Latest Vijay Iyer Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• A successful relationship is not about two people staring into each other's eyes, it's about two people looking ahead together. I think in order to construct, it's not just, "you do this, then I'll do this." It's more like, "let's work on these ideas together, and just move together, with these ideas." It does create a balance.

  Vijay Iyer

  Moving, Eye, Successful

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I notice that Indians love to tweet about each other - will be like, yeah, go India, we're awesome, Indians are awesome, here is another example of an awesome Indian. That's a dangerous false nationalism that I am not interested in. There's a huge amount of diversity within our so-called communities; within the South Asian community, there are people who would never talk to each other.

  Vijay Iyer

  People, Diversity, Community

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If we reject the word, or any word that labels music, what's left? That's the question we should all ask ourselves. Ben Ratliff asked it, and he came up with aesthetic categories. That's not what I would say. What's left are communities who make music together, or among whom music circulates. That's it.

  Vijay Iyer

  Community, Together, Aesthetic

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It doesn't matter if it's jazz or not. It's about how we listen, how we interact, how we guide our attention when we're listening, and how we can refine what we're doing musically. Also how we can create our own music, and what opportunities that can bring us, as creative musicians. And then insisting that musicians put themselves through an intellectually rigorous process, which involves a lot of reading and writing, while insisting that music scholars think about ethics.

  Vijay Iyer

  Reading, Writing, Opportunity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• You figure out how to create opportunities to make music, and then, if you take care of the music, audiences will come around. They also might leave. What matters is the moment: the moment of making music, with and for and among others, and what that offers to those people in that moment. They might never see me again; they might never learn my name. But it might still be something they carry with them.

  Vijay Iyer

  Opportunity, People, Care

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• We can create the sensation of community through the accrual of actions, and that's often the clichéd way that storytelling is talked about, as someone taking a solo, and that's great for lots of reasons. But I don't really like to feel like I'm forced to listen to it in a certain way, or that there is one master reading of performance. I think what we want from performance is multiplicity, which is lots of ways in and through it, because it's for lots of people, and it was created by lots of people, often.

  Vijay Iyer

  Reading, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I've put live performance in a lot of spaces. Part of what I want to do is take over the takeover. Another way that someone put it is, you climb over the fence and you cut a hole in it, and let everyone else in. That's kind of what this is. The museum is a repository of great works, but there is certain work that no one ever calls great. This is an insistence on directing their attention to other stuff that's great, that never gets to be in a museum.

  Vijay Iyer

  Cutting, Attention, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• This is the last sentence of my dissertation: "What is soul in music if not powerfully embodied human presence?"

  Vijay Iyer

  Soul, Dissertation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In a mystical sense, three can become one, in the sense that two is not one; three is a way of resolving difference between two. It's about creating balance: of energies, of dispositions. Sonic balance. That's the approach for me, what it means.

  Vijay Iyer

  Mean, Balance, Energy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Resonance is a physical process through which similarities are highlighted.

  Vijay Iyer

  Similarity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• To interact means being among others, and taking others into account in a way, to act.

  Vijay Iyer

  Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I make a lot of music with other desis - that's hugely important to me, but it can't be the sum total of who I am and what I do. It's not accurate; it doesn't reflect my life experience.

  Vijay Iyer

  Important, Life Experience

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I've realized that a lot of people come to me because of what's called identity. In the sense of "he's like me" - more like identification. Identity is one of those nonsense words: it's been used so much it doesn't mean anything. As individuals, we don't want to stay the same; identity means sameness, and we don't want to be the same, we want to keep changing, we want to grow, we want to become something else. We want to evolve. So when people come to me, it's about resonance - it goes back to that word.

  Vijay Iyer

  Mean, People, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I'm what they call a 'non-black person of color': NBPOC. It's easy and seductive and common to mobilize around these identity issues, but often that's done at the expense of considering structural anti-blackness. That puts everything in a slightly different light for me, especially because of where I am and why - where I am in the world of the arts, where I live, in Harlem - and the music that I've been able to make, whom I've been able to make it with, who has nurtured me. It's not just about solidarity. It's actually about debt.

