There perhaps isn’t another jazz musician north of Manhattan as widely regarded as pianist/composer Vijay Iyer. Born 42 years ago in Albany, NY, and raised in the small town of Fairport near Rochester known as the “crown jewel of the Erie Canal,” this Yale-educated son of Tamil immigrants has quickly become one of the most renowned voices of his generation of jazz players over the last 20 years as both a leader and a sideman, working alongside a wide spectrum of artists ranging from avant-garde legend Wadada Leo Smith to Brooklyn alt hip-hop act Das Racist. Yet while Iyer might be renowned for his exquisite skills on the Steinway, his ECM debut Mutations finds him furthering his role as a major player in the world of creative classical music with a ten movement work for strings and electronics originally conspired in 2005. Jambands.com had the unique opportunity to catch up with Mr. Iyer, who made his debut as a professor of music at Harvard during the Spring 2014 semester, before class, to speak about working for ECM, translating this magnificent and challenging piece of music for a studio recording and how the role of electronics played into the mix.
So you are teaching at Harvard, what is your curriculum like?
I kind of teach whatever I want to. This time I’m doing a workshop course for some of the advanced musicians here. It’ll be pretty varied…it’s sort of up to me to create my own role here…it’s academic music, so it doesn’t have a performance program yet at Harvard. But there are courses that people can take for credit. I guess it’s kind of a combination of academic stuff and applied workshop for a creative musician.
Are you happy with the amount of young people that are taking interest in creative jazz?
A lot of these academic departments don’t generally have someone like me around. So my presence here kind of changes the dynamic a little. I think more people see the department as a place that might have something to offer them. In the past it’s generally been courses about nineteenth century German music or music theory from a Western perspective. I think it’s been evolving pretty progressively at this point.
I’m very surprised that for your first ECM record you went the more classical route. What was the decision behind that? When you got signed to ECM did you always have Mutations in mind for your label debut?
I had kind of sent a few different options to Manfred Eicher. He’s very involved in all the productions, so I sent him a few different ideas. I had some live recordings of this piece and I also had different ensemble…different live demos of my own band—the newer stuff. He went for this first. I think he thought it was a good way to establish a different profile for me in relation to what I’ve done before without excluding that other stuff. We’re going to make a trio album pretty soon too.
What inspired the Mutations suite initially? I know it’s a few years old. What inspired you to create this at first?
It premiered in 2005. I was commissioned to create a piece for the string quartet ETHEL. So that itself was kind of an invitation to get out of what I usually do. And I had grown up playing violin in classical ensembles. I played a lot of the string quartet and symphonic repertoire on violin, and I had a kind of ear for it. And I had also been studying composition in my own way and dealing with small obsessions I had—different ideas about how music might be generated. So since I was invited to make a piece for this format, I decided to take that opportunity to use some of the ideas about growth and evolution. It’s not really trying to be scientific or in relation to genetics. It’s more about difference and how we accommodate difference, and how we accommodate and incorporate things that are abnormal or not like what we’re used to. So there are moments that I guess you could describe them as beautiful in a conventional sense. They’re tonal and rushed, they have a sort of grandeur to them or something. And there are moments that are a little bit strange and give you an uneasy feeling. Those sorts of juxtapositions were part of the idea. I was inspired by some visual artists that I was checking out at the time that were dealing with some ideas like that, about juxtaposing the familiar and the strange. And the other thing about it is that this was all created in New York in the years after 9/11, so these ideas about the alien in our midst, the kind of foreign contaminant in our midst.
You mentioned some of the stuff was a little uneasy. I point right to one of my favorites, Mutation V: Automata. It reminds me of the Krzysztof Penderecki composition Polymorphia that Kubrick used in The Shining almost. Is that what you were going for?
Well the beginning part of that movement, I guess my point of reference was Gyorgy Ligeti, who was used in The Shining and other Stanley Kubrick movies, so it has the same sort of aesthetic. It shifts focus and sort of becomes this almost robot fantasy kind of thing. That, to me, was sort of about investing how you might continuously move from something that’s a little jagged and aesthetically challenging to something that is, you know, using the same elements, the same ingredients, moving to something that’s actually kind of sweet sounding.
Did any of ECM’s classical albums play a role? Like Arvo Part or anything?
He’s definitely a point of reference to admire. But I don’t know that that was a conscious influence. I wouldn’t say it was. At the time I don’t think I was that familiar with his work.
When you sent Manfred Eicher the demos, maybe he heard an element of that, which inspired him to choose that as your label debut.
I think he heard it in line with other things that are out there, for sure. Maybe there just might have been a home for that strain of music, a resonance there, a familiarity.
How was working alongside Manfred Eicher? Did you learn a lot from him?
