Ars Nova Workshop

Leading up to the April 28th premiere at Montgomery County Community College of a new piece written by Muhal Richard Abrams for Bobby Zankel's Warriors of the Wonderful Sound, music writer Shaun Brady (JazzTimes, Philadelphia City Paper, Philadelphia Inquirer) will be contributing a series of blog posts about the project. This is the second installment of Brady's four-part series.

A Conversation With Vijay Iyer

On April 28 at Montgomery County Community College, Bobby Zankel’s big band the Warriors of the Wonderful Sound will premiere a new piece written for the ensemble by legendary pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams. In the weeks leading up to the event, we’ll be discussing Abrams’ influence and legacy with some of modern jazz’s leading figures. 

Pianist Vijay Iyer’s wide-ranging discography runs the gamut from his ground-breaking trio work to his long-standing collaboration with alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, the jazz/South Asian fusion ensemble Tirtha to the collective trio Fieldwork with fellow innovative composers/improvisers Steve Lehman and Tyshawn Sorey. His trio’s acclaimed CD Historicity earned him a 2010 Grammy nomination, and their recent follow-up, Accelerando, further evolves their expansive approach. In his Harlem home, Iyer recalled one early encounter with Abrams, at a gig by the initial incarnation of Fieldwork (with Aaron Stewart and Elliot Humberto Kavee). 

Vijay Iyer: The first Fieldwork gig ever was in 1999 at the Alterknit, which was this horrible little prison cell of a room in the basement of the Knitting Factory with café tables and metal folding chairs. I remember there at the front table were Muhal, Henry Threadgill, and Andrew Hill sitting right in front of us. That was basically one of the scariest gigs of my life, but it was so nice to see that these guys who’ve been such important creative forces still cared about what people like us were doing, especially since we weren’t even on the map. Afterwards, I talked to Muhal because I was so grateful that he came but at the same time I was sort of mortified to be seen in a room like that, or that people of their stature had to come into that space. It was not dignified. He said really nice things about the music, and I said, ‘We’re just trying to get out of this room.’ And he said, ‘Well, play your way out.’ Which is to say, the music contains within it the ingredients for self-transformation. And I can honestly say thirteen years later, that’s what happened.

How did you initially discover Muhal’s music? 

VI: In the nineties, when I was living in Berkeley CA, I used to buy a lot of used CDs from this place called Amoeba Records. I noticed that somewhere in the ‘A’ section there was a guy who put out a lot of records on Black Saint/Soul Note Records, so I just started acquiring some of these albums because they were connected to other artists that I was familiar with and really interested in. People like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Threadgill. They all talked about Muhal in really exalted terms, so I started checking out the albums. His level of achievement as a composer was staggering considering that you didn’t really see him ‘on the scene’ as much as everybody else.