9 April 2020
In the last decade, Vijay Iyer slipped the bonds of being just another jazz pianist in a crowded field of great musicians. Maybe this is just what happens after you win a MacArthur (among several other) Fellowship and get a lifetime appointment to the Harvard faculty in both Music and African and African American Studies departments. The first sentence of his Wikipedia entry quotes the
New York Times calling him a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway”. How does anyone live up to that kind of hype?
Iyer’s various projects, remarkably, reflect that range. He has scored films; written for ballet and for the “classical” concert hall; collaborated with Mike Ladd on poetry/hip-hop work; worked with leading figures in the New Jazz such as Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Steve Coleman; and led or co-led bands of improvising musicians that have included Fieldwork (with saxophoni
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