Playing Changes

by Nate Chinen

  These concepts resurfaced in the concert’s second half, which began with a solo medley: “Somewhere,” by Leonard Bernstein, into “Imagine,” by John Lennon. Iyer’s articulation at the piano was circumfluent, at once percussive and flowing, and his sonic manipulation of the instrument—sustaining some notes, damping others—emphasized both its machinelike attributes and the breadth of its expressive potential.

  Iyer devoted the rest of the concert to a brief set with his working rhythm team: Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums. They drew from a powerfully realized album, Reimagining, which also featured Rudresh Mahanthappa. Among the pieces in the trio set were “Cardio,” a slanted workout driven by Gilmore’s stop-and-start funk rhythms, with a chromatic bustle of pianism for a melody; “Inertia,” which took the opposite tack, with solemn chimes in a languid tempo; and “Composites,” whose churning asymmetries of pulse created the feeling of tidal variation, an inexorable but volatile pattern of surge and swell.

  Another highlight of this performance was “Historicity,” a piece with an ominous, ringing melody lashed to a destabilized beat, like a snippet of James Brown funk that had been liquefied and pressure-sprayed. Four years later, “Historicity” would be the title track of the 2009 trio album that turned Iyer into a soaring critical favorite, topping year-end-lists in DownBeat, the Village Voice Jazz Critics’ Poll, and The New York Times.

  The acclaim around Historicity had a lot to do with the unique combustion properties of Iyer’s trio, which involved his furiously dynamic pianism alongside Crump’s roving center of gravity and Gilmore’s magical propulsion—his capacity for pairing a floating, semiabstract feeling with heavy undertow. As the title implied, it was concerned with a historical matrix, all the ways in which the past and the present are in a state of perpetual dialogue. This was a fruitful line of inquiry for a trio indebted to pianistic precursors including Cecil Taylor, Geri Allen, and Randy Weston and rhythm ninjas like Gilmore’s grandfather the magisterial drummer Roy Haynes.

  The album was also graspable by way of its link to an established literature. As Iyer had done selectively in the past—notably with “Imagine” on Reimagining and an earlier tune called “Habeas Corpus,” based on the harmonic blueprint of the standard “Body and Soul”—he presented Historicity as a series of reinvented themes. Bernstein’s “Somewhere” was one of these. So was Ronnie Foster’s “Mystic Brew,” a 1972 jazz-funk tune known in hip-hop circles as the core sample for a classic single by A Tribe Called Quest. Even more out of the box was Iyer’s ingenious acoustic translation of “Galang,” an anthem by the riotously energetic rapper, producer, and songwriter M.I.A. (Born in London of Sri Lankan heritage, she was an Internet star turned underground heroine, a geopolitical radical with dance-pop flair.)

  Then, too, Historicity had one theme apiece by a pair of important figures from the jazz avant-garde: the multireedist Julius Hemphill (“Dogon A.D.”) and the pianist Andrew Hill (“Smokestack”). And Iyer’s strategy with all of the album’s covers seemed to carry an implicit air of critique. In the liner notes, he referred to this process as “versioning,” evoking a term from the otherwise unrelated words of software development and Jamaican dub music.

  Some listeners needed a little time to absorb Historicity. Many had caught up by the time Iyer’s trio made a follow-up, Accelerando, which encapsulated his knack for making prickly experimentalism feel approachable, intuitive, even stylish. Released in 2012, Accelerando featured a similar ratio of vibrantly redrawn covers to kinetic originals. As before, there were moments when Crump provided an essential fulcrum while Gilmore and Iyer circled one another like praying mantises in combat.

  Pulse once again proved an unstable compound in the music, in exhilarating ways. On “Actions Speak,” Gilmore’s lightly jagged funk complemented a swarming repetition by Iyer. “The Star of a Story,” a 1977 album track by the disco group Heatwave, took on an artfully smudged beat, with a jackhammering hi-hat and ride cymbal framing the woozy imprecision of kick drum and snare. And if that description evoked the style of a far-out electronic producer like Flying Lotus, that was only fitting: the album also had a cover of one of his tunes, “Mmmhmm,” adapted to an acoustic-trio palette.

