Playing Changes

by Nate Chinen

  Stearns didn’t invent jazz studies, but he probably coined the phrase when he incorporated his vast personal holdings—recordings, writings, and other artifacts—into an Institute of Jazz Studies in 1952. For the next fifteen years, Stearns and the institute cohabited in a large apartment off Washington Square that served variously as library, museum, and salon. A thousand miles away, similar stirrings were afoot at the Archive of New Orleans Jazz, founded in 1958 by Tulane professor William Ransom Hogan and tended by William Russell. A lapsed composer of the percussive avant-garde, Russell served as curator until 1965, when the archive shifted from Hogan’s history department to the Tulane Libraries. Up north the following year, Stearns arranged for the transfer of his Institute of Jazz Studies to the Newark campus of Rutgers. The IJS and the Hogan Archive became, each in its own way, compulsory resources for jazz scholars, many of whom have their own university affiliations.

  But until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the best that a jazz-loving faculty member could hope for from a university was that it sanctioned extracurricular interests, as Hunter did with Stearns. Aficionados went about the business of discography, biography, and history, but the closest thing to an academic discourse happened in the field of criticism—where, in the late fifties, Nat Hentoff and Martin Williams co-founded The Jazz Review. Touting jazz as serious art, their journal employed formalist close-reading practices adapted from the New Criticism; Williams had an MA in English from Penn. He and a few others, like Third Stream exponent Gunther Schuller, canonized some jazz performances solely on the basis of thematic coherence. This model set the tone for the jazz criticism to follow. Its detractors, like Eric Hobsbawm, argued for a jazz that was ephemeral and emotional, and inseparable from social context. But Hobsbawm, a leader of the British Communist Party’s Historians Group, sometimes seemed more interested in politics than in music. He published his midcentury jazz writing pseudonymously (as “Francis Newton”), jazz being a greater academic liability than communism.

  Not surprisingly, institutional acceptance of jazz studies was concurrent with the music’s rise in cultural stature. Jazz at Lincoln Center took baby steps in 1987; the following year saw the first jazz-related panel at a meeting of the Modern Language Association. Krin Gabbard, the comp-lit professor behind that incursion, represented a new group of jazz scholars from an array of academic disciplines. Gabbard tapped this far-flung community for a pair of anthologies published in 1995 by Duke University Press. Representing Jazz and Jazz Among the Discourses introduced essays by the likes of ethnomusicologist Ronald Radano, art historian Mona Hadler, and poet-theorist Nathaniel Mackey. “Relying on various poststructuralisms as well as on discourses developed by cultural historians and literary theorists,” Gabbard wrote, “many of the contributors have broken new ground by placing the music much more securely within specific cultural moments.”

  The movement gained momentum at Columbia, where the Ralph Ellison scholar Robert O’Meally was advancing Ellison’s notion of a “jazz-shaped” American landscape. Building on an interdepartmental collaboration with musicologist Mark Tucker, O’Meally secured Ford Foundation funding for a Jazz Study Group, which met on campus at least twice a year. In 1998 he edited a pointedly interdisciplinary anthology called The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. The following year he founded the Center for Jazz Studies, making the unorthodox argument for jazz as “indispensable equipment for living in our time.” The project gradually won over a skeptical university community with the popularity of its classes, concerts, and staff. George Lewis, the composer, computer-music specialist, trombonist, and AACM historian, became the chair of composition in Columbia’s Music Department, establishing a space for crosstalk between humanities types in the jazz studies realm and heavy-duty composition students, some of whom, like saxophonist Steve Lehman and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, were also notable improviser-bandleaders.

  In 2004, after much negotiation, Columbia admitted jazz into its core curriculum. This coincided with the publication of a second essay collection, Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. Co-edited by O’Meally, Farah Griffin, and the English professor Brent Hayes Edwards, it consisted of more scholarship from the Jazz Study Group, suggesting the maturation of a field. At a university lecture around that time, university provost Alan Brinkley introduced O’Meally by praising Columbia’s jazz studies program as “one of the academic jewels of the university—precisely because it has no real counterpart anywhere else.”

