Vijay Iyer Tops the Fourth Annual Village Voice Jazz Poll

Physicist, mathematician, violinist and jazz pianist are all titles one might confer on Vijay Iyer who was born in New York to South Indian immigrant parents. And now with his album Historicity he has won the Village Voice Jazz Poll for 2009.

Background:

Born in 1971 and raised in Rochester, New York, Vijay Iyer is the son of South Indian immigrants to the US. He received 15 years of Western classical training on violin beginning at the age of 3. He began playing the piano by ear in his childhood, and is mostly self-taught on that instrument. Vijay was also exposed to some Indian classical and religious music in his youth. His high school years saw a growing interest in jazz. After completing an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics at Yale when he was 20, Iyer then went to Berkeley to do a Ph.D. in physics. Vijay continued to pursue his jazz interests and served as the house pianist in jam sessions at the Bird Kage, a famous club in North Oakland, which featured some of the best local musicians such as Ed Kelly and Smily Winters, as well as guest luminaries such as Pharoah Sanders. This greatly enriched his understanding of the jazz idiom and the lived jazz experience. In an interview with A Shuman (April, 1997), Iyer states “I found that the music we were playing was a profound expression of their lives, and the lives of the audience members as well.”

Source: Vijay Iyer, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vijay_Iyer&oldid=326765112 (last visited Jan. 3, 2010).