  As for “Accelerando,” the title track, originally part of a suite composed for a modern dance company, it featured Iyer tracing a series of arpeggios with the lurching, tumbling cadence of a heavy gear turned by hand. This was a device that his trio had already employed on Historicity, in the title track and a song called “Helix.” But it received a purer distillation here, imparting a feeling both disorienting and easily understood in visceral terms.

  So it was no surprise that Accelerando received even wider acclaim than its predecessor, though few could have predicted the scale of the victory: in the 2012 DownBeat Critics Poll, it swept most of the major categories, winning top Jazz Album and securing Iyer top honors as Jazz Artist, Pianist, and Rising Star Composer and the trio honors as best Jazz Group. The forces that made Iyer a pacesetter, one of the more important figures on the vanguard of postmillennial jazz, were already hard at work.

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  Iyer was born in Albany, New York, in 1971, and grew up in Rochester. His parents were part of a wave of educated South Asians who came to the United States around the time of the Immigration and Nationality Amendments of 1965, which made exceptions for professionals in technical fields; his father earned a PhD in pharmacology. Iyer was raised in an assimilationist fashion, though he encountered acute reminders of his difference.

  He began taking classical violin lessons at age three. By six he had gravitated toward the piano, which turned into an autodidactic obsession. Jazz entered the picture in high school. “When I heard Thelonious Monk, it was a revelation,” he said. “Something about it just seemed so close to home for me—maybe partially as a self-taught pianist. Because of the way I was dealing with the piano, it wasn’t on any formal terms. Well, the formal terms were my body and its interaction with the instrument.”

  The role of the body in music perception would eventually be the subject of Iyer’s doctoral dissertation, which he developed at the University of California, Berkeley after an undergraduate degree in physics at Yale. Originally intending to pursue graduate studies in physics, Iyer switched to an interdisciplinary PhD in music and cognitive science after crossing paths with a pair of mentors. The first was David Wessel, chair of the university’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies and a groundbreaking researcher in the field of music perception and cognition. The second was George Lewis, the trombonist, composer, and longtime pillar of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians as well as a pioneer in computer music.

  Iyer’s dissertation, which he defended in 1998, was titled “Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics.” Drawing on a wide range of ethnomusicological and cognitive research, the work proposed what Iyer called a “body-based view of music cognition”—in short, an understanding of music perception in physical rather than abstract terms, especially as it relates to rhythm. “In the sensorimotor perspective, a perceived beat is literally an imagined movement,”4 he wrote. “It seems to involve the same neural facilities as motor activity, most notably motor-sequence planning. Hence, the act of listening to music involves the same mental processes that generate bodily motion.”

  This was a subject of more than strictly academic interest for Iyer. Among other things, it helped frame his personal interface with the piano, as he explained in conversation:

  What are the rhythm domains that are involved in music? They’re all the rhythmic domains that our bodies are using: breathing, and walking, and talking. There are musical corollaries to all those activities. Then when you think about music in a way that foregrounds the body, then you get closer to understanding someone like Monk. Not that it explains him entirely
. But you see that he just felt at home exploring the instrument with his hands, in the same way, actually, that people like Chopin and Liszt did. It’s a body-based view of piano playing.

  In his dissertation, Iyer demonstrated how the knotty intervals and rhythmic idiosyncrasies of Monk’s melodies, in compositions like “Four in One” and especially “Trinkle, Tinkle,” actually adhered to patterns that fell naturally under the pianist’s fingers. This insight took root in some of Iyer’s own music: his 2001 album Panoptic Modes includes at least two explicit extensions of the concept, a polytonal whorl called “Invariants” and a “Trinkle”-ish swinger called “Circular Argument.”

