A remarkable concert featuring Vijay Iyer Trio live at Fasching on April 13 2010 in full power. Here is Vijay in full concentration at the piano (pic taken with my EOS 7d and the 100-400 L, which I took by mistake thinking that it was the 70-200L 2.8!). In addition to Iyer on piano, the trio includes Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums. Their most recent album is “Historicity” (2009) on the ACT label. Several of the pieces of that album were featured at the Fasching concert. Vijay Iyer uses thick chords sweeping across the keyboard generating an orchestral backdrop onto which melodic lines navigate. Improvisation remains the central theme. From Vijay Iyer’s website: “his powerful, cutting-edge music is firmly grounded in groove and pulse, but also rhythmically intricate and highly interactive; fluidly improvisational, yet uncannily orchestrated; emotionally compelling, as well as innovative in texture, style, and musical form.”

Vijay Iyer holds a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from Yale College, and a Masters in Physics and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Technology and the Arts from the University of California at Berkeley. He has done research in music cognition, and published an article on “Improvisation, Temporality and Embodied Experience” in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (Vol. 11, No. 3-4, March-April 2004). In the Abstract of that paper, he writes: “… music perception and cognition are embodied, situated activities. This means that they depend crucially on the physical constraints and enabling of our sensorimotor apparatus, and also on the ecological and sociocultural environment in which our music-listening and -producing capacities come into being. I have argued that rhythm perception and production involve a complex, whole-body experience, and that much musical structure incorporates an awareness of the embodied, situated role of the participant. In this paper I focus specifically on improvisational music, and on what it can tell us about consciousness and cognition. Building upon the notion of cognition as embodied action, I would like to propose an understanding of certain improvisational music as quintessentially experiential, in that it leads us to re-experience our own practice of perception.” Listen to Jason Crane’s interview with Vijay Iyer from The Jazz Session, in which he talks about “everything from mirror neurons to math jazz, Fibonacci numbers to the legacy of Roy Haynes”.

Photograph above (taken with the EOS7D and 24L II lens) features Vijay Iyer on stage after the concert alongside PhD student Carolyn Marks. Carolyn has an uncanny ability to persuade musicians to pose by her side. More photographs taken during the concert are available HERE or in the link under Photo galleries.