Vijay Iyer is a celebrated jazz musician, Harvard professor, MacArthur "genius grant" recipient, and lapsed physicist.
This menagerie of impressive titles might not make him the ideal person to speak out against the "model minority" myth surrounding Asian-Americans. But, in a profile that ran in last week's New Yorker, Iyer revealed how critics' stereotypes of Asian Americans have affected the reception of his work over the years.
“To be a jazz musician is to express some American project, to be part of American history, to take in those rugged ideals to which improvisation is central ... Critical writing used to attempt to place me by othering me, by putting me outside the history of jazz. Everything I did was seen as different and not as the continuity of a tradition. Critics never describe black music as rigorous or cerebral or mathematical, although Coltrane was interested in mathematics. Since I was Asian, I was seen as having only my intellect to use.”
Iyer's experience demonstrates how Asian American stereotypes, which may seem innocuous or like minor annoyances, can be harmful. "Intellect" is a positive good in itself, but when posed in opposition to some "authentic" jazz tradition, references to it crippled critical discourse on Iyer's music. (Not to mention the fact that the dummy contrast between "rigorous" and non-rigorous jazz is sort of silly on its own, since all jazz music relies heavily on improvisation and irregular meter.)
Iyer's quote shows how stereotype threat is a double-edged sword. While critics were eager to intellectualize his work, they were hesitant to ascribe the same values to earlier, mostly black, jazz musicians, which is why it took so long for the establishment to take jazz seriously. In The New Yorker interview, Iyer touched further on the reality of the "model minority" myth as it relates to his own history.
His parents, he explained, immigrated from Tamil Nadu, India, and his father has a PhD in pharmacology, which means they were exactly the kind of Asians allowed to get American visas in the 1960s (and thereafter). It's not like everyone -- or even a notable majority -- of the billion-plus populations of India and China are doctors and engineers; their overrepresentation in America was "curated by policy," as Iyer put it.
Like a lot of second-generation Americans, Iyer seems to have grown up with a relaxed awareness of his difference, being "neither white nor black, and having a different-sounding name." One reason Asian American identity issues are easy to sideline is that the structural inequality beneath them is often of a different order than those of other minorities in America. As Alec Wilkinson writes of Iyer, "He sees himself as someone of color but, as the child of parents who came willingly to the country, as being in a different position from people whose ancestors arrived as captives."
So, not only was it tough for critics to figure out how to talk about Iyer, he himself grappled with tough questions concerning his identity and his relationship to jazz history.
Iyer's eventual and stunning success within his field came as he engaged with, rather than shirked away from, the challenge of situating himself in that African American musical tradition. A turning point came in San Francisco, where he was a doctoral student, when he found a group called Asian Improv that combined African American traditions with Asian instruments. It seemed to flip a switch for him. He realized that there is no ahistorical music, that almost every tradition is dynamic and capacious.
Said Iyer, “It became apparent to me that the history of this music is a history of communities where music was an uplifting force, and that situating myself in relation to that history was what mattered. It wasn’t about me trying to sound black. It was me figuring out my relationship to those histories.”
The full New Yorker profile of Iyer can be found here. See also: our 2013 interview with Iyer.
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