Yesterday, you saw Part I of my conversation with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer (who, by the way, is playing at Birdland again tonight!). Herewith, Part II!
Video of Vijay Iyer Trio’s version of M.I.A.’s “Galang”
Vijay Iyer Trio’s award-winning album, “Historicity“
VVG: What does it mean to be someone not only interested in making art, but also in articulating what it means? How did you get into writing? In a dialogue with your longtime collaborator, the saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, you talk about being accused of being “full of words and full of himself.” (I have some sympathy with this, having once been described as “fast-talking.”) You say, “But I felt like, either frame the discourse with your own language, or else let them take it over and completely misrepresent you.” Does this get at why you chose to take on writing as another facet of your career? To what extent do you feel that you are required to explain yourself, your philosophies of work and your work itself more because you are South Asian?
VI: I didn’t frame myself as a writer at first, but I’ve been publishing things here and there, first in academic journals, then in anthologies, then in some online media, and then in print magazines. Most of it has been by invitation, and the last few times I even got paid, so I guess that clinches it!
But seriously, I think the space where I’ve strived to produce specific discourse about identity was in the liner notes to my albums. I’ve always taken this task upon myself, sometimes to people’s dismay. (The “words and himself” quote was from a prominent jazz critic who actually likes my music.) I think of it as a textual counterpoint to an album, or as a letter to the future. But also it’s a rare opportunity to reach a captive audience; people don’t necessarily intend to read anything when they buy an album, but now they’re going to have those words in their hands every time they take the CD off the shelf. (At least that used to be the case when people still bought and listened to cd’s!) So it becomes a way to reach thousands of people over many years. People who revisit the music will at some point revisit the words.
I did find that I had to contextualize the music and my relationship to it. For all the rhetoric of tolerance and inclusiveness, there are some things that just don’t go down easy for Americans, and a South Asian American jazz composer-pianist is one of those things. It also doesn’t go down easy for jazz audiences, or other South Asians, or for people in general!
It’s never enough just to solve the problem internally for yourself. You’re always encountering people who are at some other point in the journey of awareness, and so you are constantly re-solving it for someone else. So that discourse becomes pretty crucial; fragments of it are going to keep coming back into the conversation. Continue reading
