SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2017
VOLUME FIVE NUMBER ONE
ORNETTE COLEMAN
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
TYSHAWN SOREY
(November 4-10)
JALEEL SHAW
(November 11-17)
COUNT BASIE
(November 18-24)
NICHOLAS PAYTON
(November 25-December 1)
JONATHAN FINLAYSON
(December 2-8)
JIMMY HEATH
(December 9-15)
BRIAN BLADE
(December 16-22)
RAVI COLTRANE
(December 23-29)
CHRISTIAN SCOTT
(December 30-January 5)
GIL SCOTT-HERON
(January 6-12)
MARK TURNER
(January 13-19)
CRAIG TABORN
(January 20-26)
Tyshawn Sorey
(b. July 8, 1980)
Artist Biography by Matt Collar
New Jersey-born jazz drummer, pianist, composer, and educator Tyshawn Sorey is an expressive performer with an ear for modern creative acoustic jazz and expansive avant-garde classical works. Born in 1980 in Newark, Sorey holds an undergraduate degree from William Paterson University and a Master of Arts in composition from Wesleyan University. He has studied composition on the doctoral level at Columbia University and has taught at the School for Improvisational Music, the New School, and Wesleyan University.
Along with leading his own projects, Sorey has been a regular member of trumpeter Dave Douglas' Nomad ensemble as well as saxophonist Steve Coleman's Five Elements band. He has also racked up extensive performance experience with such artists as Wadada Leo Smith, Misha Mengelberg, Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, Myra Melford, and Anthony Braxton, among others.
As a solo artist, Sorey debuted in 2007 with That/Not, followed by Koan in 2009. He also collaborated on several trio albums with pianist Kris Davis and saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, including 2010's Paradoxical Frog. He has released several classical-leaning albums albums on Pi Recordings, including 2011's Oblique - I and 2014's Alloy. In 2015, he was awarded the Doris Duke Impact Award from the Doris Duke Foundation Performing Arts Awards. The following year he released his fifth album, The Inner Spectrum of Variables, which showcased his composition for piano trio and string trio. 2017's Verisimilitude saw Sorey continue to blur the boundaries between composition and improvisation.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/tyshawnsorey Tyshawn Sorey
Tyshawn Sorey is a composer, performer, educator, and scholar who works across a very extensive range of idioms in experimental music. Originally self-taught in composition, piano, trombone, and percussion, he has worked with chamber ensembles and collaborated with a diverse array of musicians, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Ray Anderson, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Coleman, Michele Rosewoman, Peter Evans, Mat Maneri, Steve Lehman, Mario Pavone, Ellery Eskelin, Vijay Iyer, Dave Douglas, Mark Helias and Butch Morris, among many others. Sorey’s recent article, Music and Meaning, discusses his approach to composition and improvisation, which is scheduled for release in late 2009 as part of a compilation of texts by musicians entitled ARCANA IV (John Zorn, ed.). Sorey has also conducted and participated in various lectures and master classes on improvisation, ensemble playing, and critical theory at the International Realtime Music Symposium in Norway, Hochschule für Musik Köln, School of Improvisational Music, Musikhochschule Nürnberg, Berklee College of Music, and Cité de la Musique in Paris. Tyshawn is also on the faculty of Brooklyn's School of Improvisational Music and New School University's Jazz and Contemporary Music program, and has received commissions from Van Lier Fellowship and Roulette Intermedium, most recently for a multi-chapter work in progress entitled “Wu-Wei,” recently premiered in its' entirety at The Stone in New York City, where he served as curator, in August 2009.
The New Vanguard
Is It Jazz? Improvisation? Tyshawn Sorey Is Obliterating the Lines
August 2, 2017
New York Times
The composer and musician Tyshawn Sorey is releasing “Verisimilitude,” perhaps his most captivating album yet. Credit Nathan Bajar for The New York Times
NEW HAVEN — “I never listen to music passively,” the musician and composer Tyshawn Sorey said recently, nestled in an easy chair at his home studio here. “No matter what it is — if it’s dance music, or if it’s Tibetan ritual, or if it’s noise.” He seemed to be implying that the philosophy flows in both directions: His own music won’t accommodate your preconceptions, so it demands full engagement.
