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Visionary pianist Vijay Iyer gets a well-earned MacArthur

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When Vijay Iyer performed at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2001, there was no mistaking the grandeur of his pianism, nor its harmonic originality.

Since then, Iyer has developed into a singular voice in jazz, his solo playing by turns galvanic and introspective, his ensemble work mercurial in sound and gesture.

It's not an exaggeration to say that no one in jazz sounds like Iyer, including Iyer. His music, in other words, is too chameleonic and rhythmically volatile to be easily predicted or categorized, even from phrase to phrase. Each idea leads to a surprising sound or texture or color.

That the originality and creativity of Iyer's music has won him a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, or “genius grant,” will come as a surprise to no one who has followed his gripping live performances and groundbreaking recordings of the past couple of decades.

To Iyer, his unorthodox methods of building improvisations and compositions spring from the work of inventors who came before him.

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