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Interview with
Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd:
Conducted by Nermeen Shaikh of AsiaSource.
What was the inspiration for In What Language?
Vijay Iyer: The most concrete answer is that
it had to do with something that happened to the Iranian filmmaker,
Jafar Panahi, when he was passing through the United States. He
directed the highly acclaimed Iranian film, "The Circle" (among
others) and was traveling with the film, showing it at major film
festivals. He showed it in Hong Kong and was on his way to South
America when he was in transit at JFK, where he was wrongfully detained
by the INS and prevented from taking his connecting flight. Instead
he was kept in chains for 10 hours in an enclosed room for refusing
to have himself photographed or fingerprinted. Eventually he was
sent back to Hong Kong.
He later sent out an email to his friends that was
widely circulated in which he told this story. He was talking about
the experience of sitting on this airplane going back to Hong Kong
with people staring at him. He wanted to explain to them that he
was a normal person just like them but he couldn't find a way to
do it. He said at one point, "How could I tell them my story? In
what language?"
There was just something really powerful about that
story. So much of being Asian American for me has been about the
experience of being brown and what it means in the West to wear
this badge. This has also been my point of entry into African-American
music. Finding my place in African-American music was about identifying
with people who had a revolutionary, confrontational, and deeply
politicized worldview that was articulated through their music.
This was part of the reason I wanted to work with Mike because he
also clearly shared this sensibility.
Mike Ladd: Vijay wrote the proposal and contacted
me after it was knocked out. It made sense in terms of what I had
been doing; his approach was in fact quite similar to my own, in
trying to acknowledge the space that African Americans have in the
context of the rest of the world, which is something that is not
looked at that often.
The black American experience is often only understood
within the confines of the United States. But black Americans have
a rich history of travel outside the US and a rich history of writing
and thinking about the impact of those travels on ourselves and
the world. In the 19th century, for instance, they included prominent
figures such as William Wells Brown, Paul Cuffie and Frederick Douglass
(to name only a few who traveled extensively in Europe and parts
of Africa: Douglass in Egypt, and Cuffie in Liberia and beyond).
Lesser-known writers like Amanda Smith made it as far as Burma.
Everyone went for a variety of reasons. Douglass left to escape
slave hunters and to propagate the abolition of slavery, as did
Brown. Cuffie began one of the first Back-to-Africa movements. Smith
was a Methodist missionary.
What is interesting is reading how these black American
writers grappled with their Western, or more specifically, Christian
identification and the non-Christian peoples they encountered. What
happens when the American 'other' meets the other 'other'? When
Smith is in Liberia she understands the Africans there as kindred
but (similar to her perceptions of the Burmese) she is often appalled
and condescending about their non-Christian lifestyles. Similarly,
Douglass writes about feeling a deep pride for Egyptian oarsmen
he sees on the Nile but his gaze is undoubtedly Western and he feels
as much apart from these Egyptians as he wants to feel akin to them.
This issue still exists. The Black American experience
within America is still essentially an experience as 'the other'
or a 'third world' experience. However, once an African American
sets foot in a considerably poorer country, he or she is automatically
part of an imperialist experience because we are unavoidably American.
I think the primary reason this is not extensively explored is because
there have always been far more pressing issues for African Americans
within the US. But with a shrinking world and the abundance of immigrants
of color sharing space with Black Americans and with the expansive
role of the US military throughout the brown world, I think the
history and dynamics of these relationships should be looked at
more closely. The poems in this project barely begin to graze the
surface but I hope they add to what should be a growing dialogue.
I really like what Vijay Prashad has written on the subject.
I have spent a lot of time studying black expatriates
in the 19th century. In my music also, I always use Western music
that non-Western cultures have come up with, to create a kind of
cultural ping-pong. Music by Fela or Bappi Lahiri or whomever which
is heavily influenced by the West - in fact almost an imitation
of a Western genre - that is sent back here, I think I can do something
with it and send it over there one more time to see what happens.
For example, if I sample a track from Hong Kong,
it would not be traditional Cantonese music I would sample but a
Chinese surfer band from the sixties or something. The effort would
be to diminish the exploitative nature of sampling, especially on
an imperial level, and instead add to an expanding cultural dialogue
by quoting and commenting on a form that had previously quoted and
commented on previous forms that I am in some way connected to.
Many would argue that that's what sampling does best anyway.
This work has been described as an urban song
cycle. What are the distinctive features of this form?
Vijay Iyer: This is not a pre-existing form.
