Jazz musician Vijay Iyer focuses on his many musical directions.
SF-bound pianist Vijay Iyer has deep ties to the Bay Area.
Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 50 best albums of 2017 includes 49 pop, rock, hip-hop, country and R&B outings.
And one jazz album — “Far From Over” by the Vijay Iyer Sextet.
That’s just one of the high-profile thumbs-up for this album, which just might be the most universally acclaimed jazz recording of the year.
Read all the glowing press clippings and you might think that the accolades for “Far From Over” would be overwhelming for Iyer. And you’d be wrong.
“Oh, it’s not overwhelming,” says Iyer, the former Bay Area resident who now calls New York home. “Those are still isolated things. There happens to be a URL somewhere on the web where we appear to be famous. But I can still walk around on the street and have a normal life.
“It’s not overwhelming at all. In fact, most people haven’t seen that (Rolling Stones article) and never will.”
The 46-year-old pianist-composer-bandleader — who performs tonight through Sunday at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco — might downplay all the critical acclaim. Yet, it’s hard to ignore his burgeoning cheering section, which includes DownBeat, the influential jazz magazine that has bestowed Iyer with its most prestigious award — artist of the year — on multiple occasions.
“I always like to describe Vijay as the most decorated figure in jazz over the last three years or more,” says Randall Kline, artistic director for SFJazz. “He’s recognized for something that is extraordinary singular and cool: He does his thing. And his thing is being extremely well-received.
“He’s Vijay. He’s explored music in a particular way. He’s very interested in the social dynamics of the world he lives in and he incorporates that into his music, which, to me, is really what great art is about. It’s a wonderful thing. He stands for all the right things in a culture, right now, where they are being challenged.”
Part of what makes him so special is his versatility, which will be on full display during his residency at SFJazz.
Iyer kicks off the four-night stand tonight by exploring the piano duet format with fellow virtuosos Craig Taborn and Kris Davis. (Iyer will do a set of duets with Taborn and a set with Davis, and then all three will perform together at the end of the show.)
Iyer will use the setting to pay tribute to Geri Allen.
“She’s a huge influence on multiple generations of musicians,” Iyer says of the legendary jazz pianist, who died last year.
The second night, Friday, brings Iyer’s long-running trio, featuring drummer Marcus Gilmore and bassist Stephan Crump. The trio, which was named group of the year in the DownBeat critics poll of 2012, is supporting its latest release, “Break Stuff,” which The New York Times said “confirms Iyer’s stature in jazz’s contemporary vanguard, along with the dynamic excellence of his working trio.”
The third night, Saturday, will likely be the toughest ticket of the four, since it features Iyer performing with most of the same players responsible for “Far From Over.” It’s the highly anticipated return of the Vijay Iyer Sextet — and its three-horn attack — that wowed fans at last year’s Monterey Jazz Festival. The players are Iyer, Crump, Gilmore, Graham Haynes on cornet, Steve Lehman on alto saxophone and Mark Shim on tenor saxophone.
“It’s kind of an iconic format,” Iyer says of working with a sextet. “It’s the same instrumentation of (Miles Davis’) ‘Kind of Blue.’ Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers often would be in that format — a quintet or sextet. So, it’s very familiar to people who think of themselves as jazz fans.”
But familiarity brings its own set of challenges.
“It’s an interesting palette to try to challenge and confound and kind of work against and come up with different approaches to,” Iyer says. “It’s familiar, but then you can defamiliarize it in interesting ways, working with different kinds of rhythms, different kinds of forms, different ways of interacting — just different ways of organizing the experience.”
The run concludes Sunday with Thums Up, the groove-centric electronic-acoustic hybrid that takes its name from the popular soda sold on street corners throughout India. It’s the West Coast debut for the band, which features Iyer alongside rapper Himanshu Suri (formerly of Das Racist), guitarist Rafiq Bhatia (who has worked with Lorde), drummer Kassa Overall (who performed with Geri Allen) and vocalist Arooj
Aftab.
“It’s nice to be able to present a spectrum of work, a range of things I am involved in,” Iyer says. “I am really grateful to be hosted by SFJazz — they have been doing it for a lot of artists since they opened. It’s a nice space to stretch out and kind of set up shop for a few days. I have built ties to the community there. I was in the Bay Area in the ’90s.”
The New York native came out to the Bay Area to pursue a doctorate in physics at UC Berkeley after receiving an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Yale University. Yet, it was also there that his career in music really began to blossom.
“It’s actually where I became a musician — or where I chose to have a life in the arts,” Iyer says. “And it’s because the Bay Area is where I was nurtured enough to discover I could to that — that I could be an artist, I could find a community of like-minded artists, I could find a community of listeners to share it with.”
He’d eventually leave his studies at Berkeley to commit full time to music. And the decision has worked out quite well for him. His many accomplishments include scoring a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 and then following up with a professorship in the music department at Harvard University. He has made numerous trips back to perform in the Bay Area, and headed the prestigious Ojai Berkeley festival at Cal Performances last year.
And now you can read about him in the pages of Rolling Stone, right next to stories about Kendrick Lamar, Harry Styles and Lorde. But Iyer points out there is a downside to that type of mass-media exposure.
“That kind of heightened visibility sometimes opens the door to people who might check (the new record) out and not be interested,” he says. “That’s OK, too. But then they’ll log onto Amazon and comment, ‘Well, this guy sucks. I don’t know why I bought this. I should’ve bought the Taylor Swift record!’ (Laughs.) They’ll give me one star or zero stars. So, it cuts both ways, I guess.”