Mr. Sorey, 37, who is about to release his sixth album, is a preternaturally talented multi-instrumentalist who has built a career in the territory between standard definitions. In some circles, he’s thought of as a jazz drummer; in others, he fits in more as an avant-garde composer.
On “Verisimilitude,” out this Friday, he is both, at the very least. The album features Mr. Sorey’s longstanding piano trio — he is on drum kit and percussion, with the pianist Cory Smythe and the bassist Chris Tordini — making music of furrowed slowness and bodily heave. It may be his most captivating album yet.
What isn’t immediately clear on “Verisimilitude” is where Mr. Sorey’s written music ends, and where improvisations begin. “The idea of what is composed and what is improvised is pointless,” Mr. Sorey said.
Related Coverage:
Review: Tyshawn Sorey Goes His Own Way at the Vanguard
NOV. 18, 2015
MUSIC REVIEW
Tyshawn Sorey and Marilyn Crispell Improvise at the Stone
JULY 31, 2014
MUSIC REVIEW
Tyshawn Sorey’s Wu Wei Quintet at Greenwich House
APRIL 18, 2013
It was after dinner on a recent Wednesday evening, and he was wearing all black: a button-down shirt, loose slacks. I’ve never seen him in any other outfit; when he performs, he almost always wears sunglasses. It’s as if he knew that to be seen is to be categorized. To be appreciated on your own terms, it’s best to simply be heard.
In July, Tyshawn Sorey demonstrated his ability to devise lengthy, spontaneous improvisations at a residency at the Stone. Credit Nathan Bajar for The New York Times
When playing with his trio, Mr. Sorey often rearranges his compositions to elicit chancy interplay. He’ll cue Mr. Smythe and Mr. Tordini to play certain measures backward, or in a scrambled order. This stems partly from the limitless ease with which Mr. Sorey handles notation; he can read over a score once and know it by heart.
“He has these almost superhuman abilities to do things like that without error,” Mr. Smythe said. He explained that in Mr. Sorey’s hands, seemingly arbitrary rearrangements can actually make a performance more electric. “Taking a kind of novel path through the material just necessitates invention,” he added.
In Koan II, a septet he started recently, Mr. Sorey guides the musicians with a combination of hand gestures, prescribed material and writing on a whiteboard. As novel as it is, his approach is really an inheritance. Mr. Sorey has been apprenticed to some of the late 20th century’s leading figures in creative music and imaginative scholarship: He completed his doctoral studies at Columbia this year and will take up a professorship once held by his mentor, the composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, at Wesleyan University in September. Representing a new synthesis, he is able to compose and dissect his own music at the highest level, and also to detail the historical context of his work.
Unlike most musicians today who pass through the higher-education system, Mr. Sorey doesn’t come from an upper-middle-class background. He grew up in the heart of Newark, attending public schools where arts education was sparse. His father helped foster his affinity for music, playing him all kinds of records and helping him build makeshift drum kits.
Mr. Sorey largely taught himself to play the piano in the basement of his church. He picked up the trombone because it was one of the few instruments available at his middle school. At Newark Arts High School, he was finally able to explore the drums more thoroughly; by the time he was a sophomore, he was playing R&B in area groups.
He entered William Paterson University as a classical trombone major, and professors recognized immediately that he had a bevy of gifts. He often placed out of classes, then used that time to study on his own. When he applied to transfer into an open spot to study jazz drumming, he was accepted over a half-dozen other applicants.
Mr. Sorey soon joined ensembles led by the pianist Vijay Iyer and the saxophonist Steve Coleman, and began an informal apprenticeship with the musician Butch Morris. A cornetist and composer, Morris is known for his system of “conduction,” which involves directing an ensemble of improvisers with a set of gestural cues, the conductor and instrumentalists creating a composition together in real time.
Credit Photographs by Nathan Bajar for The New York Times
Years later, in graduate school at Wesleyan, Mr. Sorey studied under Mr. Braxton, a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, whose compositions use a colorful notation system that ignores the strictures of standard staves. (The association, founded in Chicago in 1965, aims to nurture visionary black composers without accommodating the classical or jazz establishments.)
Mr. Braxton, a longtime academic, has used writing to delineate and defend his own practice, and encouraged Mr. Sorey to embrace his talents as a scholar. “He was saying it’s O.K. to be a black composer in your own way, and to develop your own language, and to also write about it,” Mr. Sorey said. The idea was “to find a way to communicate it to the public, so that you won’t go down in history as being defined by someone else.”