  Beyond the tactile body-rhythm concept, Iyer’s doctoral work, which was well received in the scientific community, pointedly redressed a Eurocentric bias in cognitive studies. He had noticed that the academic literature around music perception was rooted in Western concepts of tonality and form—an approach ill suited to the analysis of rhythmic styles descended from African music, including (but by no means limited to) jazz. “A major reason for this mismatch between tonal-music grammars and most music of the world is not (as is commonly thought) differing levels of musical sophistication or complexity,” he wrote, “but rather a major cultural disparity in approaches to rhythmic organization and musical form.” By way of example, he invoked a hypnotic James Brown funk performance of the sort that summons a world of human experience over a single palpitating chord—a musical miracle that by a standard analytic framework would be understood as devoid of meaningful content.

  This commonsensical but carefully litigated argument was shaped by Iyer’s on-the-ground experience as a jazz musician. For his first couple of years in the Bay Area, he lived across the street from the Bird Kage, a club whose jam session was a draw for local jazz veterans like the trumpeter Robert Porter and the pianist Ed Kelly. Iyer became a fixture at the session, which is how he met Donald Bailey, a hard-boppish drummer who’d worked with the organist Jimmy Smith. Iyer joined Bailey’s rehearsal band, which met at his house.

  These were musicians from the African-American jazz family, and their acceptance was encouraging to Iyer. But he didn’t feel a sense of professional validation until he crossed paths with Steve Coleman, the alto saxophonist and composer behind M-Base, an aesthetic theory that advanced, among other things, a pan-African approach to improvised music. Iyer helped set up Coleman with a Bay Area residency in 1994, and their sustained contact led to a fateful invitation: the following year, Coleman asked Iyer to join his Mystic Rhythm Society on tour in Europe. (One of their Paris concerts was later issued as an album on BMG France: Myths, Modes and Means.)

  Music making had started pulling Iyer’s attentions away from pure academic work, and he didn’t fight the current. He fell in with a cadre of musicians under the banner of Asian Improv aRts, a nonprofit that had organized partly after the example of Amiri Baraka’s revolutionary Black Arts Movement and its offshoots. Asian Improv aRts released Iyer’s debut album, Memorophilia, which featured supportive cameos by Coleman and Lewis.

  Days after recording that album, in 1995, Iyer met Mahanthappa, who had traveled from Chicago to study with Coleman at the Stanford Jazz Workshop. “We hit it off in every way, very quickly,” Mahanthappa recalled. “We had so much in common, just as far as our upbringing. We were both children of immigrant Indian parents, intellectuals who came over. We were both trying to find ways to express Indian-American identity—and I think, even more than that, we were still trying to figure out what Indian-American identity was.”

  Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion and privilege, the centralizing of a norm against which otherness is measured, meted out, marginalized. My focus is the practice of the former by people subjected to the latter.

  —NATHANIEL MACKEY, “Other: From Noun to Verb,”5 1992

  Iyer has described his early interactions with South Asian culture as haphazard, a result of largely unformed coalitions that would later become far more concrete. So, like many second-generation Americans, he began to investigate his own heritage as a young adult. He became engrossed in the rhythmic nuances of Carnatic music, a school of Indian classical music distinct from the more widely known Hindustani style associated with Ravi Shankar. Dominant throughout India’s southern states, where Iyer’s family had its roots, Carnatic music is governed by a complex system involving seven categories of talas, or cyclical rhythmic patterns, and seventy-two melakarta ragas, or melodic modes.

