Vijay Iyer: Always Creating

My earliest musical memory, indeed perhaps my earliest memory at all, is from age 3 or 4. I had started violin lessons, and my beloved older sister Pratima, then 6 or 7, had started on piano. My parents had gotten her a modest spinet on which she would work through her Suzuki repertoire. Her little piano loomed grandly over me and my 1/16th-size violin; similarly I found myself looking up to her, as my sentinel and guide through childhood. One day I heard her playing something I did not recognize from the Suzuki practice tapes. She was clanging around in what was probably A minor; it involved a lot of white keys and sustain pedal. At some point, either that time or the next, I toddled up beside her and clanged in counterpoint. Together we got the instrument resonating and shaking until it felt like it might tip over. I called this a musical memory; is that the right word for it? Little me, together with one of my favorite people in the world, engaged in collaborative exploratory play, forming sonic experience, making a joyful noise, surely breaking a rule or two. Even then I must have thought, Could this be music too? Instantly, I was hooked. And to this day, every time I play the piano, some part of me is transported back to that ecstatic, timeless, transgressive moment from childhood. You could call it my origin story.

Once a young pianist asked Herbie Hancock, 'How should I develop my touch?' He responded, 'Develop your life!'

Today, as a composer-pianist I avidly study the work of others who have taken up the same challenge. What can be said in general about the great composer-pianists of the last century? What truths connect Duke Ellington, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner, Andrew Hill, Sun Ra, Randy Weston, Alice Coltrane-Turiyasangitananda, Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams, Amina Claudine Myers, Geri Allen, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Craig Taborn, and the many others engaged in this singular pursuit?

The first attribute that strikes me is the handmade quality of these artists’ work. The musical materials — melody, arpeggio, chord, bassline — always contain the indelible trace of the hand. The listener is constantly made aware of this digital dance across the keyboard interface. And at the piano, the sound of the hand includes endless tactile gradations; it is music made by touch, and that touch matters. Once a young pianist asked Herbie Hancock, “How should I develop my touch?” He responded, “Develop your life!”
This is because we hear the sound of the entire body in piano music. Somehow, in following the actions of an artist’s fingers, a listener feels the presence of arms, shoulders, spine, hips, legs, lungs, heart, voice, emotions - and by extension, ideas, language, community, culture, history, spirit, myth.

Being detached from breath, not needing to inhale, the hands can generate a sense of “ongoingness” — as in Mary Lou Williams’s left-hand stride, or Chucho Valdés’ montunos, or Stevie Wonder’s rhythmic clavinet, or Cecil Taylor’s momentum-generating two-hand accompaniments, or a Glass-like arpeggio. From this detail emerges a crucial quality: simultaneity. This is how we generate polyphony, counterpoint, multiplicity. We are at once holding and moving, to use music theorist Christopher Hasty’s rhythmic terminology: one hand might convey a steady pulse, while the other might dance around, across, with, or against it. One hand might lurch around in the basement while the other ascends skyward. In fact it’s not limited to two hands; Jason Moran talks about Geri Allen’s “third hand,” three or four select fingers seemingly generating their own stream of information in the middle register. In this way we can evoke multitudes: choirs, orchestras, rhythm sections.

The piano is a garden of sound: a matrix of discrete pitches covering the full human auditory range, an infinity of timbres housed in an enormous chamber of resonance, a field of harmonic discovery with seemingly endless dynamic capacities. It can accompany a whisper, or can spar with the most forceful drumming. As composer-pianists we attend to weight and density, knowing that we can overpower or overcrowd another instrument. We can balance a chord to bring out certain voices, to blend or separate. We can make the instrument sing sweetly or vibrate ecstatically. We can approach harmony as counterpoint and as resonance: we can attend to simultaneous movement of multiple voices, and we can construct vibratory experiences where each sonic aggregate has its own experiential force. Because of the piano’s endless multidimensionality of expression, it is useful to understand that every sound is a choice, an idea, a unique offering handmade in that instant. In this way, as Muhal Richard Abrams once said, composer-pianists like Monk and Ellington are “always creating.”

As Muhal Richard Abrams once said, composer-pianists like Monk and Ellington are 'always creating.'

Even in his later years, they had to pry Duke Ellington away from the piano every night, after every concert. After the music stands, instruments, microphones, and scores were packed away, as someone pushed a mop across the empty floor, a seated figure also toiled, building, searching, his gnarled hands ceaselessly probing the instrument. His road manager would lean on him, anxiously pointing at his watch. The writer’s tendency is to reach for the anecdote about how the musician spoke, how he walked, what he wore, what he ate, as if these things made him great. But the laborious, unglamorous zone of music-making is the same for everyone, a great equalizer: full of small failures, dead ends, abandoned drafts, ideas created and annihilated in an instant, and yet suffused with an ethic of care and discernment.

The unnerving truth is that this is what made him great, and could indeed make anyone great: a lifetime’s worth of tireless, self-assured pursuit, scrutiny, and refinement -- unpacking one idea, and the next idea, and the next, and the next. Always creating.

Vijay Iyer's 11/2 performance with Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey will be streamed on 1/10 at sfjazz.org as part of Fridays Live and available on-demand on 1/17. More information is available here.