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In conversation: Vijay Iyer, Andrea Giunta, Brinda Kumar & Kevin LeGendre
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Grammy-nominated composer-pianist Vijay Iyer was named Downbeat Magazine’s Jazz Artist of the Year for 2012, 2015, 2016 and 2018 and Artist of the Year in Jazz Times’ Critics’ Poll and Readers’ Poll for 2017. He received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and a 2011 Grammy nomination. Iyer’s sextet album, Far From Over (ECM, 2017), topped numerous year-end polls and was cited by Rolling Stone as “2017’s jazz album to beat.” Vijay Iyer is the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University. Iyer’s previous ECM releases include A cosmic rhythm with each stroke (2016), a collaboration with Iyer’s hero, friend and teacher Wadada Leo Smith.
A polymath whose career has spanned the sciences, the humanities, and the arts, Iyer received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in the cognitive science of music from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his permanent appointment at Harvard in 2014, Iyer taught at Manhattan School of Music, New York University, and the New School. He has been featured as Artist-in-Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Wigmore Hall (London), the Molde Jazz Festival (Molde, Norway), SF Jazz, and Jazz Middelheim (Antwerp, Belgium), and served as Music Director for the 2017 Ojai Music Festival in southern California.
Andrea Giunta is a Buenos Aires based curator, writer and researcher, specialising in Latin American and International Art of XX and XXI centuries. She co-curated the exhibition Radical Women. Latin American Art, 1960-1985 (Hammer Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo, 2017-2018) and was the Chief Curator of the Bienal 12. Porto Alegre, Brasil, Feminine(s): Visualities, Actions, and Affects (2020). She is the author of several books, like Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (2007); Feminism and Latin American Art (2018); and Against the Canon. Art in a World Without a Center (2020).
Giunta is a Former Chair Professor of Latin American Art at the University of Texas at Austin, and she is currently a Professor at Buenos Aires University. She is a recipient of fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and her research and writings are focussed on the relationships between art and power and the concept of “simultaneous avant-gardes”. From the latter perspective she analysed Nasreen Mohamedi’s works in relation with Latin American abstraction in the catalogue of Mohamedi’s retrospective at Reina Sofía Museum and Met Breuer (2015-2016).
Brinda Kumar is an Assistant Curator in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She worked on Nasreen Mohamedi (2016), one of the inaugural exhibitions at The Met Breuer, and was also part of the team working on Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (2016). Other exhibitions she has worked on include Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body, 1300-Now (2018) and Home Is a Foreign Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context (2019).
Most recently she co-curated the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (2020) and wrote for its catalogue. She completed her BFA at the College of Art, New Delhi; MA at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; and received an MA and PhD from Cornell University.
Kevin Le Gendre is a journalist and broadcaster with an interest in black music, literature and culture. Since the late ‘90s he has written about soul, jazz, African and Caribbean musicians and authors for many publications, including Echoes, Jazzwise, and Times Literary Supplement Online. He contributes to Radio 4’s Front Row and also presents Radio 3’s J To Z. His latest book is Don’t Stop The Carnival; Black Music In Britain. It won the 2019 ARSC award for Best Historical Research In Roots And World Music.
‘I made it my mission to identify the first black musicians in Britain and chart their development… I wanted to give an insight into the lives of these singers and players in order to convey a sense of how they were perceived by the ‘natives’, and what kind of options were open to them in terms of employment…The image of a human being holding a microphone, trumpet or saxophone against the fire and fury of conflict in which the ultimate sacrifice is made many times over is tremendously poignant. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then I hope and pray that the guitar will one day silence the gun.’
Jazz Musician Vijay Iyer and Art Historians Andrea Giunta & Brinda Kumar in-conversation with IN·FLO·RES·CENCE host Kevin Le Gendre about the inspiration of art, modernism, and minimalism in jazz expression.
This discussion includes an introduction to IN·FLO·RES·CENCE’s focus on the cross-modality of art and sound and the three speakers: American jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and Curators Brinda Kumar hailing from New York City and Andrea Giunta who’s based in Buenos Aires. Journalist Kevin Le Gendre (Broadcaster and Writer of Don’t Stop the Carnival: Black British Music, 2019) proceeds to moderate a conversation around Vijay’s ground-breaking album with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, A cosmic rhythm with each stroke, that was deeply inspired by artist Nasreen Mohamedi’s artist practice and journals, which Vijay studied during his artist-in-residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016. He was greatly inspired by the coinciding inaugural exhibition of Nasreen Mohamedi and presented two events during its run: a Durational Performance and a MetLiveArts Commission.
Nasreen Mohamedi was an Indian artist well-known for her modernist work full of minimal linear gestures creating infinity imaginary landscapes. She had a travelling retrospective in 2016 at The Met Breuer in NYC, Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, Kiran Nadar Museum in New Dehli. The two participating art historians have both engaged deeply with Mohamedi’s practice: Brinda Kumar, an Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met worked on this retrospective, and Andrea Giunta, an Art History Professor at the University of Buenos Aires wrote an essay Simultaneous Abstractions for the catalogue of this exhibition.
‘A cosmic rhythm with each stroke features pianist Vijay Iyer and the musician he has described as his “hero, friend and teacher”, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Vijay has previously played extensively with Wadada in Smith’s Golden Quartet, but the present album is the first documentation of their duo work, produced by Manfred Eicher at New York’s Avatar Studios in October 2015. The centre-piece of the album is the spellbinding title suite, dedicated to Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990), the innovative Indian artist whose improvisatory imagery evokes abstracted rhythms. Trumpet and piano interact here with a creative sensitivity to tone, texture, and space.
Vijay and Wadada premiered A cosmic rhythm with each stroke at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in March 2016 in the context of a major exhibition dedicated to Mohamedi’s art and writings. The “suite for Nasreen” is framed on the album by Iyer’s composition “Passage” and Smith’s concluding piece “Marian Anderson”, inspired by the great US contralto.’ – ECM Records
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