“A self-taught pianist with a scholarly background, Vijay Iyer arrived at jazz stardom through a side door,” writes Giovanni Russonello in Wednesday’s (6/7) New York Times. “But in the past five years or so, he has increasingly been invited into some of music’s most rarefied spaces … For the past week, he has been in Southern California, preparing for this weekend’s Ojai Music Festival, which he curated…. This year’s lineup … stretches from chamber music to free improvisation to literary activism.… Mr. Iyer will perform multiple orchestral works he has written, including collaborations with the Brentano String Quartet and the International Contemporary Ensemble. A chamber group will play the compositions of Mario Diaz de Leon, an electronic musician influenced by contemporary noise music…. The musician and scholar George Lewis’s ambitious opera, ‘Afterword,’ which tells an allegorical history of Chicago’s historic and still-formidable Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, will be staged on Friday night. A chamber performance of the pianist Courtney Bryan’s ‘Yet Unheard,’ with a libretto based on the life of Sandra Bland, the black woman found dead in a Texas jail after a traffic stop with a white state trooper, will close things on Saturday.”
Posted June 9, 2017