After receiving his master’s degree in 2011, he enrolled in a doctoral program at Columbia, where he studied with the electronic-music pioneer and ethnomusicologist George E. Lewis. For his dissertation, Mr. Sorey composed and performed an opera based on the repertoire of Josephine Baker, and he wrote a critical analysis of the media’s response to the piece.
2016 Ojai Music Festival: Saturday June 11, Ojai Late Night Concert at 10:30pm Video by Ojai Music Festival
Mr. Sorey’s ability to devise lengthy, spontaneous improvisations with the tautness and logic of a composition was on display last month during a residency at the Stone, in the East Village. On his final night, he gave a solo performance, stalking around behind a massive setup of bells and drums and other mallet instruments. He stroked a gong, then struck it forcefully, putting his shoulder into it. He tapped and pounded two close notes on the glockenspiel, drawing out its overtones. Things reached a climax about an hour in, when he swept across his electric keyboard in a violent crescendo, using a host of toneless sounds he’d programmed into it: shrieks, crashes, what sounded like dogs barking.
On “Verisimilitude,” that abundant energy hardly ever breaks through completely; it lingers just under the surface. It’s not rare for recordings of improvised music to give a sense of the physical space between instrumentalists, but with Mr. Sorey’s trio, that air seems to be in a state of charged collapse, packed with magnetic density.
Maybe what all this mystery and forbearance is about — where it derives its power — is a struggle to contain something more, something bright and physical. When Mr. Sorey is drumming in more high-action bands, like Mr. Iyer’s, there’s a bursting architecture to his playing that he simply won’t allow into his own trio.
Mr. Sorey isn’t one of the many jazz drummers now who imitate the rhythms of hip-hop or electronic dance music; the negative spatialism of his trio’s work is more obviously affiliated with Mr. Lewis’s electro-acoustic compositions, or the indeterminate music of Morton Feldman, or the ghostly drumming of Milford Graves. Still, there’s an undeniable resonance with the foreboding depths of trap, or the heavy, cavernous sounds of rap experimenters like Shabazz Palaces and Moor Mother.
But Mr. Sorey remains particularly invested in his own self-defined tradition. This summer, ECM Records released “Bells for the South Side,” by Roscoe Mitchell, also a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. It featured contributions from Mr. Sorey, who had studied Mr. Mitchell’s percussion music at Columbia; Mr. Mitchell’s vast percussion “cage” — an assembly of bells and cymbals and drums — had inspired Mr. Sorey’s own arrangement at the Stone.
During the album’s recording, Mr. Mitchell spontaneously invited Mr. Sorey to play from within his old cage, a rare honor. Mr. Sorey’s eyes went dewy as he recalled the occasion. Mr. Mitchell, reached by phone a few days later, called it “a special moment.”
“He’s an incredible thinker, and he takes his time and really has a look at things,” he said of Mr. Sorey. “He’s the next generation of us, and it’s amazing to see that happening.”
Five Recommended Performances
FIELDWORK “Door” (Pi Recordings, 2007) Mr. Iyer and the saxophonist Steve Lehman, both slightly older than Mr. Sorey, were two of his earliest confreres in New York City. In original tunes from all three members, the role of percussion, melody and leadership blur. On the drums, Mr. Sorey shows off a sparkling narrative clarity.
STEVE COLEMAN AND FIVE ELEMENTS “Harvesting Semblances and Affinities” (Pi Recordings, 2010) Mr. Coleman’s classic brand of knotty experimentalism is built on a balance of exuberance and severity. With Jen Shyu on wordless vocals, and a three-horn section rendering punchy patterns, Mr. Sorey becomes the fulcrum, holding things together with tightly bound beats and bustling syncopation.
TYSHAWN SOREY “The Inner Spectrum of Variables” (Pi Recordings, 2016) On his second album with Mr. Smythe and Mr. Tordini, Mr. Sorey adds a string trio to the mix. His lengthy compositions here run a personal gamut of modern classical influences, from Maurice Ravel to Karlheinz Stockhausen; moments of crystalline beauty fracture and disperse, opening onto something broader.
