Let's discuss how the notion of articulating identity through musical production plays out in the projects you undertake, in the way your ideas developed. Vijay, when I first met you, you were explicit about this.
Vijay Iyer: When I first came to New York, it was more through words. Now it's more through deeds-when this article comes out, there will be 12 albums of my music or co-led projects on which I've articulated the spectrum of who I am. Entering the jazz world, I had to find my place, because there were no precedents for people like me-the progeny of the first major wave of South Asians who immigrated in the mid-'60s-in this area of music, or actually in American culture at all. Coming of age in the '90s, there was this sense of figuring out just how to be a person in this scene. It took a while before we really started to be visible in culture, except in these clichéd ways. Then Jhumpa Lahiri got a Pulitzer, Mira Nair made Monsoon Wedding, everyone knows who Salman Rushdie is, we have Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle and so on-all those things are in your face. It's like I can move about the world more freely without having to specify to such a degree why I even exist. I can be more free with the projects I do, and don't feel that has to be answered any more.
Jason Moran: Good for you. I'm not there yet. I grew up in the South, in Houston, in this black neighborhood. We weren't country club, but my younger brother and I played a lot of tennis and golf, playing with kids that didn't look like us, but we'd also play with kids who did look like us in national black tennis and golf tournaments, and see this representation of yourself. But I still wasn't necessarily seeing it in music, until Wynton Marsalis came to Houston and my parents, who took us to almost every jazz concert that came to Houston, took us to see that, too.
After I moved to New York, I started hearing these conceptual questions about what it is to be African-American. Not to say that they weren't being addressed in Texas. But with all the diverse minds in New York, you get a certain insider mentality about what else is happening around America, and you think, "Come on, you all." I started looking at my roots like that: "Come on, you all!" So in my recent Thelonious Monk project, I made a point of going back to the plantation in North Carolina where Monk's grandparents were slaves. We videotaped ourselves walking through that field, and we tell the story of Archibald Monk owning Monk's great-grandparents to help the audience put together how the name Monk gets on the back of Thelonious. I wanted to remind myself. That's the wall I keep bumping up against.
Matt, during the '80s you got involved in a scene that articulated a particular outcat esthetic, which you've evolved in a systematic way.
Matthew Shipp: Right. And an un-Cecil Taylor way, which is important. It's funny-this is the third or fourth generation influenced by Monk. The first Monk-influenced generation includes Randy Weston, Mal Waldron and Cecil Taylor, diverse voices who all paid homage to Monk but created original voices of their own. Just how diverse the continuum of this music is, how much space it contains for multiple voices and ways of approaching things, for different branches and roots, is a testament to that pyramid that goes from Duke Ellington to Monk on down.
Now, before I address the idea of identity and production of sound: I am consciousness. We are all consciousness. Consciousness is energy. It's never been created and will never be destroyed. It goes through transformations. In other words, like everyone else, I have been here since forever. The quest of being a musician is taking my pure consciousness and applying it to the pureness of the ebony and the ivory that makes up the piano. Hopefully I am pure mind and the piano is pure vibrations and mathematical frequencies, and my understanding of it and its understanding of me can create some type of language that is hoisted out because I happen to be here on this planet-in this energy vibration-right now.
The last entry on Jenny Scheinman's autobiographical musings on her web site was dated December 2005. It reads, "[A]t the moment, I'm most focused on the turning of the year from oh-five to oh-six and thinking about what might come."
In career dream mode, the violinist/vocalist continued, "If asked, my new year's prayer would be ... to find a manager and a record label. Then I might have time to write a suite for septet and string orchestra, to record [my] singing band with Norah [Jones] and the Handsome People, to play my music outside of New York City, fancy that!"
More than two years later, on the first day of spring, sitting at a coffee shop near Union Square in New York, the laid-back and slender Scheinman marveled at rehearing her comments. "I'm so glad you read this to me," she said. "I don't remember writing this, but all of this has come together."
Not only has the Brooklyn-based Scheinman hooked up with manager David Whitehead (who reps David Byrne, David Bowie, Joe Henry, Rodney Crowell and a sprinkling of Texas singer-songwriters), but she's also linked up with Koch Records. As a result of these recent developments, Scheinman, best known for her frequent collaborations with Bill Frisell, launched two CDs simultaneously on May 29, making good her motto: Genre is irrelevant; categories are deaf.
