Vijay Iyer ([ˌvɪdʒeɪ ˈaɪjər];[1] born Vijay Raghunathan,[2] October 26, 1971) is a composer, pianist, bandleader, producer, writer, and professor based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway".[3] Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship,[4] a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship,[5] a Grammy nomination,[6] and the Alpert Award in the Arts.[7] He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012,[8] 2015,[9] 2016,[10] and 2018.[11] In 2014, he was jointly appointed with tenure to Harvard University's departments of music and African American studies as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts.[12][13]
Born in Albany and raised in Fairport, New York (a suburb of Rochester),[14] he is the son of Tamil Indian immigrants to the United States.[15] He received 15 years of Western classical training on violin beginning at the age of three. He began playing the piano by ear in his childhood and is mostly self-taught on that instrument.[16]