ROSCOE MITCHELL “Bells for the South Side” (ECM Records, 2017) Mr. Mitchell, a saxophonist, composer and multi-instrumentalist, convened associates old and new for this album, recorded at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago around the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians’s 50th anniversary. Mr. Sorey plays Mr. Mitchell’s old percussion cage, as well as piano and trombone; on the latter, we get a rare taste of his whispery, secretive tone.
Tyshawn Sorey’s sixth album is “Verisimilitude.”
TYSHAWN SOREY TRIO “Verisimilitude” (Pi Recordings, 2017) Mr. Sorey’s latest and best album is bereft of almost anything resembling a steady cadence. Instead, what’s inside the pulse — resonance, fluid, potential — comes to the fore.
Articles in this series examine jazz musicians who are helping reshape the art form, often beyond the glare of the spotlight.
A version of this article appears in print on August 3, 2017, on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Defying (and Denying) Definition. Order Reprints| Today's Paper
Tyshawn Sorey Defeats Preconceptions
The prodigious multi-instrumentalist and composer transcends the borders of jazz, classical, and experimental music.
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker
The prodigious drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey is currently in residence at the Stone. Illustration by Gaurab Thakali
Something vital is happening at the boundary between classical music and jazz. The border has long been an active and porous one, going back to the days when Duke Ellington adopted symphonic forms and Maurice Ravel assimilated the blues. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, what Gunther Schuller dubbed the Third Stream movement encompassed modernist compositions with jazz features and large-scale conceptions by the likes of Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman. Since the nineteen-seventies, John Zorn has been crisscrossing the divide in kinetic patterns. The striking thing about twenty-first-century explorations of this terrain is that they no longer require a name or a justification; rather, a growing community of creative musicians—from elders like Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith to younger exponents like Vijay Iyer and Sylvie Courvoisier—draw on classical and jazz elements as the occasion requires. They seek not so much a seamless fusion as the freedom to move around at will.
The composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey, a Newark native, who turns thirty-seven this month, is among the most formidable denizens of the in-between zone. He is currently in residence at the Stone (July 4-9), the Zorn-led venue that is in the process of moving from a cramped East Village space to roomier digs at the New School. In August, Sorey will release a trio album, called “Verisimilitude,” on the Pi label. And in the fall he will begin teaching at Wesleyan, taking Braxton’s place on the faculty. In the jazz world, he is best known for his asymmetrical, unpredictable, timbrally explosive drumming, which has given anarchic momentum to a number of Iyer’s ensemble pieces. Yet in the past couple of years he has also made his mark with imposing compositional statements: a song cycle paying tribute to Josephine Baker, which had its première at the 2016 Ojai Music Festival (and can be seen online), and a two-hour suite entitled “The Inner Spectrum of Variables,” a recording of which was released by Pi last year.
“Inner Spectrum,” a piece in six movements for violin, viola, cello, bass, drums, and piano, is a creation that defeats all preconceptions. It traverses a confounding array of styles, from limpid, neo-Baroque episodes to fogbound, static textures reminiscent of Morton Feldman. At times, Sorey sets up a dance-inflected pulse, suggesting not only jazz but also various non-Western traditions, including what Pi’s notes identify as Ethiopian modal jazz. Some sections are improvisational, with Sorey following a technique that the late Butch Morris described as “conduction,” or conducted improvisation. How the composer finds cohesion in such variegated materials is mysterious, but it probably has to do both with the underlying force of his ideas and with the commitment he elicits from his collaborators, who include the violist Kyle Armbrust and the versatile new-music pianist Cory Smythe. Here is an extraordinary talent who can see across the entire musical landscape. ♦
This article appears in other versions of the July 10 & 17, 2017, issue, with the headline “Inner Landscape.”
“I’m into doing the best that I can do on every given occasion to express whatever thoughts through my music,” explains Sorey, 37.
He says that creating his own ensembles, and writing for a variety of types of groups, was crucial to exploring sonic possibilities as a drummer. "For me," he explains, "it just made perfect sense, in terms of my interest in exploring timbre and texture and that kind of thing. In a lot of groups that I played in, when I'm playing more rhythmically busy music, such as — well, I don't like using terms like 'jazz' or whatever, but for sake of the argument, we'll say styles like jazz, R&B, funk, stuff like that — I'm used to playing a lot of very rhythmic music, and a lot of very rhythmically busy music. And while I totally respect the people who play in these genres, and all of the people who I've played with who do this type of work, there were no situations for me to really get to explore the instrument the way I wanted to — which is as a sound instrument, and not as a rhythmic instrument."
