I know I’m showing my age when I claim that we seem to have have lost something essential in recent years. It could be attributed to streaming, algorithms, and social media (remember that time I reluctantly coined the term “viral jazz”?), but I might trace it back further, to the decimation of what was once an underground, due to gentrification, corporatization of media, and shrinking support for the arts in general.

I suppose I’m trying to hold it down for that late-twentieth-century insurgent worldview about music-making that I learned from just existing in the 80s and 90s —and that I really learned up close from the many elders who either mentored me or simply showed me a different way to be in the world.

Anyway, I got to take part in the “Nonesuch Selects” series. Please enjoy my very Gen-X take on my various listening encounters with the label —

A couple of years ago I did something vaguely similar for ECM Records: a playlist of selections from the label for Qobuz (which, as I’ve said before, is my preferred streaming platform, because it (1) sounds the best and (2) pays among the highest royalty rates to artists). (And FYI, in case you missed out, the algorithms being what they are, I have made nine records for ECM.) With this playlist I tried to challenge the conventional wisdom about the (largely fictional) “ECM sound,” by including a bunch of counterexamples you might not have known about.

And a couple of years before that I did this piece with for Pitchfork, about “the music that made me” — checking in across my entire lifetime in five-year increments.

You could say there was a certain “politics of citation” with all of these choices — I didn’t tend to go with the most typical or familiar examples, going for more of the unsung. But most of all, I can say for certain that everything I selected mattered to me. Anyway, hope you enjoy these little fragments of a life with music.

(And thanks again to everyone who chimed in about my recent “healthcare” experience.)

Don’t forget that Fifteen is out on Nonesuch on August 21! Pre-order now and hear two tracks.

Thanks for reading — catch you soon.

v.i.

I was assured repeatedly over the two days that I was just waiting to be transferred upstairs to a bed any minute (and needless to say, that bed never materialized). I was parked on a cot jammed among many other such cots. My cot happened to be situated at the edge of what I would call the nurses’ pit, a sort of tunnel or trench formed by parallel rows of workstations facing each other, where ER staff sit back-to-back in rows for twelve-hour shifts under Severance-style bright fluorescent lights. This would, in ordinary circumstances, look like any number of high-intensity office environments, like live television production, stock trading, or a newsroom.

The difference is that there are suffering human beings crammed haphazardly on cots around the perimeter of the trench, in a once-provisional overflow situation that long ago became normalized — a ghastly and cruel scenario that apparently nobody could prevent. My particular vantage was such that I could see directly down the length of the pit. I had a clear view of many of the nurses as they stared at their screens, noting patients’ vitals and receiving messages from the odd attending physician every now and then, and occasionally toggling over to a chat window with friends or some other sites I couldn’t make out. They blew off steam with workplace banter about their gym routines, diets, or websites where you could get free stuff.

To either side of me was an endless series of New Yorkers undergoing the worst moments of their lives. At any given time, at least two of them were screaming in agony, usually to indifferent blank stares or nervous chuckles from the staff. Often there was a deeply disturbing domestic dispute unfolding on and around one of the cots. There were also, always, literally at every second, several piercing electronic alerts going off simultaneously: an IV packet had run out, or a monitor had slipped off someone’s finger, or someone’s bed was in the wrong position, or whatever. This shrill chorus of beeping would go ignored for hours on end.

The lights, a cold office blue-white, never shut off or dimmed at night. The night shift’s chatter, paradoxically, turned a lot louder; imagine a bunch of caffeinated, adrenalin-addled twentysomething New Yorkers by night, in full bruiser party mode. I often felt like I was at a bar. Incredulous, I made a few field recordings on my phone between midnight and 4am to convince myself that I wasn’t imagining it.

A friend of mine said that my description sounded nearly identical to the descriptions of Hell found in Buddhist texts. To be embedded in this hellscape as a mere observer is one thing; to be made a captive witness to it while also suffering is quite another. I lay there immobile on the same cot for 48 hours with fever, headache, diarrhea, and chills, unshowered and unhydrated, slowly losing it amid the all the beeping and yapping, trying to decode a cryptic series of Orwellian messages about my health status from mysterious doctors who, avoiding confrontation, rarely showed their faces. I was unable to rest; I was in fact actively prevented from resting, marooned as I was in this hyperstimulating torture chamber.

