Portfolio

The New York pianist and composer Vijay Iyer is without a doubt the leading jazz musician of today, the critics say. He won awards in five categories in last year’s critics poll of Down Beat magazine (being named the Jazz Artist of the Year, Pianist of the Year, Jazz Album of the Year for Accelerando, Jazz Group of the Year and Rising Star Composer). He also won four critics poll awards of the Jazz Times magazine’s for Artist of the Year, Pianist of the Year, Composer of the Year and Best Acoustic Group. Iyer gained his doctorate degree from the University of California. Vijay was recently awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Award, a great honour, given to scientists, scholars, artists and others, for a lifetime of achievement, and was named a tenured professor of music at Harvard University. In his works he combines jazz tradition (Monk, Ellington) and avant-garde (Coltrane, Hill, Threadgill) with contemporary classical music (Reich, Debussy, Ligeti, Bartók), popular music (Michael Jackson, Flying Lotus, Heatwave) and folklore (India as the country of Iyer’s roots). His basic artistic motivation on the current album Accelerando was giving sound to body movements through original pieces and authentic dance music interpretations (from various decades and genres), brilliantly redefining the typical conceptions of the piano jazz trio format.