Tyshawn Sorey’s latest album, “Verisimilitude,” comes out on Aug. 4. (Courtesy of Tyshawn Sorey)
by Dan Ouellette
Senior Jazz Editor
ZEALnyc
November 13, 2015
Kris and all of the other musicians I mentioned above are all very sensitive to the needs of the music and they serve the music ego-free and agenda-free. They are all very easy to work with, and they bring a lot to the music, not to mention the fact that they are all brilliant composers in their own right. So, I am very fortunate to be in good company.
Tyshawn Sorey Talks Drumming As a composer:
MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey stretches musical definitions
Composer and musician Tyshawn Sorey is a new MacArthur Foundation genius grant winner. (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)
by Howard Reich
October 11, 2017
Chicago Tribune
Do not call Tyshawn Sorey a jazz artist.
“I’m not interested in being a jazz musician, I’m not into being an avant-garde musician or a traditionalist — I’m not into any of that,” says Sorey, whose wide-ranging work — much of it embracing jazz syntax — has won him a MacArthur Fellowship.
Nor need anyone refer to Sorey exclusively as a drummer, pianist or trombonist, the musician giving attention to each of these instruments, as well as to his work as composer, bandleader and sideman.
“I’m into doing the best that I can do on every given occasion to express whatever thoughts through my music,” explains Sorey, 37.
“I wouldn’t say I have a primary instrument, other than what I’m doing” at any given moment. “I guess my composition thing is my voice. Everything is an extension.”
But Sorey’s “voice” as a musician happens to be as compelling as it is stylistically expansive. He has established as much in concert, playing in pianist and MacArthur Fellow Vijay Iyer’s trio; collaborating with the International Contemporary Ensemble in music of MacArthur Fellows John Zorn and George Lewis; and performing in the company of genre-stretching trumpeter Dave Douglas.
The breadth of sounds Sorey explores is evident on his recordings, as well, most notably “Inner Spectrum of Variables” (2015), “Koan” (2009) and the newly released “Verisimilitude” (2017). As composer, he ignores lines separating jazz and contemporary classical expression. At the drums, he can display virtuosic control and precision one moment, unleash a surge of power the next.
Add to this the all-over-the-keyboard thunder of Sorey’s pianism and the larger-than-life quality of his trombone playing, and you have a multifaceted artist who’s re-examining jazz, classical, avant-garde and other idioms on deeply personal terms.
Or, as the MacArthur citation puts it, Sorey is “assimilating and transforming ideas from a broad spectrum of traditional and experimental idioms.”
The ears-wide-open nature of Sorey’s art has its roots in his childhood, he believes. He grew up in Newark, N.J., hearing “all kinds of different music from the get-go,” he says, pointing to pop, jazz and R&B pouring out of the radio and from his uncle’s and father’s record collections.
“For me, it was never about style,” he adds. “It was about whatever music I enjoyed at the moment. It could be anything from classical to rock to metal to noise to contemporary classical music. Even though I didn’t understand what it was, I appreciated it for what it was.”
As a child, Sorey found himself joining in the music-making, “sort of imitating rhythms and things like that by banging on stuff that was around the house,” he recalls.
He taught himself to play piano at home and in church, learning hymns by ear.
“It was at that point I discovered I definitely had a thing for playing music,” he says.
Sorey picked up the trombone at 8 and started to learn to read scores, eventually “begging my grandfather: Please get me a drum set.”
That arrived as a Christmas present when he was 14, and within a couple of years, Sorey was playing in local bands, church functions and the like.
Considering Sorey’s eclectic musical interests, perhaps it was inevitable that he would come under the influence of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective of free-thinkers formed in Chicago in 1965.
“I feel like an honorary Chicagoan,” says Sorey,
referencing the Chicagoans whose art pointed the way for him when he was a teenager and, later, as a music major at William Paterson University.
“Anthony Braxton along with Roscoe Mitchell and all of the founding members of the AACM, and also people from the second wave of that collective, all of them had a very high impact on my work as a composer and also as a student of music,” says Sorey.
