Pianist Vijay Iyer marks a bittersweet return to Bay Area for SFJAZZ run

When pianist Vijay Iyer talks about the Bay Area there’s no hiding his abiding love for the region, and that’s what makes his gimlet-eyed view of our present struggles hit so hard.

He arrived in Oakland in the summer 1992 as a fresh-faced 20-year-old with a degree in math and physics from Yale University. UC Berkeley’s physics doctoral program kept him busy, but Iyer found time to start sitting in on the popular Sunday night jam sessions at the Bird Cage, a working class Black bar on Telegraph Avenue across from his apartment.

A casual but intense proving ground occasionally attended by tenor sax legend Pharoah Sanders, the Bird Cage sessions marked the first steps on a path that has led Iyer to the highest reaches in jazz, academia, and American music writ large, including Bay Area engagements with SF Performances, Cal Performances, Stanford Live and SFJAZZ (where he served as a resident artistic director from 2016-2018).

He returns to the SFJAZZ April 6-9, opening a four-night run with a solo recital on the Thursday show followed by three trio concerts with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey (both of whom are also award-winning composers and bandleaders).

They’re focusing on music from the trio’s yet-to-be-released second album, “Compassion,” which came together in the summer of 2021, “just as things were reopening and we were coming back into the daylight,” said Iyer, 51, the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University.

The title track of the trio’s acclaimed 2021 debut album for ECM, “Uneasy,” aptly sums up Iyer’s feelings witnessing the changes wrought on the Bay Area since his formative years here before the internet boom. The arts are still thriving, but he’s seen firsthand “how hard it’s been for people who predate all that,” Iyer said.

Referring to the news that the renowned dancer, playwright, and choreographer Robert Henry Johnson’s recent death had gone unreported for weeks, Iyer said he “just found out that someone I had worked with, a choreographer and dear friend, died several months before it was noticed, which really speaks to the abandonment of people and the harm that’s been done.”

Whether or not he mentions Johnson’s passing on stage, Iyer will have him in mind at the SFJAZZ Center, which is not far from where they once performed together when the pianist worked with the cutting-edge hip-hop group Midnight Voices. Unafraid of exploring big ideas in his music, there’s good reason why Iyer is sometimes pegged as a cerebral player. But what sets his trio apart is the ability to communicate roiling emotion in visceral interplay.

He and Sorey, both MacArthur “Genius” Fellows, have collaborated in various instrumental settings for two decades. Adding Oh to the mix instantly manifested “something pretty indescribable and intense,” he said. “Whatever that was, we need more of that! Linda and Tyshawn as practitioners of groove, that particular quality of forward motion, that thrust.”

“Both of them have spectacular ears and can hear instantaneously whatever I’m playing,” Iyer continued. “There’s nothing like that quality of listening, their virtuosity as instrumentalists and awareness of sound, texture, dynamics and propulsion.”

Always on the lookout for that indescribable feeling, Iyer said he experienced a similar frisson in 2018 the first time he performed with Grammy Award-winning Pakistan-born vocalist Arooj Aftab and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. Just released on Verve Records, their new album “Love In Exile” features Iyer on piano and electronics, Ismaily on bass and Moog synth, and Aftab’s incantatory Urdu vocals exploring a series of expansively intoxicating soundscapes.