  If that was technically true at the time, it wasn’t true for long: the new jazz studies were already cropping up across the board. By now the proliferation looks like a status quo, but the field is young enough that most of its heavy hitters are still in their prime. Among them are Ingrid Monson, the Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music at Harvard; John Szwed, who has applied his anthropological training to authoritative biographies of Sun Ra, Billie Holiday, and Miles Davis; Edwards, who authored a brilliant work of literary criticism called Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination; and Gabbard, who in 2016 published Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus, devoting a substantial portion of the book to Mingus’s voluminous writing.

  Robin D. G. Kelley, who also applied what you could call a jazz-studies methodology to his perceptive and exhaustive 2009 biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, suggests that these interdisciplinary and contextual approaches are in some ways a reversion to form. “There’s a lot that’s new in the new jazz studies,” he told me. “But there’s also a lot that’s not so new.” As examples, he cited longstanding work by the pianist-composer Randy Weston, the drummer Max Roach, and the poet-critic Amiri Baraka. O’Meally, offering a similar disclaimer, included Jackson Pollock, Albert Murray, Jack Kerouac, and Alvin Ailey.

  It’s worth noting that Stearns was thinking contextually, too—The Story of Jazz delved into anthropology and social history—and that he wrote the definitive study Jazz Dance, along with his wife, Jean. (Note too that the 1956 Newport panel included poet Langston Hughes.) The vision that he prophesied may have turned out a little differently in the particulars, but not in the essence. And because an influential subset of jazz artists were paying attention, the new jazz studies found meaningful traction where it really counted, in the new jazz.

  Ornette Coleman, The Lenox Jazz School Concert (Free Factory)

  Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life (ECM)

  Steve Swallow, Real Book (XtraWatt)

  Mark Turner, In This World (Warner Bros.)

  The Westerlies, The Westerlies (Songlines)

  8

  Infiltrate and Ambush

  The concert began in a state of rippling composure: Vijay Iyer at a Steinway, his tolling chords and arpeggios carried aloft in the evening air. When his sextet landed on the downbeat, completing a phrase initiated at the piano, it was with a sharp sensory jolt. The band was lashing into “Far from Over,” the title track of an album due out months later on ECM Records. This performance effectively served as the public debut of the music, to an outdoor festival audience of roughly a thousand, and many more tuned in to a live stream on the web.

  Iyer chose not to make this stand at a marquee jazz festival, though his sextet headlined its share of those around the album’s release later that summer. Instead, he was putting the finishing flourish on the Ojai Music Festival, a prestigious event of classical pedigree. Established in the late 1940s, this annual convocation—in scenic Ojai, California, framed by the rugged Topatopa Mountains—has long upheld a tradition of rotating music directors, including composers like Aaron Copland, Pierre Boulez, even Igor Stravinsky. In 2017 that privilege went to Iyer, who took the opportunity to expand the frame, bringing in not only ensembles like the Brentano String Quartet but also an array of mentors and peers at the interstices of orchestral composition, collective improvisation, and what you might call experim
ental jazz, though he’d probably prefer the less idiomatic term “creative music.”

  The Ojai Music Festival leadership, then marshaled by artistic director Tom Morris, had seen in Iyer a persuasive avatar of the ever-increasing dialogue among an array of new musics—some of which traditionally fell under a “classical” header, forming the heart of the Ojai enterprise, and some of which fell under a “jazz” header and usually found their foothold somewhere else. “He’s an exceptional figure in his breadth,” said Morris of Iyer, speaking in an administrative office during the festival. “His deep and vocal advocacy of a borderless music world is also what’s happening today—and I suspect he’s leading part of that change.”1

  As if to confirm this impression, Iyer’s festival programming felt pointed, wide-open, and supercharged. He naturally performed in a handful of concerts himself, notably with several configurations of the International Contemporary Ensemble. He presided over the world premiere of Trouble, a violin concerto he’d composed for Jennifer Koh. He played with an all-star quartet of Indian descent: the vocalist Aruna Sairam, the tabla master Zakir Hussain, and the alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. He also played a riveting duo set with one of his mentors, the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, drawing from an acclaimed recent album.