“Anthony Braxton, specifically, what he has done in terms of paving the way for African-American composers like myself to basically show me that, yes, you can do this too. You have a voice also,” says Sorey.
“Watching people like him and Roscoe and Muhal (Richard Abrams) face these criticisms or inaccurate definitions of their work made me want to (pursue) composition more, (realizing) that black music wasn’t relegated to straight-ahead jazz or bebop or funk or R&B or hip-hop.
“I never thought of being a black composer until I got in touch with their music.”
Braxton served as a mentor to Sorey during graduate studies at Wesleyan University.
“He has shown me the way to create music that I believe in, and to really look at my work as something you live for and not something to earn a living from,” says Sorey.
“It doesn’t matter what style of music you create, as long as you believe in it. If someone else believes in it, that’s great. And if no one else believes in it, that’s also great.”
But Sorey’s convictions were tested during his first year of doctoral studies at Columbia University. He faced what he considers “an existential crisis that I had regarding my work,” he recalls.
“I felt extremely discouraged by the academic environment I was in at Columbia University.”
George Lewis, another AACM master and MacArthur Fellow and a mentor to Sorey at Columbia, “helped me pull through to really embrace myself, to really love myself, and to embrace the differences I have between myself and my colleagues. But not on a level that I have to distance myself from my colleagues, but to get along with them and learn from their work.”
Sorey has completed his doctoral studies and now teaches at Wesleyan.
Roscoe Mitchell recently gave Sorey one of the greatest boosts of his musical life. While Sorey was working on Mitchell’s recent “Bells for the South Side” recording, Mitchell invited Sorey to play Mitchell’s fabled “percussion cage.”
This “was the biggest honor,” says Sorey. “He’s asking me, on a whim — I had no idea. That’s like a sacred space to me. Being in that space, you’re no longer who you were.”
What does Sorey plan to do with the MacArthur funds?
“What I hope to do with this is to do some collaborations that I never thought I would be able to do,” says Sorey.
Further, he asks himself: “How do you move forward? How can you be like the people who are on that list of Fellows?”
He sees himself trying to make “a difference not only in my life, but in the lives of other people who grew up like me, who didn’t have access to things I eventually could get access to.
“I want to provide inner-city kids who grew up in the ghetto, like myself, that they also can do this.”
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @howardreich
The Record
The Musicians
Tyshawn Sorey, A Musical Shapeshifter, Wins MacArthur 'Genius' Prize
2:33
October 11, 2017
Heard on Morning Edition
NPR
Composer, multi-instrumentalist and educator Tyshawn Sorey, who has been granted a MacArthur Fellowship. John Rogers/Courtesy of the artist
This morning, the latest crop of MacArthur Fellows was announced — the so-called "genius" awards. Sometimes, a MacArthur fellowship is given as a capstone to honor a long, glorious career. But one of this year's winners, Tyshawn Sorey, is just 37 years old.
Earlier this week, I visited Sorey at his office at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., where he began teaching this fall. When we met, Sorey was dressed entirely in black, as he usually is. When he plays, he often wears sunglasses — no matter the time of day or night. That's a stereotypical uniform for a jazz musician. But Sorey seems to wear it because it fits his shy personality.
His own music ranges from masterful solo drumming to Ethiopian-inflected music for a small group to a song cycle based on the life of Josephine Baker to works for jazz trio. His most recent album, July's Verisimilitude, reluctantly falls into the latter category.
He says that creating his own ensembles, and writing for a variety of types of groups, was crucial to exploring sonic possibilities as a drummer. "For me," he explains, "it just made perfect sense, in terms of my interest in exploring timbre and texture and that kind of thing. In a lot of groups that I played in, when I'm playing more rhythmically busy music, such as — well, I don't like using terms like 'jazz' or whatever, but for sake of the argument, we'll say styles like jazz, R&B, funk, stuff like that — I'm used to playing a lot of very rhythmic music, and a lot of very rhythmically busy music. And while I totally respect the people who play in these genres, and all of the people who I've played with who do this type of work, there were no situations for me to really get to explore the instrument the way I wanted to — which is as a sound instrument, and not as a rhythmic instrument."
YouTube
Sorey says that in general, labels don't concern him. "I don't have any particular interest in construct, you know, in terms of social construct," he asserts, "like what I'm supposed to listen to as a black kid growing up around the projects in Newark." He listened to everything, from Morton Feldman to Charlie Parker to Public Enemy.