The idea of a song cycle is pretty old and we call this a song cycle
because in a sense it is answering back, in an ironic way, to the
classical notion of a song cycle, which is something that you associate
with composers like Schubert. When we make albums you could call
them song cycles too. They are like suites of pieces that are connected
in some way, put together in some sequence that makes sense. The
purpose behind using this terminology is to demand that our work
be considered on these terms. Even if we are associated with the
so-called "jazz world" or the so-called "hip-hop world," calling
it a song cycle just asserts that there is a bit more weight behind
it than is usually assumed to be the case with more popular forms.
There is a great deal of thought that has gone into it and it is
actually telling a larger story in a way.
By designating it a song cycle, we are also expanding
the idea of what a song is because there is no singing in this piece,
but the poems that Mike have written are very beautiful. They have
a yearning quality to them that you could hear almost as a song.
The way I have set them to music has been more like creating musical
environments for these texts to be delivered quasi-dramatically:
read as poetry really. So we are also experimenting with the idea
of what can be construed as a song cycle.
This is your first collaborative effort. How
do your individual experiences and talents complement each other?
What prompted you to work together on this piece in particular?
Mike Ladd: Hip-hop is often touted as some
universalizing phenomena for my generation and those that succeed
it. However there is something to be said for such a verbose popular
art form and its impulse toward dialogue. It allows people of different
cultural backgrounds to share an art form, and though it remains
primarily Black American (for now), people are allowed to verbally
insert their own cultural identifiers (as long as it doesn't offend
the mass market). Vijay and I both grew up around this tradition.
This is an anomalous example but once at a talent show in high school
in Uttar Pradesh, my friend Javaid and I rhymed while playing tabla;
predictably the chorus was "dah dhin dhin dah".
This project made a lot of sense to me because of
the experiences that I had had - whether it was living in Boston,
or going to high school in Uttar Pradesh, or living in NY for ten
years, or living in Zimbabwe. It enabled me to put things together
in a much clearer, more explicit, way, rather than having them as
secret influences. It also allowed me to learn a lot about things
I have always had an interest in: jazz, experimental music, and
forward-thinking music in general.
Vijay has been able to help me get a better foothold
in all this because a lot of what I do in my own work is experimental
but you always need to build your base. We are in a time where,
especially with electronic music, you can hack around forever and
get plenty of accolades for making what is essentially bullshit.
I am not a musician, but I make electronic music. So it helps me
a lot to solidify where I am going musically to be better acquainted
with people who treat music from every angle - from a rigorous angle,
from an academic angle, and also from the same visceral angle with
which I approach it.
Also, the fact that I am not actually doing any
substantial music for this project is a godsend, because it has
enabled me to do what I've really wanted to do for a long time,
which is get back to strictly writing.
Vijay Iyer: Mike is being really modest about
his musical abilities because the stuff he puts together, the musical
collage work, using samples and electronic sounds, I think is completely
brilliant. Something that I was drawn to immediately when I heard
it was just a sense of how to be with music in a way that you don't
often hear from poets or hip-hop artists. Even when he recites his
poetry, I hear his belief in the power of music. He really hears
the space between the words as music.
Both of us have this strong urge to articulate hybridity
through our music and writing; it seems to work in a very complementary
way. All our influences are hybrid, all the way down. It is not
about taking some stable classical form and merging it with some
other stable form. All these forms are dynamic and changing all
the time. When we talk about "Indian" music, what is that exactly?
Music that a billion people listen to? I have no idea what that
is, it could be anything really.
At some point for this project, we were putting
together an electronic track for one of the pieces and we thought
we should sample some Bollywood music because the character is talking
about the beauty of Bollywood film. Mike has a fairly large collection
of Bollywood music and we tried to delve through it to find something
that would be iconically Bollywood-sounding, but we couldn't because
it is so hybrid to begin with.
They have been sampling the rest of the world longer
than anyone has been sampling them. I think it is important to tell
this story - and tell it in a way that is not necessarily linear.
It can be told just in the details of how we put music together:
the form itself can reveal something about this hybrid space that
we live in.
Both of you have been quite prolific and successful
in your respective fields. Would you say that your previous work
has generally been overtly political in the way that this piece
is?
Mike Ladd: Yes, certainly. This piece is
actually toned down a bit from what I normally do, so it has been
a bit of an evolution for me. My first work was pretty much just
rhetorical.
This work is political as much as everything I am
ever going to do is political even if it is just an album of whistling.
This is just my understanding of politics. I am continuously asked
whether I consider myself a political artist, and in fact I don't
think of it in those terms. I consider myself someone who is always
expressing my life in its entirety. A great deal of my life was
spent sitting around my mother's dining-room table with her friends
who, for the most part, were writers or musicians or professors,
and listening to political discussions. Or at my aunt's house, where
I also grew up a lot of the time when my aunt was cleaning houses,
and my uncle worked in the post office, there would also be political
discussions. Or when I was hanging out with my cousin Dean, there
would be a political discussion; a lot of what he was doing was
also political.