  Rather than attempting to imitate this tradition, which he recognized as an impossibly immersive challenge, Iyer adapted some of its language—notably the transfixing power of cyclical rhythm—for his own purposes. Coleman, who has drawn inspiration from ancient Egyptian and African musics, framed this adaptive process in terms of a diligent creative license: “When you’re dealing with traditions that are very old, there are no sonic representations, so you’re forced to be creative. I would say the same is true if you’re living in this country and your music is informed by something from another culture, like South Indian Carnatic music. They don’t play pianos in that music. So if Vijay wants to apply this information to a standard jazz-quartet setup, he’s going to have to make a lot of creative adjustments.”6

  Iyer’s cultural translation was also inexorably influenced by his experience as a nonwhite American citizen. “I grew up in America,” he said. “And this is the reason why I continually invoke people like Randy Weston and Max Roach and Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix and Nina Simone.”7 He continued:

  They’re people who were trying to make music about their perspective in America as people of color, and also as people with a heritage that needed to be reconstructed. My relationship to America is as much about being brown as it is about being Indian. Maybe more so, in a way. My primary experience growing up wasn’t so much being seen as Indian as being seen as foreign and different, having a funny name, being dark-skinned. So this legacy of people speaking truth to power, voices on the margins commenting on the mainstream from the periphery—that’s what I relate to the most. That’s what resounded to me, people who had this real sustained critical dialogue with America.

  Baraka, in his landmark 1963 book Blues People: Negro Music in White America, described the white appropriation of black music in linguistic terms, as the mutation of “swing” from verb to noun. Another important African-American poet, Nathaniel Mackey, borrowed and inverted this idea in a 1992 essay called “Other: From Noun to Verb.” At the core of Mackey’s argument was a pragmatic notion of language as symbolic action. As Mackey explained it, victims of racist or otherwise repressive “social othering” have often found subversive power through the innovative practice of “artistic othering,” especially in black poetics and jazz. Mackey’s essay was pivotal for Iyer, whose work tackles othering in both senses of the word.

  Certainly that was true of Iyer’s quartet music, which featured Mahanthappa’s alto as an incisive lead voice, a whirring blade of agency and critique. Among the original compositions recorded by the quartet were some with an urgent political thrust, like “Numbers (For Mumia),” which sympathized with the plight of Mumia Abu-Jamal, then America’s most famous inmate on death row; “Song for Midwood,” named after the section of Brooklyn known as Little Pakistan, which suffered a rash of unjust post-9/11 arrests that led many residents to leave the country; and “Macaca Please,” a nod to a racist slur used by a Republican presidential candidate.

  The practice of artistic othering found even deeper purchase in Iyer’s collaboration with Mike Ladd, a rhythmically nimble poet and performer. Their first project, commissioned by the Asia Society, where it premiered in 2003, was In What Language?—a song cycle inspired by the experience of the Iranian artist Jafar Panahi, who was en route between two international film festivals when he got detained at JFK Airport and was depo
rted in handcuffs. Exploring a notion of the modern airport as a liminal space, “a contact zone for those empowered or subjugated by globalization,” Iyer and Ladd created a linked series of vignettes, often in the voice of a specific passer-through. Ladd and several other spoken-word artists took turns delivering his scathing, wistfully sad, or wryly comic monologues, against electro-acoustic backing by a band including Iyer, Mahanthappa, and Crump. The project, released on Pi Recordings, was an audacious success—a marriage of political indignation and progressive aesthetics that also happened to be one of the more ambitious by-products of the intersection between jazz and hip-hop, so long as you weren’t strict with your understanding of either genre.

  Iyer and Ladd connected again, in further partnership with the conceptual artist Ibrahim Quraishi, for Still Life with Commentator, a multimedia oratorio commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in 2006. Featuring a similar balance of electronic textures and troubled lyricism, with ambient shadings of hip-hop and jazz, it was designed to satirize the sensory riot of contemporary media and news culture. This was a ripe target, but the execution fell short, with Ladd saying little that wasn’t already known.

  Glibness was far less of an issue with the third and most devastating Iyer-Ladd alignment, Holding It Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project, about the experiences of minority veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ladd based much of his material on interviews with these veterans. There was also original poetry by Maurice Decaul and Lynn Hill, who served in different places and capacities but with a similar residue of alienation and ambivalence. One track, “Capacity,” began with a ghostly toll of piano chords and a self-critiquing litany by Hill, a former drone operator: “I have a capacity for war / I have a capacity for hate / I have a capacity for insanity / For anger / For lies.”