America’s capitalist maw, with its malevolent, genocidal indifference to human agony, has conjured Hell for us right here under our noses, instantiating the worst imaginable conditions for those in most dire need of care. I have been inside prisons, I’ve seen video of ICE detention centers, I’ve read descriptions of US black sites, I’ve seen the endless doomscroll of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinian lives, I’ve seen privileged elites in India and in the US indifferent to the sprawling slums around them. These circumstances, clearly intolerable, have always managed to strike me as somehow aberrant, out of whack with humanity, and in need of immediate action. In a word, in each case I believed it could be reformed someday. But after my short, tumultuous, and ultimately harmless stint in the ER, I now know deep in my bones something I wish I didn’t know — that humankind will simply never stop constructing its thousands upon thousands of Hells on earth. The powerful will never cease to subject its most vulnerable and tormented human souls to squalor and abjection. And this endless human appetite for the misery of others simply must be stopped, reversed, undone, abolished.

For two nights after my return, I would close my eyelids and my visual field would flood with what seemed like AI slop, an unending grisly fountain of images of carnage from out of nowhere pouring into my mind’s eye. I’d open my eyes in terror, glimpse my quiet room and blank ceiling, and close them again, only to be treated to more gore and wreckage. It was like a bad mushroom trip, but these images were just showing up unbidden, residual ripples of something like PTSD. I’m not sure how I slept. But I know for sure that it’s images like those that power many of today’s Hells.

Let this radicalize you. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore often says, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” The only thing stopping us from changing everything is our own comfort with things as they are.

Somewhere in that hellish swirl of a week, Gio Russonello asked me to write about Geri Allen for one of the NY T*mes’s “Five minutes that will make you like” segments. I missed that train, for obvious reasons; many of my colleagues did weigh in, and you can find it on the NYT site. But here’s something we did back in 2018 up at H*rv*rd, several months after the divine Ms. Allen’s untimely passing. It’s a beautiful panel discussion of Craig Taborn, Jason Moran, Kris Davis, and me, each of us speaking in loving detail about her piano artistry and all that she meant to us.

1. The idea of originality is bound up with the concept of [intellectual] property: creating artificial scarcity around ideas.

2. Notions of genius, newness, and innovation are bound up with our limited understandings of our own pasts.

3. The ‘originality’ of the colonizer is often a sanitized word for appropriation, extraction, or theft.

4. Improvisation (which is the core of every creative process) is our way of channeling everyone and everything that speaks through us.

5. Channeling is an unruly and error-prone method of citation. Its counterpart is nothing more or less than accountability.

6. We often produce copies of what we have repressed or concealed from ourselves. What we call “intuition” is a kind of cognitive transparency – a thought process whose workings are unavailable to us, a forgetful amalgamation of that which has made us.

7. Originality is often relative to a domain. One can carry a self-evident concept in one domain, for example the scientific understanding that knowledge is embodied, into another domain, such as music, and produce “new” insights.

8. To quote the Black experimental musician Lester Bowie, “What is jazz? That depends on what you know.”

9. Sometimes originality is about forgetting, or about adopting a certain stance of naïveté, or beginner’s mind. As Ornette Coleman once told his bandmates, “If you cut loose the method, what’s left is stone presence.”

10. Each artistic encounter – between text and reader, between music and listener - frames and conditions the experience of originality. Witnessing works by Bach or Shakespeare involves a fantastical connection to the past, and a faith in the idea of faithfulness.

(Then I reached my stop.)

v.i.

Fanfare for a Warrior: Remembering Greg Tate

When Greg left us, we all felt kneecapped. I remember the shock to my gut, my heart as broken as when Amiri Baraka had passed eight years earlier – my body freezing mid-step on 125th Street, my eyes flooding, my mind ablaze trying to assimilate this newest void in our universe. The way each of them had continually shown up for us, held us, supported and nurtured us, challenged, confounded, and inspired us – we had come to depend on their regular presence and input, as observers, commentators, witness-bearers, gentle mentors, dispensers of jokes and shrewd takes and wise advice. Without you, how would we make sense of this world? And how should we carry on at all, in a world without you?

