“There are records I'll listen to one time and zero in on what's happening, and then I'll listen again to something I didn't notice the first time. The art of making records is something like this: you want to provide a multiplicity of experience in a single object, which is to say you want layers so that people can revisit and have something revealed to them that wasn't apparent the first time. We often will listen to the same music over and over again, and that tells you something, too.” PeopleArtFirst TimeMultiplicity Author:Vijay Iyer
“My concern with this approach is that music becomes a substance devoid of people. It's a consumer model of what music is: subjects listening to objects. For me, music is subjects listening to subjects. It's about intersubjectivity.” PeopleListeningMusic IsConcern Author:Vijay Iyer
“What I've learned from my gurus is that when you hear music, you hear a person, or you hear people, and you hear everything about them in those moments. They reveal themselves in ways that cannot be revealed any other way, and it contains historical truths because of that. To me, that is the most important thing. It shouldn't be a footnote, or the last chapter. It should be the complete thesis about a book on listening.” PeopleImportantBookMomentsListeningTruth IsHistoricalGuruThesis Author:Vijay Iyer
“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.” PeopleGivingSometimesArtistHopelessnessSmall Things Author:Vijay Iyer
“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.” PeopleThinkingWorldMeanLongDesireEasyWeekEmbraceVulnerableVulnerability Author:Vijay Iyer
“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.” PeoplePlayerMusic IsEmpoweringImprovisation Author:Vijay Iyer
“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.” PeopleThinkingKindMeanTermTraditionDistanceJerk Author:Vijay Iyer
“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.” PeopleMeanIndividualIdentityEvolveNonsenseSameness Author:Vijay Iyer
“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.” PeopleThinkingReasonActionReadingCommunityStorytellingMultiplicity Author:Vijay Iyer
“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.” PeopleMomentsCareOpportunityAudienceTake Care Author:Vijay Iyer
“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.” PeopleCommunityDangerousDiversityNationalismNot InterestedTweet Author:Vijay Iyer
“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.” PeopleThinkingEyeTogetherMovingSuccessfulBalanceStaring Author:Vijay Iyer