Any portrait of Vijay Iyer is necessarily a group portrait. A composer, pianist, band-leader, teacher, and thinker, Iyer channels his insatiable curiosity into innovative acts of collaboration with like-minded artists—across genres and disciplines. So when the chance came to serve as music director of the 2017 Ojai Music Festival,

Iyer was ideally positioned to draw on the sorts of boundary-defying affiliations that give Ojai (now in its 71st year) its unique character. Ojai at Berkeley, the Northern California edition, will take place between Thursday, June 15, and Saturday, June 17.

Vijay Iyer’s Creative Connections

OJAI AT BERKELEY 2017

by Thomas May

5.17 OJAI.indd 8 4/20/17 1:12 PM

Vijay Iyer’s Creative Connections

Iyer’s outlook as an artist has been shaped not just by his many-sided aesthetic interests but by the ongoing bonds he regularly forges across diverse communities. The four programs scheduled for Berkeley could hardly reflect this more clearly. They range from the Bay Area premiere of Iyer’s new violin concerto (written for Jennifer Koh) to improvisatory collaborations mingling jazz impulses with South Indian classical music traditions, a pathbreaking experimental opera by George E. Lewis, and a film with live score created to mark The Rite of Spring’s centenary, but from a cultural perspective rooted in Indian tradition. “There’s a sense of connectedness here that comes from my real associations with all of these communities of artists,” Iyer points out. “Everyone on these programs has played a role in my life and in each another’s lives. I think the cross-currents among this community of artists will resonate.”

The Blurring of Boundaries The word community recurs frequently when Iyer talks about music: for him, the unique appeal of live performance is that it entails an act of communing—among the musicians and with the audience. This is an artist always in search of the moments when “we get the music

LEN

A A

DA

SH

EVA

Vijay Iyer

JIM

MY

KAT

Z

5.17 OJAI.indd 10 4/20/17 1:12 PM

8

off the page and into the space and involve the audience in a way that isn’t mere witnessing.” When music is viewed as a way of creating community, for Iyer, performance offers both the encounter with new experiences and the chance to learn more about ourselves—as well as the possibility to discover how music can even change our lives.

“We are living in a phenomenally interesting time in music, when the lines between categories once thought separate are blurring,” observes Matías Tarnopolsky, executive and artistic director of Cal Performances. “Iyer blends jazz and classical, music that is improvised and that is written down. What I love about these programs is that they really celebrate the idea of the boundlessness of music—of its being unbound by genre, philosophy, geography.”

On one level, this year’s Ojai at Berkeley is a homecoming. Iyer began developing his approach to music while he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1990s. “I had been playing music my whole life, but Berkeley is where it dawned on me that there could be a creative community and I could continue this with them as more than a hobby,” he explains. After studying mathematics and physics as a Yale undergraduate, at Berkeley he embarked on a doctoral program in music cognition. “I wanted to understand cultural difference in terms of the underlying sameness of humans—the shared parts of being human that are expressed in ideas of pulse and breath and then give rise to all these different possibilities and manifestations.”

Another significant catalyst during Iyer’s Berkeley years was Steve Coleman, the visionary composer-saxophonist who, at the time, was involved with the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). “Steve had been at IRCAM with Boulez, and he coordinated collaborations between composers and engineers to help them technically realize some of their ambitions and ideas at CNMAT, Berkeley’s mini-IRCAM. I would hang out in that fertile space: a space that brought together improvisers, people dealing with interactive tech, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, musicologists.” Parallel to his academic pursuits, Iyer also cultivated formative relationships with musicians in town, including “elder African-American musicians like [the late] Donald Bailey and E. W. Wainwright. I was in both of their bands for years.”

RADHE RADHE

PR

AS

HA

NT

BH

AR

GAV

A/C

RA

IG M

AR

SD

EN

5.17 OJAI.indd 8 4/20/17 1:12 PM

Relinquishing ControlThe artists Iyer has invited to Ojai are, like him, at home in many different traditions. Like Steven Schick (an emeritus music director of Ojai) and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), which again this year serves as the resident ensemble, they routinely ignore conventional notions of musical boundaries, Tarnopolsky points out. “Take Jennifer Koh, who is more than a clas-sical violinist: audiences might remember her playing the role of Einstein when we present-ed Einstein on the Beach. Or Tyshawn Sorey [the multi-instrumentalist and composer], who made such an impression at last year’s festival, a phenomenal performer, composer, and musical philosopher.” Iyer himself “is a font of creativity as a composer, performer, and academic.”

