Embracing the spectrum

The laurels keep coming for jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and his trio.

From The Village Voice to The San Francisco Chronicle, Iyer's music continues to garner positive reviews across the United States and beyond. Downbeat Magazine's respected international critic's poll recently selected Vijay Iyer Trio's CD Historicity as album of 2010. More praise came last July when GQ India chose Iyer, with conductor Zubin Metha, journalist Fareed Zakaria and novelist Salman Rushdie as one of the 50 most influential Indians.

Such accolades may seem natural to those who have followed Iyer's career over the past two decades from grassroots California beginnings to international visibility today.

Born in New York State and now based in New York City, Iyer's jazz roots were nurtured early on by the California jazz community. Speaking to The Prague Post about those pivotal years, Iyer says "part of my education was playing in jam sessions with jazz elders in Oakland, in the early '90s at the Birdcage and other empty places [laughs] where I'd get to work with some of the older players who were part of that legacy."

The legacy Iyer refers to is the futuristic jazz that took a variety of forms from Duke Ellington to Sun Ra. What Iyer calls "creative jazz music" was practiced by artists like Horace Tapscott, Ed Kelly and Smiley Winters, and remained far from the spotlight on the west coast of the United States from the '60s through the '90s. Before his exposure to these torch bearers, Iyer says he learned from musicians such as Ellington, Randy Weston and Andrew Hill.

"These were people from the jazz age, but I always heard them as innovators, as creators, not as stylists or bastions of jazz conservatism. These were people who had ideas and acted on them," he says.

Since moving to New York City in 1999, Iyer has worked with many of the artists he met in Oakland, including Steve Coleman's M-Base collective, Wadada Leo Smith and the poet Amiri Baraka.

"These are all elder Afro-American artists who are part of that whole jazz legacy but approached it as innovators, not as regurgitaters," he says.

But Iyer does value the past. He tries to embrace the entire historic spectrum of jazz and refuses to chose between classic and more innovative jazz, insisting "it's not an either/or thing."

The musicians on Vijay Iyer Trio's Historicity certainly cover the complete spectrum of the jazz genre. Drummer Marcus Gilmore was aptly described by The New York Times as playing with "rolling grace and swing, adding furtive microfills of funk." Bassist Stephan Grump has the jazz mastery you would expect of someone who has played with everyone from Mahavishnu Orchestra to Tommy Dorsey.

Reflecting Iyer's eclectic approach, Historicity mixes interpretations of compositions by Leonard Bernstein, Stevie Wonder and Julius Hemphill along with sizzling Iyer originals. The result is the music Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sun Ra prepared us for in the '60s and '70s combined with innovation that takes us into the future.

Asked what kind of set he and his trio have planned for their upcoming concert at Prague's Lucerna Music Bar as part of the Strings of Autumn festival, Iyer replies bluntly.

"We do not plan our programs even until we walk onstage. We have a large repertoire, and I've been working with Marcos for seven years and Stephan for about a decade, so we have developed a deep trust and rapport," he says. 

Playlist or not, the Vijay Iyer Trio will speak to the moment with deep respect for the past and the expressive urgency jazz was made for.

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at
features@praguepost.com