Vijay Iyer
PROJECTS:
Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active and revered across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last three decades, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, three Grammy nominations, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. His newest albums are Defiant Life (ECM, 2025), his second suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith; Compassion (ECM, 2024), featuring his celebrated trio with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; Trouble (BMOP/sound, 2024), a composer portrait album comprising three of his orchestral works, including the titular violin concerto performed by Jennifer Koh; and Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), his Grammy-nominated collaboration with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. The New York Times observed, “Iyer’s music has always been both intelligent and unpretentious, complex without being opaque; [he] ponders a phrase with obsessive rumination, unveiling layers of shifting, subtle emotion, before letting it fly with joyous abandon.” He is a professor at Harvard University.
TRIO
Iyer’s ever-evolving trio conception, developed over 30 years with an enviable roster of state-of-the-art bassists and drummers, finds inspiration in the trio music of Ahmad Jamal, the Ellington/Mingus/Roach summit Money Jungle, Andrew Hill’s Smokestack, McCoy Tyner’s 1970s ensembles, the rhythm-section alchemies of James Brown, Fela Kuti, and the Meters, South Asian rhythmic forms, and the expressive nuance of chamber music. The results, over the span of his trio’s five pivotal recordings and hundreds of performances, have not only defied the old categories, but created entirely new ones.
DUO WITH WADADA LEO SMITH
Two of creative music’s most heralded luminaries, each feted with prizes and critical accolades from across the globe, composer-pianist Vijay Iyer and composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith construct powerful, uncategorizable duets full of subtle emotion, mystery, and spiritual intensity. Their music reveals the improvisational magic of the duo, the expressive individuality of the participants, and the ways that they can – as Smith says – “merge as a single wave, or a single voice.”
Referring to Smith as his “hero, friend and teacher,” Iyer played in the AACM icon’s “Golden Quartet” from 2005 through 2012. Their duo, first formed in the crucible of that band, received sweeping praise for their 2016 album A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM). Nine years later, with Smith now an octogenarian, the duo returns with spellbinding music from their March 2025 release Defiant Life (ECM). As Iyer writes in the liner notes to Defiant Life, “This recording session was shaped by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility.”
PRESS:
“one of the best in the world at what he does”
Pitchfork
“Iyer clearly has a voice for all seasons”
London Times
“Iyer’s music has always been both intelligent and unpretentious, complex without being opaque; Iyer ponders a phrase with a scholar’s obsessive rumination, unveiling layers of shifting, subtle emotion, before letting it fly with joyous abandon.”
The New York Times
