{"id":3587,"date":"2017-06-06T08:24:17","date_gmt":"2017-06-06T15:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=3587"},"modified":"2017-06-06T08:35:05","modified_gmt":"2017-06-06T15:35:05","slug":"pianist-vijay-iyer-and-the-ojai-music-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2017\/06\/pianist-vijay-iyer-and-the-ojai-music-festival.html","title":{"rendered":"Pianist Vijay Iyer and the Ojai Music Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[contextly_auto_sidebar]<\/p>\n

This year sees an unlikely but, I suspect, fortuitous paring: Pianist Vijay Iyer \u2014 one of the most inventive figures in jazz today \u2014 is curating the Ojai Music Festival<\/a>, a friendly, mellow outdoor gathering dedicated to new, challenging, and rarely performed classical music. (The festival starts Thursday and runs through Sunday.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of Iyer\u2019s emphasis is presenting music by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a group of Chicago jazz figures founded in the \u201860s and dedicated to progressive racial politics and adventurous musical possibilities. (One of the AACM\u2019s key members, Anthony Braxton, taught a jazz history class I was lucky enough to take, many years ago.) <\/span><\/p>\n

Your humble blogger has visited Ojai, on and off, for two decades now, but for complicated reasons, I’ve not been for three years. So I\u2019m very much looking forward to what elapses this weekend. <\/span><\/p>\n

What follows is my phone conversation with Iyer, who lives in New York City and teaches at Harvard University. <\/span><\/p>\n

So you\u2019re a bit of an atypical choice to helm the Ojai Festival; you\u2019re best known as a jazz pianist. On the other hand, you make perfect sense, since the festival has been defined by a kind of eclecticism. How do you see yourself fitting into what Ojai has done over the years. <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really feel pressured to fit in \u2014 I’m just doing what I like to do. I\u2019ve brought a lot of my friends along, people I respect, artists whom I trust. That\u2019s really all there is to it.<\/span><\/p>\n

As you say, I\u2019m best known as a jazz pianist, but nobody is one thing, really. Especially not today. <\/span><\/p>\n

Did you grow up with classical music? And whenever it hit you, who were the first composers or styles that knocked you out? <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Well i don’t really believe in styles. I think styles are fictional unities and ways of stereotyping about people. So i don’t find that a useful concept or approach.<\/span><\/p>\n

But i grew up playing music in two very different ways. One was that I started Western classical violin lessons at three, and continued that for 15 years \u2014 in orchestras, playing solo repertoire, in chamber groups. So a lot of different things. <\/span><\/p>\n

Did it feel like something for your parents sake or something you got into at some point? <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

I think what energized me about it was playing in ensembles, playing with people. The way you study, and in private lessons the emphasis is solo repertoire, perfecting \"\"<\/a>these pieces that have been played millions of times by other people.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the second parallel track, when I was growing up, was that I played piano by ear, at the same time, so i was always improvising at the piano, picking out melodies, and figuring things out and just screwing around basically, on the piano. That eventually developed in a very different way, in a different musical sensibility that was in contrast to my training on the violin.<\/span><\/p>\n

The music that impacted me when I was about five. I also remember listening to the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever \u2014 that record, when it came out\u2026 And I was very into Michael Jackson and Prince, the Police\u2026 <\/span><\/p>\n

Then when I was in high school I became more aware of the African-American composers and improvisers associated with the word \u201cjazz,\u201d started delving into that more seriously. We had a very good jazz ensemble at my high school: They let me in as a pianist and that let me study that musical language, that repertoire in more depth.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the orchestras we played Rachmaninoff and Borodin and Smetana, a lot of Eastern European stuff. But then also Scandinavian \u2014 Sibelius \u2014 Brahms\u2026 I played concertos by Bruch, Saint-Saens\u2026 And I was also studying Thelonious Monk\u2019s music, Duke Ellington\u2019s music, Coltrane\u2019s music, Randy Weston\u2019s music, Andrew Hill, Alice Coltrane, Charlie Parker, a lot of stuff.<\/span><\/p>\n