Greg Tate’s jangling, shimmering sentences first rang in my ear around 1989. Then a sophomore in college, I sprung for a subscription to the (now defunct) Village Voice in order to keep up with New York’s music and art worlds. Back then, that weekly paper featured a lot of cultural writing, all of it contentious, most of it progressive, a good portion of it decentering whiteness. But Greg’s thousand-word salvos invariably felt the most alive and current. He could and would write about anyone — Tina Turner, Spike Lee, Geri Allen, Cecil Taylor, bell hooks, Public Enemy, Sun Ra, Samuel Delany, Whitney Houston, Michael Jordan – implicitly asserting that they might all be understood as part of an interconnected fabric, that they all were vibrating together in so many heterogeneous ways, and that they could all be the sprawling domain of one writer. This sensibility was not new (certainly Hurston, Baldwin, Reed, and Baraka had already claimed such mobility), but it was new to me, and it felt thrillingly right. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm was the title of A Tribe Called Quest’s debut, but it might as well be the name for Greg’s signature meta-genre, his method, his take on cultural history.

I learned as much from the way Greg connected dots across disparate fields of human endeavor as I did from the curvaceous liveliness of his prose. A forthright trickster, he would luxuriate in intoxicating flurries of ornate phrases before issuing a sharply devastating cut to the chase. His writing became my textbook, my history lesson, my back channel of continuing ed. And in the long run, his words gave orientation to my nascent brown life, showing me how I might move and feel, as a South Asian American in clangorous contact with Black musics and Black music-makers.

In December 1998, I moved from Oakland to New York. I had become acquainted with Greg through some mutual friends; I was awestruck but tried not to show it. Somehow within weeks of my arrival, I was enlisted into his impromptu, exploratory, Bitches’ Brew-inspired recording session. It seemed a little sketchy, but it was Greg so I was up for anything. I showed up at the allotted time to find a motley collective of folks from every walk of musical life, a full subway car’s worth of outsized characters, packed into a cluttered, dusty studio whose saving grace was a sumptuous hundred-year-old Steinway tucked away in its own booth. I planted myself on its bench, donned the headphones, and set to playing with and against whatever was happening in the next room.

What we did that day became the raw material for four or five albums of the band Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, including our (in retrospect, very piano-forward) debut Blood on the Leaf. On some of it, like the track “A Blood Sample from Erroll Garner,” his producer’s ear zooms in on a piano moment during which I sound unaware that the tape is rolling; I’m playing to myself, the sonic equivalent of “Dance like no one’s watching.”

There was something pivotal in Greg’s way of hearing the beauty of our full quotidian selves, these ordinary and unguarded moments somehow elevated to art. It therefore made sense when he soon took up some of Butch Morris’s “conduction” language, a method of transducing people’s individual humanity into elements of musical architecture. We soon began assembling en masse on any stage that could barely hold us, playing gigantic sets of celebratory, gloriously sludgy grooves around New York. It felt like P-Funk meeting Sun Ra Arkestra as a weekend bowling league / be-in / lowkey cult. The conductor’s baton in Tate’s hand became a slightly demented lightning rod, adding a punk edge or stunt quality that channeled chaotic good. With all that he knew, this was his way of doubling down on the unknown. Burnt Sugar, baby! We dubbed ourselves “the band that never plays the same thing once.”

Most of all he helped me do what every musician must do, which is to learn to hear another person, and in so doing, to love them. His uncanny ability to hear and honor the greatness in others felt at one with the compassionate critical listening of Amiri Baraka, another legendary Black writer/performer/critic/theorist whose band I had joined at the time. The ongoing experience in those years of being fully heard by both of them, being received as a whole person, being included and embraced as though I belonged in the worlds they traversed, being allowed to feel like a comrade and fellow traveler among giants – it all invited and even dared me to summon the most sincere, most intensely liberated artist that I could find within myself.

