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… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
What I find the challenge is with working with, say, digital machines - performing electronic music - is that when we play instruments there's… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
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… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share
It is one thing to be a virtuoso, but a different thing to play with compassion. — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
This is the last sentence of my dissertation: "What is soul in music if not powerfully embodied human presence?" — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
I find myself skeptical of music that forces you to have a certain experience, emotional reaction, or specific constructive arc of experience. But performers should still take care of that, to a certain extent - how does it add up? What you want from performance, because we're all in a room together, is that somehow we've gotten somewhere at the… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share
In the 1990s I got to play in a group that played in prisons in California. We would play in maximum security wards. It… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
I want to make sure that I represent a variety of backgrounds and that represents the reality out here in the world. — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
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… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
Beyond that, it gets down to the nuts and bolts of discipline - not a tradition or genre, I don't care about that, actually… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
Music is made of what we do when we move, and we can only move in certain ways, in certain ranges of tempo because… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
The sense of having to be the best at everything gets in the way of anybody doing anything. I put all that aside; it's… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
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… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
