because I didn’t know what I was doing; but in the course of the tour I got the dynamics and the different facets of Wadada’s music.” “Vijay is a great artist, a great composer and a great thinker,” said Smith, who has known the pianist since the 1990s, when he was playing avant-garde music at places like the old Yoshi’s in Oakland (on Claremont Avenue), where the youngster would be in the audience. “The creative thing comes from another zone,” Smith added. “Vijay has great compassion for the musical community. He’s not afraid of working with the elders and he’s open to the younger guys. He embraces it all. Over the years that I’ve known him and seen his artistic development, I see how sympathetic he is to artistry, and we’ve become very close.” After relocating from the Bay Area to New York, Iyer evolved into a major player on the scene. An early break came when jazz scholar Gary Giddins caught him at Sweet Rhythm in 2000 and lauded the newcomer to the city in his “Weather Bird” column in The Village Voice. It proved to be a pivotal moment for Iyer—an early blessing in his career is how he described it. Fast-forward to 2014, a year after he was honored by the MacArthur Foundation with a fellowship (aka the “genius grant”). At the time, Iyer said, “I’m already starting to see it make a difference—giving me a larger stand and increased visibility. People are paying attention
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and promoters are getting hyped up.” One case in point: Iyer played at the Harvey Theater stage in December 2014 as part of the BAM Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn, delivering a mesmerizing show that included the shimmering, percussive, pensive, furious score to director Prashant Bhargava’s Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, performed with the 12-piece International Contemporary Ensemble. (Iyer’s original score can be heard on the DVD.) The most poignant portion of the evening was a commissioned piece that was planned to be a solo piano spotlight, but because of “the urgency of the time” (due to protests in response to the police killings of African Americans in Ferguson, Baltimore and Staten Island), Iyer invited several dancers and non-dancers to stage a die-in. “Really, it wasn’t supposed to be art but an action,” Iyer said. “So we started the evening by not starting.” In his still ascending role as an intelligent, highly creative artist who draws attention from far outside the jazz world, Iyer has been invited to bring innovative music to spaces not typically known for adventurism. In 2015, he was called upon to be artist in residence of the new Met Breuer space (part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), where he staged more than 100 shows at various times of the day during the month of March. “I did everything I wanted to do,” he said, noting that he actually played in 60
of the shows. “We were doing anywhere from four to six sets a day for the whole month. We really occupied that space for a solid four-anda-half weeks. We made it ours.” The musicians played Radhe Radhe almost every day and used many of the performances as workshops for potential future projects (including several sets featuring Patricia Brennan on marimba, Linda Oh on bass and spoken word by NigerianAmerican writer and art historian Teju Cole). But the climax came when Iyer and Smith performed A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, which had only recently been released. The heart of the recording and performance is a suite based on the works of Indian abstract artist Nasreen Mohamedi that are riveting in their simplicity and obsessive in their complexity. “There are patterns of rhythms in her work,” Iyer said, pointing to examples in a book on his living room table. “And there’s a lot of silence in her work but still a life force behind it that is mysterious.” As for the poetic sensibility that Iyer and Smith created in their improvisation-fueled work, the trumpeter says, “It’s almost like a dialogue—Plato and Socrates—where we’re looking at big issues and their impact on society. The suite on Mohamedi was a mental, intellectual, spiritual experience. After talking about her work and its impact, we set up in the recording studio, and the first piece just popped out. It