Jazz is Not Easy Listening: An Interview with Vijay Iyer

by Tom Chandler

Like many of the Bay Area’s jazz illuminaries, Vijay Iyer made the jump to New York a couple of years ago. Since then, his restless muse has continued to manifest itself, with a variety of projects, ranging from electronics and spoken word to playing with South Indian percussion to his more “standard” jazz quartet. Always an incredible pianist, Iyer’s new quartet album Reimagining takes his fascination with South Indian rhythms to new heights with edgy compositions and improvisations from Iyer and his longtime associate Rudresh Mahanthappa, as well as Stephen Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums. The disc closes with a drastic reworking of John Lennon’s “Imagine”, done as only Iyer could do.

Tom Chandler: Why the move to Savoy? How did it happen?

Vijay Iyer: Savoy wasn’t just Bird you know.

TC: It’s interesting to me that as a label they’ve gone with slightly more adventurous folks, such as yourself.

VI: I think what it signals is a shift in what can be considered mainstream. What’s going on in mainstream jazz is nothing like what’s going on in mainstream anything else. Mainstream pop or rock or hip hop is much edgier and much more experimental, when you really get down to it. Somebody like Missy Elliott or Timbaland or Bjork. All these people are pushing boundaries. When you look at the history of jazz, it’s always been a progressive tradition. They cover a spectrum, they have Andy Bey, a superb stylist who does what he does amazingly well, and they have Ravi Coltrane, who’s kind of covering a range of ground himself.

TC: I think of his Savoy album as being pretty progressive, also.

VI: It’s funny. I performed opposite him in London, and I’ve known him for years. I knew Ravi even before he connected with Steve Coleman. He’s grown a lot since I’ve known him. In London, I was struck by how good a fit it is that we’re both on the same label. We take it in different directions, but we definitely have similar points of reference.

TC: How much listening to actual Indian music do you do?

VI: Quite a bit, actually.

TC: Do you do it currently?

VI: Yeah, I’m a bit more choosy now in that I have my favorites, instead of trying to take it all in. I’ve studied it kind of on my own terms, mainly looking at the rhythmic aspects of it. I think I probably started doing that about ten years ago. A lot of it is sort of internalized now. I’ve spent some time with various practitioners in the tradition, like I’ve collaborated with a couple of the world’s greatest South Indian percussionists. I learned a lot from those experiences. I spent a month in Madras, with Steve Coleman actually. It was amazing.

TC: It seems like the focus involved in not getting lost, when you play in those rhythms, must make your brain explode.

VI: Part of my goal is to make that stuff feel natural. So you almost don’t even know it’s happening. To me, dealing with those rhythms isn’t exactly the point of the music, it’s just a tool for us to try and access some stuff we didn’t know was possible, something that was new to us.

TC: What about melodic material? Some of the things, like the the “Song from Midwood”, really remind me of raga.

VI: Some of it is really raga-based. For lack of a better word, they’re modal. The art of raga is more than mere modes, more than a set of pitches. It has much more detail in the way that melody is constructed. When you transfer it to piano, it gets stripped away, because you can’t get those nuances of pitch. So a lot of the vocality gets lost. So I focus on the percussive aspects and leave Rudresh to deal with the vocality of it. We met in 1995, and we’ve pretty much been in constant collaboration since then. A good nine years.

TC: How do you juggle all your different projects? Do you say, this week I’m dealing with Fieldwork and next week it’s the quartet?

VI: It’s more like hour by hour! A lot of it is just about trying to be myself in all these different contexts. That’s half the battle.

TC: So it’s not like you yourself are changing focus, it’s just about interacting.

VI: It’s like anything else, when you interact with different people, it brings out different sides of you. Certainly, just to balance things out, you highlight different aspects of your artistic personality.

TC: I’ve read a lot of reviews of your music that accuses you of being too cerebral. How do you react to that accusation?

VI: Well, I try to bring both mind and some physicality, some visceral thing to it. I guess some people think that jazz isn’t supposed to activate your mind! If you listen to Bird, it’s really pretty impressive what his thought processes were, when you really examine it. Bird and Monk and Duke Ellington, these guys were all deep thinkers. They had ideas! When I connect with the history and the tradition, I think of it as the history of ideas as much as anything else. I think that part of it also, is that you when you see it live, there’s a viscerality that’s hard to reproduce on record. I try to infuse what I do with a lot of emotion too. It’s kind of funny. I don’t always take it as an insult. I like the fact that I’m dealing with compositional structures that can be quite intricate. Sometimes, that aspect of the music can kind of creep up on people. It may take a few listens to realize that there’s all this structural stuff going on too. It’s the rhythms and the emotions and the viscerality of it that hits you first, I think.