Sorey has always been intensely private, and his childhood revolved around music and school. "Growing up," he recalls, "I've never really gone out and played with other kids or anything or hung out with other kids." He's always been a scholar: After he studied as an undergraduate at William Paterson University in New Jersey, he went to Wesleyan for a master's degree in composition, and then did a doctorate at Columbia University that he finished this past spring, just before joining the Wesleyan faculty.
Much the way an abstract painter is interested in color, shape and form, Sorey says he was always interested in sound. "I wasn't necessarily only interested in rhythm, melody and harmony," he says. "Music is really a manifestation of our life experiences, expressed in sound — melody, rhythm, harmony, all of these things exist together."
Claire Chase YouTube
Sorey doesn't want listeners to pick apart what he does — what's composed, what's improvised, what genre it all supposedly falls into. "Deal with the mystery of it all," he advises, "because sometimes it's best not to know. Go with how the music makes you feel."
Tyshawn Sorey says that winning the MacArthur is providing him encouragement and the runway to think even bigger: The $625,000 fellowship gives him the freedom to pursue some large-scale projects that have long been a dream.
He adds that the fellowship fills a gaping hole for American artists. "In the United States, just look at where things are right now," he says. "I mean, it's like you hardly get any support for the arts whatsoever. There's virtually no support for the arts, and so groups like the MacArthur Foundation are really great for that."
Moreover, because the fellowship isn't tied to one specific work or achievement, Sorey says that it offers validation for his larger path. "You get it for just being who you are," he says. "I've been recognized for doing something that I truly have believed in, and worked on for the past 20-odd years. It's a blessing."
Note: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which awards these grants, is among NPR's financial supporters.
Jazz / Music / Post No Bills
Tyshawn Sorey achieves the sublime on the new album The Inner Spectrum of Variables
by Peter Margasak
07.01.16
Chicago Reader
- John Rogers
- Tyshawn Sorey
Percussionist Tyshawn Sorey has never concerned himself much with doing what a "jazz" drummer is supposed to do. Though his talent in that area is beyond doubt, it's only a part of his full diapason. He's a world-class composer who's dramatically focused his vision in recent years. He's a powerhouse player, yet on his brilliant 2014 trio album, Alloy (Pi), he's a faint presence on the music's surface, playing with exquisite subtlety and allowing remarkable pianist Cory Smythe to dominate the performances of Sorey's compositions—which owe more to Morton Feldman than to Mark Feldman.
On Sorey's devastatingly gorgeous new album, The Inner Spectrum of Variables (Pi), he's occasionally a more forceful presence as drummer, but his role as composer and conductor takes precedence. The six-part suite, spread over two CDs and running almost two hours, is not only his greatest work so far but also one of the year's most arresting and ambitious recordings. Sorey turns 36 next week, and it staggers the mind to think he's already accomplished so much—and to imagine where he'll go next.
In his liner notes to the new album, Sorey cites the influence of composer-improvisers such as Anthony Braxton and Lawrence "Butch" Morris, and notes that The Inner Spectrum "is a highly flexible score that can be performed in a myriad of ways. The version heard on this recording employs conducted improvisation (the score contains a lexicon of visual cues for the conductor to use at any point during a given performance to enable real-time improvisation), but the work can also be realized with the performers following prescribed directives for improvisation or without any improvisation at all."
Sorey's group here includes Smythe and Alloy bassist Chris Tordini, joined by three remarkable string players: violinist Chern Hwei Fung, violist Kyle Armbrust (brother of Spektral Quartet violist Doyle), and cellist Rubin Kodheli. I've listened to the album four or five times, and I feel like I'm a long way from cracking its genius; I'm consistently unsure about what's notated and what's improvised, and that's a wonderful thing. Sorey's ideas make room for various traditions and genres, but the result isn't a pastiche or postmodern goop. Smythe is the central force throughout; on the opener, "Movement I (Introduction)," he plays alone, using a delicacy and melodic sophistication that sounds almost neo-Romantic, and then the music opens up into the second part and invites the rest of the ensemble in. Conjectures about whether a particular passage reflects this tradition or that misses the point of Sorey's work, because he has the entire world of music on his palette. He fits everything together with elegant fluidity, grace, and logic, enriched by a rich sense of dynamics and a faultless structural sensibility.
