Vijay Iyer

Vijay Iyer is an American pianist, composer and bandleader, born in 1971 in Albany, New York, to Indian immigrant parents. Largely self-taught at the piano, he works between jazz, improvised music and composition, and he is best known for his trio recordings and his long run of albums for ECM. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 and has taught at Harvard since 2014. Vijay Iyer studied mathematics and physics at Yale and took a doctorate at Berkeley on rhythm and embodied cognition in African and African American music.