To say that the American composer and jazz pianist Vijay Iyer is a multi-faceted artist would be quite the understatement. The son of Tamil immigrants, Iyer was born and raised in New York and began classical music training at age 3. His undergraduate degree at Yale was in mathematics and physics, but music retained its strong pull, and at UC Berkeley his 1998 Ph.D. dissertation was titled ‘Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics.”

As a pianist, Vijay Iyer started attracted a lot of attention. Reviewing “Break Stuff,” his 20th CD release, the critic Steve Greenlee wrote, “He may be the most celebrated musician in jazz.”

On today’s date in 2005, Iyer and the ETHEL String Quartet gave the premiere performance of his chamber work entitled “Mutations,” a suite that combines improvisatory elements of jazz with the meticulously organized scoring of contemporary classical music. The work was recorded for the ECM label, a home for many cross-discipline composers and performers.

“The world likes to put us in boxes,” says Iyer. “But when you’re an artist, a composer, a creative person .. you find a lot of different sides of yourself opening up.”