How does Iyer balance the expectations of “classical” performance tradition with the improvisatory collaborations that share a cen-tral role in his musical practice? “The word ‘improvise’ simply means ‘what is not fore-seen,’” he remarks. “It’s about incorporating moments that are not scripted but that have a set of possibilities instead, which means you really have to listen and make choices.”

Jennifer Koh

Tyshawn Sorey

5.17 OJAI.indd 14 4/20/17 1:12 PM

FAMILY LAW GROUP, P.C.

PERSONAL ATTENTION

THOUGHTFUL LITIGATION

FINAL RESOLUTION

FA

MIL

Y L

AW

415.834.1120 | San Francisco | www.sflg.com

Proud to Support the Arts

“ Our goal is to preserve our client’s dignity and humanity.”

CP__WW_ads.indd 1 4/21/17 12:43 PM

10

These varying approaches converge on the opening night program ( June 15), which brings together violinist Jennifer Koh, conductor Steven Schick, ICE, the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, bassist Stephan Crump, Tyshawn Sorey on drums, and Iyer himself at the keyboard. His new violin concerto, titled Trouble, is a multi-part work whose structure he likens to a suite or “a collection of episodes.” By way of introduc-tion to the score, Iyer says he believes it’s not useful to think in terms of genres. “It’s more about who is involved in the piece and what are they good at. How can they interpret what’s on a page, how good are they at dealing with color and varying the attack on the note?” Iyer suggests putting aside assumptions about the different musical realms in which we might be tempted to locate the various parties who come to the table for this concert. “It’s not a matter of ‘I’m a jazz this, you’re a classical that.’”

“This festival expresses the spectrum of all of those strands I began exploring as a student at Berkeley and that are still going on for me,” Iyer says. “My own compositional palette is just one strand; the improvisational collaborations that have emerged are very important as well.” The Saturday afternoon concert ( June 17), for example, focuses on his relationships with art-ists representing various Indian traditions: the extraordinary vocalist Aruna Sairam, who will sing in the intricately ornamented Carnatic style from the South of India; Zakir Hussain, the world-famous tabla master long based in the Bay Area, who has blazed many trails by sharing the Hindustani classical tradition of India’s North in unprecedented collaborations; and the jazz saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, born, like Iyer himself, to emigrant Indian parents who settled in the United States. Mahanthappa has pioneered new amalgams of improvisatory music-making drawing on Western and Carnatic models.

Experimenting with Experimentation: Afterword, an operaThe Bay Area premiere of George Lewis’ Afterword, an opera ( June 16) is an especially antici-pated performance, says Tarnopolsky. “The historical context of the work will be fascinating for Berkeley audiences, and Lewis is a major actor in this country’s musical life.”

Iyer’s ties to George Lewis—a fellow recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship—range from scholarly collaboration to collective improvisation. Both aspects date back to Iyer’s Berkeley years, when Lewis (then based at UC Davis) served on his PhD committee—along with Olly Wilson, the late David Wessel, and Physics Nobel Laureate Donald Glaser. Active as a composer, a jazz trombonist, and a scholar in multiple disciplines (he currently serves as Professor of American Music at Columbia), Lewis became a model for the category-blurring approach to music that inspired his protégé.

Aruna Sairam Zakir Hussain

SU

SA

NA

MIL

LMA

N

5.17 OJAI.indd 12 4/21/17 3:24 PM

12

Rudresh Mahanthappa George E. Lewis

J.J.

TIZ

IOU

In 2008 Lewis published his multiple-award-winning history of the Chicago-based Asso-ciation for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM): A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Founded in 1965 as a scrappy collective of adventur-ous musicians and still in operation (Lewis has been a member since 1971), the AACM was created to nurture the experimental work of African-American artists. AACM’s extraordinary influence made it “an engine of creative inspiration and practical outreach that has touched nearly all corners of modern music,” according to music writer Larry Blumenfled.