Something Greg wrote once about the contrasts in my own music - “violence and terror one minute, ravishing beauty the next” - reminded me of a line Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: “Proximity to terror is [Afrodiasporic] music’s inaugural experience.” What Black livingness might have to do with me, I had yet to figure out. But less than two months after 9/11/01, in that moment’s initial (now long since normalized) efforts to weaponize airport “safety,” I got pulled aside at JFK while boarding a flight with Baraka’s band. As the security guard went through my backpack and frisked me, Baraka strutted by, untouched and unbothered, pointing at me and cracking up. When I later recounted this moment to Greg, he chuckled too, naming it instantly: “Welcome to racial profiling.” The new world order had arrived. Baraka and Tate were alike in this way: both were able to pinpoint, in a single utterance, the absurd stakes white supremacy had imposed on us all by throwing us into such uneasy relation.

Over dozens of hangs with Greg and thousands of revelations in these decades in New York, it was not lost on me that I was the recipient of generous Black love and brotherhood from a true icon. Little that I can say can do it justice, but one phrase of his might. In summer 2021, I convened an online panel with Roscoe Mitchell, Imani Uzuri, Yvette Janine Jackson, and him. In the days leading up to it, our preparatory communications offered yet another glimpse of his trickster spirit, his effortless way of harnessing the unknown. Though it was months before he passed, it became one of the last written communications I would receive from him: a text message that read, “Always leave room for the ghosts.”

Sound advice, if there ever was any. GT, if your ghost is reading this, please know that it has a permanent all-access pass to every joint in town. We miss your words, your rhythms, your signifying, your furious styles, your mellow touch. Thank you for your knowledge, your synthesis, your genius, your heat, your heart.

Vijay Iyer

New York City

June 7, 2023

Get into this website for a bit more about and from Greg.

Thanks for reading. See you soon.

vijay

I'm delighted to share the first single from Fifteen, the forthcoming collaborative album by Henry Threadgill, Dafnis Prieto, and myself. Here's video from our recording session of us doing my piece "I Wanted a Map":

As Threadgill states, “each time we come together to perform, it seems brand new… We’ve got three composers here. Every time the music changes, it holds up a different world, because it’s coming from a different place – because of each one of us, [and] our different approaches to composition.”

The album Fifteen will be out August 21 on and is available now for pre-order.

If you are near NYC, we are playing four shows this Friday and Saturday, June 19-20 at the Jazz Gallery, with sets at 7pm & 9pm each night.

Thanks and enjoy!
Vijay

1.

Many musicians in my sphere know Sarah Rothenberg as the artistic director of Da Camera of Houston, where she has presented concerts of all flavors in Houston, TX for decades. But she is also a phenomenal pianist who studied at Curtis and in Paris with Yvonne Loriod, and has performed and recorded many classical and contemporary works.

Sarah recently founded a record label called Da Camera Editions, whose inaugural release was my dear brother Tyshawn Sorey’s stunning, monumental work Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) for choir, vocal soloist, and chamber ensemble, released in January.

Now, In Darkness and Light, Sarah’s brand-new solo recording, features two daunting piano works, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 (Op. 111) and Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari, alongside a piece of mine she commissioned and premiered a few years ago, titled For My Father. I thought it was crazy for my music to get tossed in with those guys, but she firmly believes that these pieces work together, and I trust her!

You can get the album (CD or digital) through the Da Camera Editions Bandcamp page. (If you order the CD now, perhaps you’ll receive it in time for Father’s Day.) Both are also available on all the streaming platforms; if you must go that route, I’d advocate for Qobuz, which offers the best audio quality, pays artists the highest royalty rate, and is not affiliated with the devil (yet).

