Vijay Iyer: Critics Are Really Bad At Listening

The American jazz musician on the ugly politics of music and facing prejudice by concert reviewers who tend to be “99 percent white men”

- Urvija Banerji

In the past decade and a half, American pianist-composer Vijay Iyer has grown to become one of the most celebrated names in modern jazz. He’s just completed writing a concerto for violin, an instrument he’s played since the age of three. He’s also fresh out of the studio after having recorded his 22nd studio album (that number increases if you count his numerous collaborations), a sextet recording which is due out in September.

His music career might be following a dream trajectory today, but things weren’t always this natural for the American-born Iyer, who counts himself in the first generation of South Asian Americans to grow up in the U.S. “I was very serious about music growing up, but aside from that being all of my extra-curricular activities when I was in high school, it wasn’t really seen as a serious thing to pursue... There was no precedent for us, there was no clear series of steps that one would go through to have a career in the arts,” says the 45-year-old musician. He adds, “We were a strongly curated community of Indians, or basically of non-Western immigrants, who had scientific and technical training,”

As a result, Iyer has a degree in physics and mathematics from Yale University. When he moved to California in his early twenties to pursue a doctorate in physics at UC Berkeley, he found a community of Asian-American musicians that accepted him into the fold, but it was the influence of saxophonist Steve Coleman that served as the catalyst for Iyer’s decision to drop his physics program and become a musician.