Working with longtime collaborators Catherine Sullivan and Sean Griffin, Lewis was persuaded to create an opera based on the book’s “Afterword” chapter, which he wrote in an experimental style as a departure from the academic writing of the rest of his history. “It draws quotes from all of the interviews I had conducted for the book and stages a virtual meeting of the AACM,” explains Lewis. “I started from that and developed a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsoper, about Black experimentalists trying to revise and revitalize their practices in the face of a lot of discouragement and resistance.”

Lewis recalls that early audiences of his opera seemed puzzled by the lack of attention paid to racism in his treatment. “Racism is obviously important, but to make that the overarching theme of every narrative is very restrictive. I didn’t want to dramatize their particular struggles. My focus was on the collective struggle everyone was engaged with. We have operas about Romantic heroes—think of Die Meistersinger and how it depicts the struggles of a young artist—but I wanted to create an opera about experimental musicians.”

Iyer is intrigued by what he describes as the “M.C. Escher aspect” of Afterword: “You enter the world of the opera and 50 years later there’s an opera that has come out of that world—and that is what you’ve been watching and listening to. The continuity is what is really astonishing—such an interesting close of a loop.”

Final RitesFor the festival’s concluding program ( June 17), Iyer will juxtapose Cliff Colnot’s arrangement of The Rite of Spring for chamber ensemble with RADHE, RADHE: Rites of Holi. The later is Iyer’s collaboration with the late filmmaker Prashant Bhargava, which was commissioned to mark the centenary of Stravinsky’s modernist icon in 2013. “RADHE, RADHE was created

5.17 OJAI.indd 10 4/20/17 1:12 PM

415.392.2545 SFPERFORMANCES.ORG

COMPANY WAYNE McGREGORThu–Sat, Mar 8–10, 20187:30pm | YBCA TheaterAutobiography

L.A. DANCE PROJECTPIVOT: New Adventures in the Performing ArtsTue, Jan 23, 20188:30pm | A.C.T.’s Strand Theater

WENDY WHELAN BRIAN BROOKS BROOKLYN RIDERWed–Thu, Nov 29–30, 20177:30pm | Herbst TheatreSome of a Thousand Words

2017–18 Season Series Subscriptions On Sale Now!Available online at: sfperformances.org/season Single tickets go on sale July 31st.

around the skeletal structure of Rite but tells a very different story, though it uses a similar template or energy contour,” according to Iyer. Bhargava documented the colorful Holi festivities in Mathura. This is the festival of spring associated with various Hindu traditions, including the story of the love of the goddess Radhe for Krishna (whose legendary birthplace is in Mathura). Holi is immediately recognizable around the world for its Carnival-like, playful spirit as partic-ipants throw colored powders at each other in a spectacular free-for-all.

“You have this very raw, extremely sat-urating, and powerful cinematic footage of the holiday being celebrated by regular folks in this century. Along with all these tradi-tional and extremely devotional touches, there’s a very earthy and dangerous element.”

Stravinsky’s collaborative work for the Ballets Russes tailored Russian folk myth to the tastes of its French audience. “They presented this fanciful, imaginary version of Russian myth in a sort of self-exoticizing way. What we strove to do was to present what really happens in this place, with a kind of intimacy that Prashant achieved cin-ematically. So you feel connected to it, raw and real. But at the same time this stylized mythic tale is being interwoven in a mysteri-ous way—all in the context of live music.”

The critic Ian Patterson writes that Iyer’s score “traces the arc between the myriad manifestations of the festival’s early morning preparations and the unfolding maelstrom of mass euphoria that follows.” As with the other programs he has organized for the fes-tival, Vijay Iyer emphasizes that the power of such collaborations arises from elements beyond the control of any single participant: “It’s about what you can authentically build together.”

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator. Along with essays regularly com-missioned by the San Francisco Symphony and Opera, the Juilliard School, and other leading institutions, he is a critic for the Seattle Times and Musical America and blogs about the arts at www.memeteria.com.

5.17 OJAI.indd 11 4/20/17 1:12 PMCP__WW_ads.indd 2 4/21/17 12:43 PM