Vijay Iyer. Interview by Diego Ortega Alonso. Perfiles

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: Can you describe your last album, Still Life With Commentator?

VIJAY IYER: Still Life With Commentator is a collaboration between myself and poet/hip-hop artist Mike Ladd, along with several other performers (Pamela Z, Guillermo Brown, Liberty Ellman, Okkyung Lee, Palina Jonsdottir, Masayasu Nakanishi) and with contributions from theater director Ibrahim Quraishi. The project is about our symbiotic relationship with the news media and its accompanying technologies, and particularly the heightened intensity of that relationship in a time of endless war.

We've called the project an oratorio, but anyway it is a series of thematically related songs. These songs consider our addiction to forms of personal testimony: live newscasts, blogs, reality TV, and so on. Mike's lyrics critique our participatory role as eager spectators of others' suffering, considering this phenomenon against a backdrop of surveillance and spin. In many of the songs, Mike's lyrics appear alongside ironically lush and comforting music - creating an inherent contradiction that is similar to the very sensation of watching television news.

In this way, it is our intention to evoke the inherent complexities of our mediated relationship to world events. Mike said it best: "My intention was not to condemn the media or vilify it, but to try and better understand something so massive and all encompassing by treating it as an environmental phenomenon, much like the weather - i. e. sunny in one place and absolutely tempestuous and devastating in another. I hope that Still Life... functions as a type of respiratory device for this new atmosphere. "

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO:What are the main differences between Still Life... and your previous album with Mike Ladd, the great In What Language??

Vijay Iyer - Mike Ladd - Still Life with Commentator (Savoy Jazz, 2007)

VIJAY IYER: Thank you for the compliment!These two discs do indeed sound pretty different from one another. Still Life With Commentator is overall much more electronic and has a lot more singing. But I'm more interested in what they have in common: most significantly that they are both projects about modern contact zones. In What Language? considers the post-millennial airportas a complex site of interactions among individual members of globalized communities. Still Life With Commentator is also about such a site, but this time the space is virtual. This means that the interactions we experience are much more distant, more isolating, and more psychological.

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: Your project with Ladd, Fieldwork, Raw Materials, your Quartet, your collaboration with the American Composers Orchestra, Burnt Sugar... How doyou do it to be in so many sites simultaneously, and do it so well?

VIJAY IYER: It's easy: I have no life!Honestly, I just work constantly and try not to make a fool of myself.

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: I heard you in a solo concertin Italy, where you mixed your acoustic side with the electronics in a perfect way... Have you thought to publish a disc solo?

VIJAY IYER: Thanks again. I would like to put out a solo album sometime, the right opportunity has to come along. At this point it's increasingly difficult to think in terms of putting out CDs, because the CD business is in such decline. But it is important for me to document my work. I just need to think more creatively about how to do this now.

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: How much can the origins of a person inform the development of a music likejazz?

VIJAY IYER: I suppose you're referring to my South Asian heritage, being as I am the son of immigrants from India. Well, I will say thatI have made it a point of considering the music of my heritage as a source of inspiration, but in my case this has been a very conscious choice, and a careful one. The many musics of the South Asian subcontinent are very influential on me, but so is the music of Thelonious Monk, Gyorgy Ligeti, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, Prince, Public Enemy, the Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana, the peoples of the Central African Republic, Afro-Cuban rural communities, and so forth. I think that my origins are part of my story, but like anyone else, I insist on treating those origins as an open question, not as a definitive, closed statement of who I am, but as a productive area of creative inquiry.

I consider my identity not only as a South Asian American, but also as a person of color, which means that I am already outside of the mainstream. That ongoing experience of marginalization is something that animates me as a person and as a musician; my artistic output could be understood as myrefusal to be silenced. This, I feel, is what connects me to the African American tradition.

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: You have a total rapport with Rudresh Mahanthappa...

VIJAY IYER: He and I have made a lot of music together over the last eleven years. What I described above, in terms of my relationship to my heritage, is something that we have worked through together, in the course of all these years of collaborative musicmaking.

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: Your participation in the Vision Festival must have being very important for you… Sharing the stage with the great musicians of the improvisation scene must have been quite something…

VIJAY IYER: Yes, it was quite exciting, nearly every leading figure of improvised music was there. Of course I have interacted with a lot of them many times before, because we're all in the same milieu. For musicians, the divisions between scenes aren't as strict as they might appear.

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: How is the European scene seen from New York?

VIJAY IYER: What I see is that Europeans have a lot more assistance from their governments, record labels, educational institutions, and cultural organizations than we New Yorkers (or Americans in general) do. European musicians are also often competing in much smaller markets, delineated by nation and language. And there is an ongoing cultural nationalism and surging reactionary politics that I find problematic.

All of this forms the backdrop to the music I hear coming from Europe, which is therefore rarely born of the same conditions as the music coming from New York or elsewhere in the US. When we talk about "origins," these political and economic considerations are crucial elements to consider.

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: Many speak of the "decentralization" of jazz. What is your opinion on the matter?

VIJAY IYER: I agree with what Thelonious Monk once said:"Where's jazz going? I don't know. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens. "

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: We are chatting through the Internet, a medium through which your work arrives to places where it'd have been impossible before. How do you value this situation?

VIJAY IYER: I'm glad that so many people are able to find me and hear my music this way. However, there's a lot more competition now!

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: What do you think about music downloads?

VIJAY IYER: It's a good way for music to circulate. There is, however, the danger of music becoming more disembodied, stockpiled, and robbed of its human origins. People start to forget that music is made by people.

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: Are there any recordings of yours that nobody is allowed to hear?

VIJAY IYER: I made an album with a quartet in 1998 that I never released. I would like it to see the light of day sometime, but not right now!

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: What discs would you take to a desert island?

VIJAY IYER:

Duke Ellington, The River
Andrew Hill, Smokestack
Prince, Sign 'O' the Times
Umayalpuram Sivaraman, Drums of India
Abida Perveen, The Incomparable Abida Perveen
Art Tatum, Complete Pablo Solo Recordings
Vladimir Horowitz, The Last Recording
Thelonious Monk, Live at the It Club
John Coltrane, Transition
Sudha Raghunathan, San Marga

DIEGO ORTEGA ALONSO: When are you coming to Spain?

VIJAY IYER: I'm waiting for a proper invitation!There is a possibility for this fall. I look forward to my next visit, whenever it may be.

Thanks & best wishes-
Vijay