I think we learned from each other. We kind of met as equals, I’ve made seventeen albums, he’s made, I dunno, nine hundred albums. He still had a very genuine connection to what was happening. He was listening very intently. I gave him a copy of the score, he was following along making detailed suggestions to the ensemble. He also had his hands on mic placements, had his hands on the faders. He was involved in choosing takes. He did all the stuff that producers are actually supposed to do. No shooting the breeze about the good ol’ days which some producers do. He wasn’t like that, he was very focused and everything he said was very constructive. He listened to what I wanted and what my ideas were, took what I said very seriously and tried to help me make it happen. It was good, that’s the way it should be.
Of all the jazz I’ve been listening to the last 20 years, the names that seem to consistently come up producer-wise are Rudy Van Gelder, Bob Thiele and Manfred Eicher. Those are the big three I see that produced a gargantuan amount of sessions. You wonder when someone walks into the studio with one of these guys how it works out.
What was nice for me to experience was how genuinely perceptive he was and how much he listened to what other people said. He was a very positive thing, it wasn’t like he was telling us what to do. Some cases he’d offer his opinion. Sometimes that opinion made a difference in what we did, other times I had a different opinion. It was genuine, that’s what I could say about it. He did his job very well.
When you first started and you looked at the jazz labels, was ECM the goal you wanted to attain?
I don’t know about that. It’s a great honor, I’m very happy to be doing it, but I’ve had a lot of other very major personal milestones to me. I guess I’ve been on enough labels at this point that I don’t see the process as something magical, you know? In a way, you know, they’ve been rightly framing it as a collaboration. We have common interests here, so it’s working well, but it’s you know, I’m still very much the same person. I’ve listened to a lot of music on the label over the years, maybe the last thirty years…so I guess it’s nice to be in that lineage now. I guess I hadn’t really imagined that I really would be in that same space, you know?
Do you have any personal favorite ECM albums?
ECM puts out sixty albums a year. I think people tend to think of the label as the Keith Jarrett label or something but there’s a huge range of stuff on there that I like, from Craig Taborn’s last album Avenging Angel to stuff from back in the day, like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette….
What I love about ECM is how they’ve been on the forefront of the way electronic music is being utilized in a creative way in jazz, far beyond how it has been utilized in the past where it was more of like a novelty. Were there any albums that you kind of point to that came out on ECM that have been reference points for that incorporation of electronic music into jazz?
To me it’s more about just paying careful attention to the sonic details, which you hear on almost just about every ECM album. I think back a lot to those early Art Ensemble of Chicago albums from the late 70s and 80s. There was a real sense of mystery in the way sound evolved. There’s an interesting sense of space in there. You kind of hear the process of music being created. I think there’s always this sense of putting that process on a pedestal, you know, as the process is what matters, meaning the creative process in real time, people interacting and listening to each other. And I think even when you throw electronics in the mix like with the Food albums or Eivind Aarset, it’s still subject to that sensibility, which is very appealing to me. Even in the case of this piece, for me, the fact that there are electronics in it is not really the point, it’s just another piece of the palette.
How did you incorporate the electronics into this?
The main thing I did was I sampled the string instruments playing percussive sound, so what you hear is percussive textures here and there. Whether it’s tapping on the body of the instrument or hitting the wood of the bow on the strings, things like that. So that was a way of multiplying the sound of the instrument. Most of the time it doesn’t sound like it’s from another place, the electronics are kind of in the same sonic world as what you really hear coming from the strings. So it kind of created more polyrhythm. There are several things where I record them doing something and then I use it later. That long upward glissando that’s in Movement 2, that comes back in Movement 9. It’s basically the sample.
Like a reprise.
Yes, exactly.
One thing I really loved, and what kind of drew me toward your music, is your interest in electronic music. I loved the review you wrote on the Flying Lotus album Until the Quiet Comes for the Talkhouse. Did Lotus ever reach out to you?
He didn’t. I know Thundercat through him, however, and we talked about collaborating. He asked me to do a tour with him last year. It didn’t work out though.
I know the late Austin Peralta, who was an active player in Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder crew, was a student of yours.
He had lessons with me. Real intuitive guy. Part of the reason he was able to work with all those guys were those affiliations. They basically had a community unto themselves. They believe in each other, that’s where it comes from. That’s why you see them showing up on each other’s albums, so he was part of that mix just by virtue of being from L.A. and being friends, and they’d hang out and do crazy stuff together. So it was a sort of sociality behind all of it. It wasn’t just, “Oh this guys making cool stuff, let’s go try and network with him.” It was more like, “We’re all friends that play music together.” It’s organic in that way, that people are just kind of, they have this almost familial relationship and collaborations kind of grew out of that.
Do you consider what Flying Lotus does to be jazz in its own way? Do you feel like this is Alice Coltrane’s nephew when you listen to his music?
Well it certainly is in his ear bones. He’s certainly in the strain of that creativity. Ravi Coltrane told me a story once, when Alice Coltrane was still alive that [Lotus] found himself in a taxi with Alice and Ravi Coltrane and they were talking to the taxi driver and they told him they were musicians. And Alice Coltrane said, “Yes, I’m a musician, and Ravi’s a musician, and Steve [Ellison, aka Flying Lotus] is a musician, too, he just doesn’t know it yet.”