I don't think it is possible to extract politics
from any one of these realms. And that is just how I approach everything.
Vijay Iyer: I have always seen my work as
politicized in a certain way. It is also very much about my life
experiences transduced into this other medium. Not only are they
representing my life experiences, they are literally my life experiences:
the act of making music is my life experience. Within that is my
perspective as a person of color in this country and that is utterly
fundamental to everything I do and to every human interaction that
I have in this culture. I think just being aware of that casts a
different light on the work I do from my own perspective.
What I mean is that I always see what I am doing
as somehow the outcome of this path that I have been on, and so
much of that has been about negotiating this identity and figuring
out who I am, and trying to express that.
Mike Ladd: This is a very old point, but
if you have any shade that is not white it is difficult to extract
politics from what you are doing. The reality is that for anyone
who is white it is also difficult to ignore politics, but there
are a lot of blinders set up so it is still easier to avoid from
that perspective. But these are also fragile blinders.
I think it is also important to point out that this
project started before 9/11. So this piece was conceived of before
the airport, as an idea, had changed shape yet again, and has since
probably metamorphosed about 15 times.
When I first began to look at this stuff, when I
first wrote 'Airplane', the vessel was still completely passive.
I talked to good friends who did not grow up here but either just
went to college here and were thinking of staying, or had decided
to move here. We always talked about how the airplane represented
a carrier of family, and thoughts of home. It was a much softer
object still.
My friend, Kanishka Raja, has an amazing painting
of this airplane flying, and it is quite ambivalent whether it is
flying into a classroom, or above it. He was showing it at a gallery
when 9/11 happened, which completely changed the context of the
airplane in the work. So politics is this as well: no matter how
hard you try not to be political, some things are out of your hands.
How can you possibly avoid that?
Vijay Iyer: One thing I think we are exploring
in this piece is the degree to which a place like an airport which,
in the past, was perceived in idealistic terms as this neutral public
place, is in fact very non-neutral. It is actually shot through
with all these power dynamics and contingent situations. It is a
space that has so many associations now. Also of interest to us
is the way the airport is represented: the more you explore, the
more you realize the depth of its implication in this globalized,
postcolonial world.
Is there something about the content of this
piece that made you experiment with all these different musical
forms (hip-hop, experimental jazz, etc.)?
Vijay Iyer: In my music I have learned from
a lot of different forms. I would not say I am doing all those forms;
I wouldn't even say that I am doing hip-hop. In fact it is often
debatable whether I am even doing jazz!
It's difficult when you're dealing with something
that is as mass-culture and as global as hip-hop is now. Hip-hop
almost refers to a generation more than it does to a style or even
an aesthetic. It is so vast.
Mike Ladd: The names of all these forms are
so loaded. Both jazz and hip-hop are such exploited genres. All
these concepts, like jazz-dance, or hip-hop theater, you get the
idea of people who couldn't come up with the thing itself, couldn't
play jazz or couldn't rhyme, so they had to invent new terms!
Of course there is amazing jazz dance and great
hip-hop theater but I think any fusion of genres is risky. What
we are doing is risky. What makes me feel a little better is that
we (especially Vijay) were fairly accomplished in our respective
genres before we came together. But these combinations of amalgamations
are inevitable. Many of my favorite poets were influenced by music
as much as by writing and they understand the natural symbiosis;
Al Young, Michael Harper and Baraka to name only a fraction. Thomas
Sayers Ellis did the same thing with Funkadelic (that got me heated
because I wanted to do that!) For me, the line between good hip-hop
and strong poetry can be incredibly thin. When people ask you what
you think of the state of hip-hop, which you get in a lot of music
magazines, it's like asking, "What's the condition of the weather
around the world? And what do you think of it?"
Vijay Iyer: It's like what I was saying before
about hybridity. All these are things I listen to and love, and
things that inform what I do, but I wouldn't claim to be representing
any one of those genres. I would just say they are things that have
inspired me; this has just been the case in all of my music before
this project as well.
This project specifically is a departure for me
in the sense that I am working so closely with text and trying to
leave space for that. I have to think much more compositionally
than I really ever have. I have always tried to have a compositional
perspective on everything in my work; meaning that it is not just
about showing off that I can play the piano, but about really trying
to create some larger statement or larger shape. Having to do that
in a way that's married to this text is kind of a different act.