  Vijay Iyer

  Art, Seductive, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The phrase I use is 'easy camaraderie.' Non-western immigrants of color and their progeny like me - my parents came here fifty years ago and I was born and raised in Rochester - whether it's Teju Cole, or Rudresh Mahanthappa, or Himanshu Suri, or Miya Masaoka, or Barack Obama, we all have that in common. And that's different from being descended from enslaved African captives. I am very conscious of that difference, and conscious of how easy it is to forget about it. I find myself always coming up against that.

  Vijay Iyer

  Parent, Different, Common

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I use are provisional terms, and they usually put any proper nouns in critical distance. I'm in a tradition of people who resist naming, fixity. That means it's a tradition of people who insist on mobility, who defy proper nouns and genres and those kinds of things. When I push back against the word 'jazz' it's because I've learned that from many, many elders who think that way. I'm not just being a jerk.

  Vijay Iyer

  Distance, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• This is a tradition of resistance to the term that's as old as the term itself, especially because that term has been used to commodify and reduce black creativity, and also to appropriate and sell it. That's what John Coltrane said in an interview with a Japanese journalist: "Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist." And he's treated as one of the central figures in the history of jazz. So if he rejected it, then why is it weird when I do it? I'm in the tradition!

  Vijay Iyer

  Creativity, Black, Jazz

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I like the idea of the objecthood of music being destabilized by process and things like improvisation. That's what empowers us; that's how we make each day new as players, as people.

  Vijay Iyer

  Player, People, Empowering

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I teach a graduate seminar called "Theorizing Improvisation" that is pretty interdisciplinary, but really makes students deal with black studies seriously. A lot of authors of color, a lot of women of color - those become central to the intellectual trajectory. It considers music, but it also considers areas of thought that might seem unrelated to music. That's partly because we're expanding the notion of what music is beyond objects, beyond scores, beyond things.

  Vijay Iyer

  Black, Intellectual, Students

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Music making features real-time creation, real-time decisions and actions. It's basically improvisation, which is the stuff of everyday life. In the realm of discourse about music, improvisation is marginal, but in the realm of doing it, it's omnipresent. Strange distinction here: we're improvising all the time, but when we tend to talk about music, we tend to talk about objects that are fixed, like recordings, scores, pieces.

  Vijay Iyer

  Decision, Everyday, Action

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Beyond that, it gets down to the nuts and bolts of discipline - not a tradition or genre, I don't care about that, actually - but discipline in the sense of just working on music and working on thinking about music. It doesn't matter if it's jazz or not. It's about how we listen, how we interact, how we guide our attention when we're listening, and how we can refine what we're doing musically.

  Vijay Iyer

  Thinking, Discipline, Listening

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I know from the elders that it's not so easy to sustain a life in music, a presence in the music world, for decades on end. And that's what we're here for: we're thinking about the long game. If that is dependent on other people's desire for me, then it becomes extremely vulnerable to change. Rather than subject myself to that vulnerability, I'd rather embrace change and allow myself to transform, and maybe that means that what I do next week, the people who liked me last week won't like anymore, but maybe that will also lead people to like something else.

  Vijay Iyer

  Mean, Thinking, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The sense of having to be the best at everything gets in the way of anybody doing anything. I put all that aside; it's not worth thinking about when I'm there. My agenda as an artist doesn't go away when I teach. It actually gets intensified.

  Vijay Iyer

  Artist, Thinking, Going Away

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Whatever we can do to just give people a sense of hope in the face of what seems like hopelessness. That's a small thing that an artist can do sometimes.

  Vijay Iyer

  Artist, People, Giving

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In the 1990s I got to play in a group that played in prisons in California. We would play in maximum security wards. It was infuriating. Those kinds of situations stick with me. We got to come in and play music for them because that's a way of caring, just offering something, a gift, basically. They're basically the most grateful audiences I've ever experienced, because nobody's giving them anything.

  Vijay Iyer

  Grateful, Caring, Giving

  Source: www.guernicamag.com