An interview with jazz ‘genius’ Vijay Iyer : NPR

Vijay Iyer’s thoughts is a bit bit terrifying. A MacArthur-certified “genius,” he earned levels in arithmetic and physics from Yale and Berkeley earlier than committing to a profession as a pianist and composer. His STEM background profoundly informs his music-making, from utilizing the sequence of Fibonacci numbers to construction his work, to making use of theories of embodied and located cognition in his examine of the music of the African diaspora. The New York Times has referred to as Iyer a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway.”

But after I sat down with Vijay for this dialog on the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn., (the place we every carried out throughout a weekend of music representing a wide ranging array of traditions and aesthetics), I wasn’t actually targeted on the intimidating energy of his exceptional thoughts. Instead, I used to be aware of the center and soul in music — its capability to create understanding and communication. At Big Ears, you can also make your manner from a conventional bluegrass set to an Indian jalatharangam efficiency, traversing continents, cultures and centuries as you cross the road between two venues.

So Vijay and I talked about listening. The alertness of listening within the artistic states of improvising, composing and collaborating with different musicians. The significance of listening to your historical past and lineage, and the agility of listening to the current tense of the world round you. The capacity to pay attention throughout borders of geography and language, affirming the humanity and empathy that comes with it. In the top, it was Vijay who introduced up an emotion that is the antithesis of something cerebral. “It feels like family,” he stated. “To really hear everything that’s happening in the music and also hear what a person is saying and hear what they have to offer as a human being. It’s really this deep love that is at the heart of it.”