Below are the original program notes for my piece:

//

For My Father (2022)

In memoriam Y. Raghunathan (1933-2021)

1. Prelude: Orison

2. Fugue: Upastuti

My father, Y. “Raghu” Raghunathan, came from India to the U.S. in 1963, followed soon after by my mother Sita. Dad enjoyed a substantial career as a pharmaceutical chemist, but he drew satisfaction from a simple life among family and friends, never allowing professional demands to overshadow his devotion to loved ones. Modest, compassionate, and ardently egalitarian, he was careful not to take anything too seriously, especially himself. He embraced his own ordinariness because it connected him to everyone else; it made him no better or worse than his neighbor, no more or less deserving of friendship or kindness than any of his fellow human beings. He showed us how to live with dignity, compassion, grace, and boundless love. His last piece of advice to me: “Go slow.”

Several weeks after his passing, I happened upon a recording of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, opus 87. I couldn’t understand why at the time, but the sixteenth prelude and fugue took hold of me and would not let go. I completely immersed myself in that piece for ten days, until it became a mystical conduit for something else: in this semi-trance state I produced a prelude and fugue of my own, in prayer (orison) and in praise (upastuti). It shadows Shostakovich’s form, but it somehow expresses my father’s unhurried, loving spirit. I’ve come to believe that he sent me this piece as a blessing. I hope you feel his presence in it as I do.

Vijay Iyer

//

p.s. Here's a bonus video of the 2022 premiere.

2.

My friend Min Kwon is another fantastic pianist and pedagog who runs the piano program at Rutgers. Over the COVID years Min reached out to dozens of composers and convinced them to create their variations on “America the Beautiful.” The result of her efforts is America / Beautiful, an impeccable five-volume compendium of 76 world-premiere recordings of new solo piano variations on that theme. (The set is available on CD and streaming on all platforms. Here’s the Qobuz link.) Min is playing a series of concerts in the NYC/NJ area this month, drawing from this repertoire.

When Min first invited me to participate, I thought it was a terrible idea — just problematic and cringeworthy on so many levels — but then I wandered over to the piano and created this impromptu variation, which I called “Crown Thy Good.” It opens the third volume of her album. Here’s a fragment of my short program note —

//

I find nationalistic sentiment dangerous, and will not write or sing praise songs to this or any nation. I am surely not alone in this, especially now that we've seen some of this nation's most powerful citizens implement terror, cruelty, and violence against the most vulnerable, under a false banner of patriotism. In the end, instead of declining the invitation, I managed to assemble this depleted, ambivalent, mournful echo of the original.

//

[BTW, if you’re the type of person who likes to buy sheet music for pieces like this, the scores for my “concert works” are published by Schott Music.]

3.

Since 2012, I’ve had the honor of collaborating with none other than the legendary Henry Threadgill and the incredible Dafnis Prieto in a collaborative trio project. We’re reconvening on June 19 and 20 at The Jazz Gallery in NYC, It’s hard to believe that this is our fifteenth year in cahoots — and we’ll have a special announcement that week…! Come through if you can.

Stay strong out there. Catch you soon.

Vijay

linktr.ee/vijayiyer

Last Friday I was somehow invited to give the keynote for this conference. Here is its sort of sheepish beginning section, maybe the verbal equivalent of a doomscroll. Felt astute, might delete later.

We all like to tell ourselves we have radical imaginations, and to be honest, although I am always honored to be included, honored to be thought of at all, there’s an underlying unease I often feel in movement spaces, as though I were a kind of impostor. Once back in 2016, I was hosted by [my fellow conference speaker] the brilliant Dr. Neferti Tadiar for a talk at Barnard-Columbia. The talk I gave was titled “Resistance as Music.” In that talk I tried to attend to the tempos, rhythms, polyphonies, vocalities, and improvisational character of social movements, to highlight their inherent musicality, to posit that this might offer a productive way to understand moments of change. Afterwards, Dr. Tadiar invited me, more than once, to publish the talk in a journal she was co-editing. But the piece felt wrong, or inadequate somehow, so much so that I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t even bring myself to respond. Belatedly, I’m indebted to Dr. Tadiar for her encouraging affirmations, and wish I’d found a proper way to heed that call at the time. Today, I am going to try again.

