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Jazz artist Vijay Iyer to perform at DePauw Friday
The DePauw School of Music welcome the Vijay Iyer Sextet on Friday as part of the Green Guest Artist Concert Series and the School of Music’s annual Jazz Festival.
Iyer is a Grammy-nominated composer-pianist and has been described by Pitchfork as “one of the most interesting and vital young pianists in jazz today.”
The Vijay Iyer Sextet is a group of generation-defining, virtuoso improvisers – horn players Graham Haynes, Steve Lehman and Mark Shim alongside rhythm partners bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Tyshawn Sorey – who leverage a wealth of jazz history even as they push it boldly forward.
The music ranges from the thrillingly explosive, to the cathartically elegiac; with melodic hooks, entrancing atmosphere, rhythmic muscle and an elemental spirit all part of the allure. Iyer has been working with the members of this sextet for close to 20 years, in a number of different configurations.
“Far From Over,” Iyer’s 2017 ECM Records release, represents something of a culmination of that work.
Throughout “Far From Over,” the pianist plays off the melodic-rhythmic possibilities of the material in a characteristically engaging way. His orchestration of the horns is both textural and exciting, but in creating his sextet music, Iyer tends to “build from the rhythm first, from the identity of the groove,” he explains. “Many of the rhythms come from folk music – from West African drumming or Indian classical music and South Indian folk rhythms.”
Iyer sees this music as aiming to “transform” the listener, with an eye toward the especially troubled socio-political climate in which this music is being made.
“There’s a resistance in this music, an insistence on dignity and compassion, a refusal to be silenced,” Iyer said. “The music can hit hard while also having a searching quality, a yearning – which is basically a blues aesthetic that has been abstracted and then embodied in different ways by the different players in the group. There’s a defiance there, though it’s balanced by a unity the sextet achieves. Defiance and unity, somehow together — that’s the sound this band captures to me. Joy and danger — that spectrum of possibilities is in there too.”
Iyer has been voted DownBeat Magazine’s Artist of the Year four times — in 2018, 2016, 2015 and 2012. He was named a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist.
In 2014 he began a permanent appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, with joint affiliations in the department of music and the department of African and African American studies.
The Friday concert begins at 7:30 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium of the Judson and Joyce Green Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets are $20 for general admission and free for youths, students and seniors.
For more information about the sextet, and to purchase tickets, visit music.depauw.edu or follow the School of Music on Facebook and Instagram @depauwmusic.
This concert and the DePauw Jazz Festival are made possible by the support of the Indiana Arts Commission, Arts Illiana and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.