It just requires a bit more space. What I can say about what I've
learned from these other genres or these other equally hybrid forms,
is how to create space, how to work with space.
What performers and musicians are you most influenced
by?
Mike Ladd: Ishmael Reed, especially in regard
to this project, because he has one album called "Conjure" that
he did with Taj Mahal which is a wonderful fusion of poetry and
music. Also for this project, I've been reading a lot of Harriet
Mullen, Ai; Yousef Kominyaka, Agha Shahid Ali, Tagore, Senghor,
Robert Hayden, Octavio Paz, Nathaniel Mackey, Mahmoud Darwish, and
Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
Musically, John Coltrane's Infinity, Leo Jones,
with a lot of hybrid type jazz from the '70s, De La Soul, and Eric
B and Rakim, Def Jux emcees, Nas, Yo La Tengo, Funkadelic, Anthony
Braxton, and Ornette Coleman.
Vijay Iyer: All the same people!
Braxton is a hero of mine, Mingus is a hero of mine,
Ornette Coleman is a hero of mine. As a pianist, I have been mainly
inspired by the pianist composers, the people who approached their
music more from a compositional standpoint than from the standpoint
of showing off that they could play. People like Duke Ellington
and Thelonious Monk and more recently, Randy Weston, Geri Allen,
and Muhal Richard Abrams. These are all pianist composers who have
inspired me.
Some of these people I have listened to for thousands
of hours. Someone like Coltrane or Thelonious Monk, when I hear
them now it's almost like hearing my uncle or my father or my teacher.
It feels like they're talking to me when I listen to them because
I have learned so much sitting at their feet. What I've learned
specifically is how to be a musician of the world, how to really
listen to everything and speak that through your music, while still
being completely yourself. That is something I think has been done
in African-American music to a higher degree than anywhere else,
because that music has always been about reaching beyond the immediate
for something else.
Mike Ladd: Reaching, and also being able
to understand what is beyond the immediate because there is always
this certitude in black music, like saying: "I know exactly what's
beyond these four walls, I know exactly what's past this field,
and here it is."
Vijay Iyer: It is almost like articulating
a sense of how the world should be -- which is just deeply inspirational
in so many ways, not even just musical ways -- or just about how
to exist in the world, to live with that certitude.
Of course I am also very influenced by the music
of South Asia, a good deal of which I grew up hearing. Over the
last decade, I have tried to figure out what is going on in this
music that is so beautiful, that would mystify me when I was a child.
I remember seeing Carnatic music concerts, which were embodied by
such precision, and yet such mystery as well. This music could be
really playful but it also had this sense of depth, because it's
devotional music. I have studied West African drumming so a lot
of the polyrhythmic ideas that I concoct are inspired by some hybridization
of West African drumming and South Indian drumming.
I am also inspired by the classical tradition of
Europe, particularly of 20th century composers, like [B*la] Bart÷k,
[Oliver] Messiaen, [Arnold] Schoenberg and people like that. I grew
up listening to pop music, and when De La Soul's Three Feet High
and Rising came out in 1988, it changed my life; Public Enemy was
equally important. I grew up around hip-hop too and that has been
very much a part of my life. I think all these things just speak
through the music that I put together. I just try to make music
I like, and this is all music that I like so it just ends up sounding
occasionally like elements of all of it. http://www.asiasource.org/arts/language.cfm
Village Voice
A Jazz Pianist and a Hip-Hop Poet Catch Language in the Balance
Invisible Cities, Invisible
Men
by Hua Hsu
May 7 - 13, 2003
Vijay Iyer (left) and Mike Ladd,
at the Asia Society (photo: Richard Mitchell)
On April 15, 2001, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi
deplaned at New York's JFK Airport on his way from a film festival
in Hong Kong to one in Buenos Aires. Panahi was on a festival tour
for his latest film, The Circle, and planners in both cities,
as well as the attendants on his flight, told him that he did not
require a transit visa. They were mistaken. Iran is on a short list
of nations from which the United States requires all travelers to
present visas regardless of the length of their stay, and in 1996
Attorney General Janet Reno had signed an order requiring the INS
to fingerprint and photograph all Iranians upon entry into this
country. With no transit visa and too much pride to have his mug
shot taken, Panahi was chained to a wooden bench with similarly
detained travelers from around the world. Ten hours later, he was
sent back to Hong Kong, in handcuffs.
