BY MANVI PANT
The story of composer-pianist Vijay Iyer does not really begin with music. It starts with arrival.
A young couple arrived in the United States in 1963 with a suitcase full of clothes and an imagination crowded with people like themselves. They were Vijay Iyer’s parents. Before “South Asian” became a demographic and diversity a matter of policy, immigrants were simply individuals—carrying degrees, ambitions, and quiet inheritances. In 1971, Vijay was born into this first-generation family, present yet not fully acknowledged.
Iyer grew up in upstate New York. He rarely saw familiar faces on television. Popular culture had little that felt familiar. At home, his parents struggled to build community. Weekends brought small gatherings of engineers, doctors, and scientists—professions favored by the immigration system. Art and culture were less encouraged. In this mix of chaos and stability, music entered the Iyer home quietly. Vijay played violin. His sister, a few years older, played piano. What began as an enrichment activity soon became a place of belonging for the siblings.
The raw musical exploration evolved into a more defined skill, and Iyer found himself playing with others, joining bands, all while pursuing a different academic path. Despite almost picking a career in STEM, music became a foundation for him. However, the idea of becoming an artist still felt like stepping outside a prescribed mold.
Though music eventually became his calling, Iyer’s academic grounding in mathematics and physics remained part of his creative DNA. The same curiosity that once drew him to STEM later found its way into his compositions, shaping a body of work that blends artistic expression with intellectual inquiry. Over the years, his work has earned widespread recognition, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship — popularly known as the “genius grant” — along with multiple Grammy nominations.
Quite early in life, he figured that these stereotypes didn’t spring from nowhere. They were shaped by a kind of curated reality—immigration patterns that favored a very specific, highly educated demographic. So, in a way, his worldview was a bit skewed. The broader U.S. culture was still adjusting to people like him and his family. He remembers glimpses. Vijay Amritraj appearing on screen, the arrival of Salman Rushdie—it was a signal that voices like his might, in fact, be heard. And that South Asians had a new and visible cultural presence in the West.
By the early twenties, Iyer decided to tread the path he loved, though with slight hesitation. The question wasn’t just whether he could play—it was whether there was a place for him at all. “Who would listen?” “Would anyone care about what I was trying to express?”
“With instrumental music especially, the expression is deeply emotional, and I found myself wondering if those emotions would resonate with anyone,” he says. Gradually, in the 1990s, he found some collaborators and apprenticed with older musicians.
“I started to see a real pathway for myself, where I could do it, and if I could do it with other people, in public, professionally, that kind of thing. So, that was just like doors started to open. Something just started to reveal itself,” he adds.
Artists like Thelonious Monk, Ahmad Jamal, Herbie Hancock, and McCoy Tyner left a huge impact on the Steinway artist. What felt like a connection or a community at first became more of a spiritual experience as he listened to these artists. He realized there was an aliveness in their playing, a sense that the instrument wasn’t just being played—it was being channeled, like something larger was moving through it.
A different kind of realization dawned on him when Iyer lost his father about five years ago.
“I realized in that process that there’s a lot of music in him and in his side of the family. He had, in fact, wanted to be a singer when he was little, and he used to win vocal competitions as a child. Discouraged by his father, he let it go. But then I realized he was kind of living vicariously through my musical life. At some point, my mother showed us a video of him singing with a friend from just a couple of years ago, when my dad was still around. And for the first time, I felt like I truly heard him. It wasn’t just that he enjoyed it; it felt like something coming from deep within him. That’s what really stayed with me.”
Speaking of evolution in music, the New York-based award-winning collaborator notes that there’s now more mixing, blending, and experimenting than when he began. Technology has taken over, making things easier. He emphasizes that, for him, music is always about being true to oneself. He seeks the right people to share his craft with—a tabla or mridangam player, a drummer, a singer, a guitarist, or a bassist. Much of his collaboration has been rooted in African American music, which he considers central to American music and the foundation of rock and roll and pop.
“I grew up listening to Michael Jackson and Prince. I don’t feel like it’s rare to see artists of color doing great stuff.”
“It’s actually very common. What’s more interesting to me is where it’s less about like representing a tradition and more about actually finding ways to make something new together. I got to do some pretty lovely projects with musicians with South Asian roots, like Arooj Aftab is one example. We made an album a few years ago called Love in Exile, which I’m very proud of. And, Shahzad Ismaily, another Pakistani American. It was more like we all have something in common now as members of this larger global South Asian ties. We had this immediate feeling of belonging,” shares Iyer.
The incredibly talented artist has a new album coming out this summer with the composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill. Besides that, he is engaging more with Western classical musicians, people writing orchestral and chamber pieces.
The tenured Harvard University professor doesn’t really measure his musical journey in terms of highs and lows. He believes in being in constant motion – starting new projects, revisiting older ones, and trying to go a little deeper each time. At one end of the thread, he is in the middle of a run of 12 concerts in New York with a group of much younger musicians—some of them 20 to 30 years younger than him; on the other, he is collaborating with artists in their 80s. Calling it a range, Iyer feels music creates a space where age, background, and experience can meet without hierarchy.
One doesn’t have to stay within one’s own generation to find something meaningful.
