact on him, above all the pianists who drew on the rhythms and melodies of Africa as well as the vocabulary of African-Americans. On occasion there are echoes of the tranquil grace of South African legend Abdullah Ibrahim on Uneasy and Iyer states that the experience of seeing him live was ‘an inspiration’. And the legendary Randy Weston, creator of such masterpieces as Blues To Africa, had a very decisive effect on Iyer. A 1995 Weston concert he attended was a revelation. “That attentiveness to the sacred, that sense of being tapped into something ancient, but aware of all futures…something elemental,” says Iyer of Weston.

In 2019 Iyer took part in a celebration of the music of Weston, who died in 2018, with fellow pianists Rodney Kendrick and Marc Cary, at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. The fact that three artists who have made strong statements on the need for equality and justice came together in the American capital at a venue that bears the name of a slain leader who embodied a generation’s hopes is noteworthy.

Given Donald Trump’s debilitating presidency, the arrival of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could be seen as some kind of light after four years of darkness, and hopefully a prospect of recalibration of America’s unenviable track record of making martyrs of leaders with progressive ideas. Iyer is not about to celebrate just yet though. He urges caution.

“State power is always suspect,” he declares, cracking a wry smile. “There’s always a nefarious dimension to it. My CD Far From Over came out in 2017, but the suite was written in 2008 and premiered at the Chicago jazz festival. I said from the stage… when Obama becomes president there’ll still be a lot of work to do! The struggle for justice is far from over. Because there’s a new face of American empire, injustice vanishes? That’s not how it works.”

By way of reinforcement, he reminds me that the sleeve of Uneasy is a distant view of New York with the Statue of Liberty cutting a lonely figure, practically lost at sea and swathed by a clouded sky.

“Part of what’s represented here is a skepticism for the idea of nation. How does the U.S as one of the newer nations, and one of the most violent nations, work… can we think beyond the confines of nation?”

This article originally appeared in the May 2021 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today