"I saw the Statue of Liberty in the waters and I
unconsciously smiled," Panahi wrote in an e-mail to the National
Board of Review of Motion Pictures, which had awarded The Circle
their prestigious Freedom of Expression Award. "I tried to draw
the curtain and there were scars of the chain on my hand. I could
not stand the other travelers gazing at me and I just wanted to
stand up and cry that I'm not a thief! I'm not a murderer! I'm not
a drug dealer! I... I am just an Iranian, a filmmaker. But how I
could tell this, in what language? In Chinese, Japanese, or to the
mother languages of those people from Mexico, Peru, Russia, India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh... or in the language of that young boy from
Sri Lanka?
"Really, in what language?"
Almost two years to the day later, pianist Vijay
Iyer and rapper-poet Mike Ladd are sitting in the homeliest diner
on the whole Upper West Side and discussing In What Language?,
a live multimedia projectÑinspired by Panahi's storyÑthat runs at
the Asia Society from this Thursday through Sunday. It is an ambitious
protest for a belittling time. The performance fuses Ladd's depictions
of the internal monologues of travelers and laborers in an international
airport with Iyer's rumbling, troubled soundtrack. Though the particulars
of Panahi's story are never directly invoked, they set the inspiration
and context for the show. "He had already checked what his needs
would be, what his requirements would be," Iyer explains calmly
and coolly, before his voice rises to meet his outrage. "He was
just transiting! He wasn't even leaving the airport!"
The airport, with its relentless energy of coming
and going, is the perfect site for the pair's commentary on lives
in transition. Iyer had long hoped to engage in something that looked
at how people of color negotiated globalization, but it wasn't until
hearing about Panahi's case that his project found its shape, name,
and setting. He applied for a grant through the Asia Society and
approached Ladd about contributing lyrics.
Iyer and Ladd first met in 1997 when Iyer was playing
keyboard for boho San Francisco hip-hop band Midnight Voices. In
the years since, they've distinguished themselves as freethinkers
resisting the trappings of their home genres. Ladd's five albums
bear the schizophrenic energy of someone equally moved by poetry,
hip-hop, and hardcore punk in youth. His hoarse, wandering vocals
belie the concentrated vigor with which he approaches and dissects
history. Iyer's playing is marked by a dense and deceptively rhythmic
style; nothing comes easy in his music but it never feels like an
exercise in avant-excess. Instead, it's the injury of collapsing
his disparate, sometimes dissonant, influencesÑAfrican, Asian, and
European AmericanÑinto a single, cross-cultural stream.
The weight of history hangs heavily on each of Iyer's
notes, but his music isn't literal about the stories he's telling.
The experiences of a self-taught, 29-year-old jazz pianist born
to immigrant parents aren't supposed to constitute a neat, accessible
story, and that's part of the self-conscious worry Iyer and Ladd
bring to the character sketches of In What Language? Ladd explains:
"It's that real challenge of trying not to exoticize anyoneÑtrying
not to fall into any stereotypes, but at the same time, trying not
to universalize the situation. You don't want to end up with this
thing where, hey, we're all humans."
The majority of Ladd's 18 poems are told from the
point of view of travelers and laborers. The characters are all
composed from snatches of conversation Ladd had while traveling
or hanging out with the hodgepodge of nationalities and cultures
that compose his Bronx neighborhood. Ladd also wrote a series of
more personal interludes titled The Color of Circumference that
re-examine the story from his perspective as a young African American
male. There is also a biting critique of the American empire, "The
Density of the 19th Century," that Ladd describes as "the history
of conquest in two minutes."
In What Language? succeeds by not wearing
its political views on its sleeve but offering them slyly, through
the feeling the performance evokes. The musicÑcomposed by Iyer and
performed by a seven-piece bandÑglides and swirls with a thick,
heartening spirit. Ladd's characters are complicated, and though
they emphasize the uniqueness of their positions, there's always
something open, even affirming, about them. A Sierra Leonean woman
awaiting her asylum hearing and withstanding hysteria retreats into
her memories. She shares one of her father, sitting on a faraway
beach, sipping an orange soda and listening to a cassette of Billy
Joel's "New York State of Mind." An Iraqi businessman packing his
suitcase watches mob movies on cable, trying in vain to mentally
parse the insecurities unique to his own character from those the
world wishes upon him. "It's just so crucial that people see some
depiction of normal people," Iyer emphasizes. "Right now, they're
just blips on a screen, they're not real people."
"Inanna After Baghdad" is not about a real person
but it's one of the evening's most moving moments. The poem is named
after the Mesopotamian goddess of life, and is narrated by someone
seeing her appear, disappear, and reappear throughout history. As
if to suggest that divinity has been defeated by human folly, the
poem, which is the only one that is explicitly about the war, ends
with Inanna trudging through deserted Baghdad streets, tears trailing
behind her righteous steps. It's an image that screams pain, in
this language or any.
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