Vijay Iyer

Born in 1971 to parents who emigrated from India to the U.S. in the '60s, Bay Area-based composer and pianist Vijay Iyer has led several distinct combos, including Spirit Complex, the Poisonous Prophets, and the Vijay Iyer Trio. All three groups appeared on the musician's 1995 debut on Asian Improv, Memorophilia, a collection fusing jazz forms with the rhythms of South Asian music. In addition to working to create interactive software for improvised musical performance, Iyer worked frequently with alto saxophonist and M-Base pioneer Steve Coleman in his groups the Mystic Rhythm Society and the Secret Doctrine, and occasionally sat in with the Five Elements. By the time of Panoptic Modes' release in late 2001, Iyer had a working quartet with alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, bassist Stephan Crump, and drummer Derrek Phillips. Phillips gave way to Tyshawn Sorey, and the quartet released Blood Sutra in 2003. At the same time, Iyer was working with hip-hop's Mike Ladd on In What Language?, an examination of the often dehumanizing world of international travel in a post 9/11 world, also released in 2003. He continued working with Mahanthappa and Ladd, appearing on Mahanthappa's Mother Tongue in 2004 and Ladd's Negrophilia: The Album in 2005 before releasing his own Reimagining, also in 2005. He was back with Mahanthappa for 2006's Raw Materials, and Ladd for 2007's Still Life with Commentator. Tragicomic appeared in 2008.

During this same time period, Iyer was also composing for orchestra ("Interventions," 2007 with the American Composers Orchestra) and string quartet ("Mutations I-X," 2005 for the string quartet Ethel) as well as for theater (Betrothed, 2007) and film (Teza, 2008). He also performed regularly on piano and synth with Greg Tate's Burnt Sugar. Iyer's 2009 release, Historicity, was chosen as the number one Jazz Album of the Year by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Metro Times, National Public Radio, the Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll, and the Down Beat International Critics Poll, and was nominated for a 2010 Grammy for Best Instrumental Jazz Album (Iyer's first nomination and the first for an Indian-American in that category). The Vijay Iyer Trio (with Marcus Gilmore now in the drummer chair) won the 2010 Echo Award (Germany's Grammy equivalent) for best international ensemble, and the 2010 Down Beat Critics Poll for best small ensemble. In 2010 he also released his first solo album (Solo) and was named the 2010 Musician of the Year at the Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards. Iyer kicked off 2011 with a new band called Tirtha, a trio with electric guitarist Prasanna and virtuoso tabla player Nitin Mitta. The group released a self-titled album on ACT early in the year and toured globally in support of it; the album appeared on many jazz critics' year-end lists. Iyer's piano trio with Gilmore and Crump returned to recording later in the year; they released Accelerando in March of 2012. In 2013, he collaborated with poet/spoken word artist Mike Ladd on Holding It Down: The Veterans' Dreams Project, and won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Mutations, his debut for ECM was released in March of 2014. Iyer had also been working with filmmaker Prashant Bhargava composing and performing a score for a multimedia project focused on the eight-day Holi festival in Northern India. ECM released Radhe Radhe Rites of Holi as a DVD in the fall. They re-entered the studio in June and put a new album in the can. Break Stuff, the result of those sessions, was released in February of 2015. ~ Jason Ankeny & Sean Westergaard, Rovi