While Prince is on the radio around you\u2026<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

I was a huge Prince fan from basically \u201981 to the mid-\u201890s; I was obsessed with his music. I saw him a few times; that really stuck with me. <\/span><\/p>\n

Improvisation has been a part of classical music in the past, but it\u2019s nowhere near as central to it now as it is to jazz. I wonder if you think classical music could be more robust and full of possibility if it restored that lineage that it\u2019s mostly abandoned.\u00a0<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not gonna advance any thesis like that. Because I don\u2019t have any allegiance to a construct called classical music. Nor to a construct called jazz. I\u2019ve been quoted by the Ojai press people as saying we should replace the idea of genres with \"\"<\/a>community. It\u2019s not about styles, it\u2019s about people, and what people find themselves doing over time\u2026. If you treat it as a style that\u2019s static and has issues with itself, as opposed to a community that evolves and interacts with other communities\u2026 Its borders are only as solid as they police themselves to be.<\/span><\/p>\n

So when we think of it as a group of human beings working together, it\u2019s got more of a sense of ethics and responsibility\u2026. It\u2019s about, What are people in that community looking to do today?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You say I seem like an outlier, but I think it\u2019s part of a larger trend, in this system called classical music electing to create change. <\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how it\u2019s working elsewhere, but in the last few weeks I\u2019ve been to the LA Phil for an Iceland Festival which included Sigur Ros and ended with this virtual-reality Bjork thing that was very cool; I saw Brooklyn Rider play new music at a hall in Beverly Hills, this summer at the Hollywood Bowl has several mergings of classical and indie rock\u2026 So I know its getting more eclectic around the edges. I wonder how representative of the larger world of classical music this is. I\u2019m happy to see the fissures around the edges. <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

I guess the more interesting question to me is, What kind of sense of resp\"\"<\/a>onsibility does that classical music community feel toward artists of color, music made by people of color in the West, especially people of African descent in the West. Because for a long time, the term classical music has been a code word for whiteness, for music and art and people of European descent. And it\u2019s been willfully and persistently excluding anyone else from that category. So this is the peril we encounter when we talk about stylistic eclecticism \u2014 we\u2019re not talking about people. I\u2019m interested in, What is the music doing? And who is it doing it for? <\/span><\/p>\n

You have at least a few events dedicated to the AACM, including a piece by Anthony Braxton. What makes that era, that movement important to you? <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

When I think of the questions we\u2019re addressing here, I realize, there\u2019s a legacy of people addressing these questions for half a century. And they picked up where others left off. So Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, George Lewis, and a younger generation\u2026 And George Lewis\u2019 opera is about the AACM \u2014 it\u2019s about a collective of musicians on the segregated South side of Chicago, who decide to create a new world for themselves, in the music that it\u2019s portraying. That music creates its own historical trajectory. And I\u2019ve been mentored by all of these people.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the two years that we took programming this thing \u2014 Tom Morris and I \u2014 there was a mutual interest in shining a light on that body of work, that body of artists. And continuing their presence in the festival \u2014 George Lewis\u2019s music has been performed at the festival before. <\/span><\/p>\n

Those artists paved the way for what I do; they created the reality that I exist in, to put it bluntly. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar] This year sees an unlikely but, I suspect, fortuitous paring: Pianist Vijay Iyer \u2014 one of the most inventive figures in jazz today \u2014 is curating the Ojai Music Festival, a friendly, mellow outdoor gathering dedicated to new, challenging, and rarely performed classical music. (The festival starts Thursday and runs through Sunday.) Part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30,29],"tags":[722,718,804],"class_list":{"0":"post-3587","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"category-west-coast","9":"tag-classical","10":"tag-jazz","11":"tag-ojai-music-festival","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3587"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3595,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3587\/revisions\/3595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}