What I can say is that as a music-maker I’ve been around musicians and other artists whose concepts, insights, actions, and utterances have, at times, shaken me to my core. Today I speak to you from that place. I want to start by acknowledging the moment, and bringing in one of the catalysts in my life, the late Imamu Amiri Baraka (1934-2014): “There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”

I confess that I’ve still found myself somewhat at a loss about what I might have to offer today. What is left to say, after what we’ve seen and found out — both the level of shameless abdication of progressive values by liberal elites, and as one horrified clergyman described his visit to the occupied P4lestinian territories, “a vast ecosystem of genocidal methodologies”? What we now know about the systems that hold us only amplifies what we knew all along. To paraphrase the hackneyed William Gibson quote by way of Alberto Toscano: Fascism is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.

In Late Fascism, Toscano draws from the firsthand accounts of George Jackson and Angela Davis to articulate the longstanding, indeed foundational presence of fascism right here in the U.S. — such that it can coexist quite consistently with a pretense of liberal democracy. As Baraka once asked, “Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying / Who talk about democracy and be lying?” Who, indeed, engaged in and profited from chattel slavery while articulating a new transcendent category of political freedom? Whose freedom always depended on your confinement?

If some of us on the left have dreamed of abolition, a rather different demolition project has moved swiftly and merrily along over the last half-century, carried out by a global network of child trafficking billionaire war criminals. The fraudulent five-year plan known as DEI, the bait-and-switch of affirmative action, the pseudo-democratic legislative interregnum formerly known as civil rights, the false sanctuary of the U.S. university, the demonic western lie of a rules-based international order, the board-game fantasy of the nation-state as a geopolitical unit – each of these empty promises has been scrapped by mere whim, all of a sudden, in service of a few hundred ruling elites.

The long war on terror turned out to have served both as a project serving the defense and fossil fuel industries, and as large-scale cover for the slow-motion voluntary surrender of your digital autonomy. This massive systemic betrayal was somehow accelerated by the pandemic, a time when tech-industry elites, able to hold us housebound and fully captive on our devices, readily abandoned their facades of liberal benevolence. Leaning into genocidal fascism proved much more effective for maintaining their hoarded wealth and their controlling interests in global power.

Guilt is no longer a social force that we on the left can use. Accountability doesn’t work anymore. You can’t shame the shameless. But what is new, as I mentioned at the outset, is the level of exposure. Yes, we’re bathed daily in the grotesque, we’re broken and unmade by the routine horror, to the point that we must keep slapping ourselves, shaking each other awake, to resist becoming hardened or jaded. But generations of people cannot unsee what they’ve seen. Global anti-Blackness, global anti-Islam, global anti-labor, anti-indigenous, anti-woman, anti-trans, anti-youth – the disingenuous, violent, arbitrary nature of these schemes is now painfully apparent to a critical mass of humanity.

These cycles have produced a structure of feeling that we on this continent have known for at least a full decade, if not a quarter century, or indeed a quarter millennium. It manifests as an endless drip of panic, disgust, and dread – itself the result of a systemwide strategy of containment, a manufactured public mental health crisis of existential stress: staging violent confrontations between state actors and ordinary people; relentlessly dismantling public goods, legal frameworks, and safety nets; assuming control of the country’s media; criminalizing dissent; erasing histories; continually fanning the figurative and literal flames of communal hatred and of planetary destruction; maintaining a facade of incompetence while seizing more power than any regime in the history of the world; exacerbating lived precarity at every opportunity. This is their game plan, and it always was. Genocidal fascism is here.

I offered this opening reminder because this is what artists do. We are not here to redeem you, or even ourselves. We are here to remind you of the abyss and the expanse, the squalor and the abundance, the nothing and the everything – the world beyond your world. At the close of What Is Philosophy, Deleuze & Guattari summarize D.H. Lawrence’s essay “Chaos in Poetry” as follows:

people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent…

There are certain sounds that, to use Bloch’s phrase, “rip open the times” like this for me. The weight of a human heart, sonically transduced in an instant, a single gesture redolent of all that is carried within a being, a hologram of all that comes to pass among beings. Not an escape, but a surmounting; not a victory, but a defiant livingness.

Thanks for reading. Catch you soon.

v.