  Other festival offerings conveyed Iyer’s perspective without the need for his presence. A collective called the Trio, comprising three additional mentors—Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and George Lewis—performed an hourlong concert free of any premeditated impulse, let alone a score. Bach and Stravinsky shared airspace with new chamber works by the flutists Nicole Mitchell and Claire Chase. Another irrepressible force, Jen Shyu, presented Solo Rites: Seven Breaths, a mesmerizing performance piece featuring her pliable voice, a series of choreographic movements, and a small array of folk instruments.

  The brilliant drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey, a member of Iyer’s sextet, was almost ubiquitous: playing a rumbling duet with Chase, expanding on a theme by Edgard Varèse; leading an improvisational “conduction” of chamber musicians, in the style of Butch Morris; manning an orchestral percussion rig in Iyer’s hybridist work Emergence; performing The Inner Spectrum of Variables, his own unclassifiable suite.

  On some level Iyer saw his stewardship of the programming at Ojai as an invitation to stir things up, and not just in musical terms. “It’s an overwhelmingly white audience, and wealthy,” he had told Rolling Stone India a few weeks before load-in. “So this is a chance to infiltrate and ambush into that space with a lot of different ideas and different perspectives on music that they may not have been aware of or willing to pay attention to.”2

  But “infiltrate and ambush”—terms of covert action with subversive intent—amount to a distortion of Iyer’s larger project, at Ojai and beyond. He doesn’t quite have an iconoclast’s compulsion for chaos. And yet his empowerment by elite institutions presented what he saw as a moral imperative, a responsibility to speak for the margin. It hadn’t been long since he was bouncing around in those hinterlands himself.

  * * *

  —

  If there was ever a hinge on which Iyer’s career tilted toward cultural prominence, it came in late summer of 2013, when he was in possession of two big secrets. The first was that he would be joining the music faculty at Harvard, in a tenured position as its first jazz artist in residence, beginning the following term. The second was his selection for a coveted MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant. As a pianist and composer with an academic background and a working foundation in the avant-garde, Iyer had already been the recipient of vaulting critical acclaim. But the combination of these two announcements would catapult him to an exceedingly rare tier of prominence. Because of who he was, or what he represented, it would also strike some in the jazz world as a needling provocation.

  Even aside from the news, Iyer was at a pivotal moment in his career. After almost twenty years of making albums on an assortment of small independent labels, he had been signed to ECM, an august German operation whose roster includes revered new-music composers like Arvo Pärt and Meredith Monk as well as heralded improvisers like Keith Jarrett. As he held on to his secrets, Iyer was getting ready to record his label debut, Mutations, whose centerpiece was an inquisitive ten-part suite for string quartet, piano, and electronics. There had been all sorts of issues with the availability of the classical players, bringing a frantic air to his preparations, but the recording session turned out beautifully. The string quartet brought a singing resonance to Iyer’s writing, and he played piano while running the sampler and software behind the electronic manipulation that lurks at the heart of the piece.

  Mutations was just being mixed when the big news broke: Iyer was one of twenty-four individuals, the only improviser and composer across a range of disciplines, to be honored as a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. Congratulations began to pour in.

  Then came the startling backlash, from an assortment of jazz musicians who regarded Iyer as an unqualified outlier, someone who hadn’t met the right criteria or paid the appropriate dues. This grousing unfolded in the nebulous public-private zone of social media, notably on the Facebook wall of the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, who carped that Iyer had been the beneficiary of an opportunistic and credulous media. “Well I guess I will be one who says it: Vijay Iyer is not a great pianist,” he wrote, voicing what he called a counterbalance to the hype. “No touch, no tone, no melody, nothing exceptional in any way. Sorry, I’m not hating I’m just de-glorifying. It’s just not true.”

