New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Pianist and composer Vijay Iyer - "one of the most creative figures in improvised music" (Boston Globe) - will have a prominent presence at Big Ears Festival this year, with four appearances between March 30 and April 1 in Knoxville, TN. This marks Iyer's third appearance at the annual festival.
The presentations include the Vijay Iyer Trio, a supergroup featuring
Linda May Han Oh on bass and Tyshawn Sorey on drums, performing selections from Iyer's 2021 release Uneasy (ECM), named one of the best albums of that year by Pitchfork and the New Yorker among others. The Vijay Iyer Trio has been performing across the U.S. and
Europe since, including recently at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, over the summer at Newport and
Detroit Jazz festivals, and more slated for 2023 including SF Jazz in April. The Vijay Iyer Trio with Oh and Sory has another recording nearly ready, slated for release on ECM in the coming year.
On March 24th,
Verve records will release "Love In Exile", a Trio recording with two of Iyer's longtime collaborators: recent Best New Artist GRAMMY nominee Arooj Aftab, and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. Their show at Big Ears will be the trio's first show after this highly anticipated record release.
With the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet, Iyer will be performing selections from a number of original compositions, including Mutations I-X (2005), Room for
Ghosts (2022), Time, Place, Action (2014), Mozart Effects (2012). Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University, the Parker Quartet's numerous honors include winning the Concert Artists Guild Competition, the Grand Prix and Mozart Prize at France's Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition, and Chamber
Music America's prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award.
Iyer will also participate in a conversation with Mary Halvorsen and Nate Chinen on Saturday morning at East Tennessee Historical Society.
Four Appearances Include:
Thursday, 3/30 - Bijou Theatre, 10:30 - 11:45 PM
- Vijay Iyer Trio featuring Iyer,
Linda May Han Oh (bass) + Tyshawn Sorey (drums)
Friday, 3/31- Tennessee Theatre, 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM
-
Love In Exile featuring Iyer, Arooj Aftab (vocals) + Shahzad Ismaily (bass)
Saturday, 4/1 - East Tennessee Historical Society, 10:00 - 11:00 AM
- Conversation with Mary Halvorson + Vijay Iyer
Saturday, 4/1 - St. John's Cathedral, 4:15 PM - 5:15 PM
- Vijay Iyer with Parker Quartet featuring Iyer,
Daniel Chong + Ken Hamao (violin),
Jessica Bodner (viola) + Kee-Hyun Kim-Big (cello)
Vijay Iyer is best known as a jazz pianist who performs his own music. Since his 1995 recording debut as a leader, Memorophilia (Asian Improv), he has released twenty-four albums and blazed trails with his trio and sextet. Iyer has won the DownBeat Jazz Critics poll numerous times, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Few jazz musicians who have recently completed their fifth decade are quite so celebrated, with no signs of critical interest waning. A MacArthur Fellowship and a professorship at Harvard University complete Iyer's bona fides. But his reach has long extended beyond jazz, what he and many musicians feel is a fraught and potentially limiting category.
Iyer's interdisciplinary collaborations with poets, filmmakers, and choreographers are well known, and he has been making chamber and orchestral compositions for close to two decades. Although he is a self-taught pianist, he studied the violin for many years as a child. Numerous ensembles prominent in the new music scene have commissioned him, including the American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, A Far Cry, Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Silk Road Ensemble, Imani Winds, and So Percussion. In 2017, Iyer was an unusual and groundbreaking choice to serve as the
Music Director for the 2017 Ojai
Music Festival in Southern California, which has presented adventurous fare for more than 70 years. In 2019-20 he was the Composer-in-Residence at London's Wigmore Hall and premiered his new work "Human Archipelago," a cello concerto, with the
London Philharmonic Orchestra in fall of 2022.