  This was the first salvo in what quickly became a hail of darts, a comment-thread denunciation of Iyer not only in terms of his fitness for the MacArthur but also his basic validity and competency as a jazz musician. The ugliness intensified, producing ripostes from those who defended Iyer, retrenchments and counterattacks from the opposition, and stunned silence from the pianist himself, followed by a diplomatic and above-the-fray response.

  Behind the scenes, Iyer engaged with a few of his dissenters, yielding tenuous but conciliatory dialogue. He did some private seething. But he also had the distraction of another pressing commitment: having just finished Mutations, he was now gearing up for the world premiere of a large-format commission for a twenty-person ensemble, at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Iyer had titled this piece Open City, after the acclaimed first novel by the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole, who read excerpts from the book as part of the performance.

  Iyer’s collaborative assembly for Open City further included one of his mentors, Steve Coleman, and one of his recent students, the flutist Elena Pinderhughes. Also in the ranks were Ambrose Akinmusire and Jonathan Finlayson, progressive postbop trumpeters of similar experience; Okkyung Lee and Mat Maneri, probing improvisers on, respectively, cello and viola; and Hafez Modirzadeh, a tenor saxophonist and ethnomusicologist with a theory of convergence between Western and Persian musical dialects. Himanshu Suri, the rapper best known for his role in the mischievous, provocative hip-hop group Das Racist, joined Cole in punctuating the music with spoken word.

  Open City was riff-based but mysterious in its development, an elaborative bloom of rhythmic feints and spontaneous interjections. Iyer later characterized it as “this beautiful expression of family and community,”3 the manifestation of a creative peer group spanning multiple generations, backgrounds, and approaches. “It was just what I needed at that moment,” he said, referring to the dustup around him. “Because what I was hearing from certain corners was being completely contradicted by what was happening in my midst.”

  The fractious dispute over Iyer’s place and pedigree in the jazz lineage was a momentary distraction as far as the public discourse was concerned. It might even have become an obscure footnote to his achievement, except for the fact that its animating tension—the policing of acceptable artistic or social practices, based on a grid of bias and presumption—forms an important subtext in Iyer’s output. This po
licing, which goes arm-in-arm with a less antagonistic tendency toward pigeonholing and exceptionalism, had often kept Iyer at arm’s length from “the jazz tradition,” even in the midst of overwhelming acclaim from the jazz establishment. The irony is that his work preempts such narrow-minded perceptions.

  With Mutations, and with all of my music, I am interested in probing this loose constellation of concepts: change, stasis, repetition, evolution, attraction, repulsion, composition, improvisation, noise, technology, race, ethnicity, hybridity.

  —VIJAY IYER, program notes, January 2005

  Mutations had its premiere eight years before Iyer recorded it, at Merkin Concert Hall, one block north of Lincoln Center. The string quartet was Ethel, and the performance hummed with a carefully layered unrest. After a mournfully elegant first movement, the second movement opened with the strings in a unison glissando, sliding up the pitch scale like a slo-mo air-raid siren. Later, in the ninth, there was a recurrence of that sound in sampled form, which confronted the string players with digital echoes of their own recent actions. Elsewhere the suite deployed the strings in a contrapuntal web or a tensile hush, drawing from twentieth-century classical modernism and postminimalism as well as experimental electronic music. Iyer divided his physical attentions between a grand piano and his laptop, plugged into a console. When he improvised, as in the rhythmically brittle fourth movement, his playing was confident and clear.

  The suite was emphatically a new-music composition, but unimaginable without a process derived from jazz. Its score combined precise compositional notation with what Iyer called “structural improvisations,” melodic scraps that served as signposts or motifs. In a slippery way, Mutations tied together a range of ideas Iyer had put forth in the program notes: evolution and genetics, Western notions of the mutant “other,” technology as an alien intermediary, noise as a musical tool.