Below you can listen to the entirety of the lengthy "Movement IV," which contains some of the album's most rhythmic passages as well as a few (dare I say it) jazzlike moments. Of course, this isn't simply jazz even when it sounds most like jazz: the stunning viola solo by Armbrust employs glissandos that collide academic microtonality and what sounds to me like Indian classical music. I've been waiting a while for Sorey to bring this music to Chicago—a few years ago, International Contemporary Ensemble played one of his pieces at the Museum of Contemporary Art—and while no show is announced yet, the drummer is in town tonight. He plays two concerts with pianist Vijay Iyer at Constellation, subbing for Marcus Gilmore in Iyer's long-running trio with bassist Stefan Crump. Sorey has plenty of experience with the pianist, most notably in another trio called Fieldwork, and though he's a sub, I'm sure he'll significantly recast Iyer's music—he and Gilmore are very different drummers. I'm psyched to hear how it plays out.
Today's playlist:
Zen-informed musician Tyshawn Sorey wins $625,000 “Genius Grant”
October 13, 2017
LionsRoar
Tyshawn Sorey performing in Brooklyn, NY, 2014. Photo by Steve Pisano,
The 2017 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellows were announced on Oct. 10, and among the 24 individuals was 37-year-old musician and composer Tyshawn Sorey.
The MacArthur fellowship — also known as the “genius grant”— is a $625,000 no-strings-attached award distributed over a five year period to those who show “exceptional creativity” based on significant past accomplishments.
“It’s the biggest honor I’ve ever received in my life,” Sorey told the Hartford Courant about the fellowship. “I’m still processing it.”
A multi-instrumentalist specializing in drums, percussion, trombone and piano, Sorey is known for defying distinctions between music genres, specifically when it comes to breaking down the lines between improvisation and composition into a singular expression of contemporary music.
While often associated with jazz and classical music, Sorey is wary of being identified with any specific genre. If there is a label that applies to him, it’s “experimental.”
“Koan” (2009) was Tyshawn Sorey’s second Zen-influenced recording, after “That/Not” (2007).
Over the past decade, Zen Buddhism has played an important role in Sorey’s work. In 2006, he visited a Japanese monastery, which sparked his interest in Zen concepts and meditation. Not only was he interested for his well-being, but also found it inspiring musically. Sorey felt that, while his music was good, it was often difficult for difficulty’s sake.
With this in mind, meditation helped shape two of his five recordings: That/Not in 2007 and Koan in 2009. While That/Not is praised by music critics as breathable and melodic, Koan is polarizing in its existentialism and aims to explore how we experience listening.
Sorey released his most recent album, Verisimilitude, in August. The recording consists of five abstract, spontaneous, yet formal compositions in which Sorey challenges the expectations of the jazz piano trio tradition.
Sorey received his Doctorate in Musical Arts in Composition from Colombia University and is currently an assistant professor of music at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
About Haleigh Atwood
Haleigh Atwood is an editorial intern for Lion's Roar. She has also written for Montecristo Magazine, J-Source, and CBC Nova Scotia Information Morning. Find her on Twitter @HalEAtwood.
Tyshawn Sorey: The Maestro
How an eager young sideman from Newark became one of the most gifted, ambitious and multifaceted figures of the avant-garde
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11/25/2016
by David R. Adler
JazzTimes
Months before the release of his Blood Sutra in 2003, pianist Vijay Iyer and his quartet premiered music from the album in a concert commissioned by the Jazz Gallery (then still on Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan). Iyer had developed a generative rapport with drummer Derrek Phillips on past projects, but Phillips was no longer in New York. The gig went to an up-and-comer, a Newark, New Jersey native and undergraduate at William Paterson University named Tyshawn Sorey, who completed the Blood Sutra lineup with Rudresh Mahanthappa on alto saxophone and Stephan Crump on bass.
Sorey stunned listeners that night with his raw, inventive rhythmic approach and gale-force chops. But few people, perhaps not even Iyer, were yet aware of the breadth of Sorey’s talent.
What Iyer did know is that Sorey also played piano. He played it not just adequately, but with a skill “seemingly unprecedented in its precision and scope,” Iyer wrote in an email, recalling having heard “fully rigorous serialist improvisations, for example, or a spontaneous Nancarrow-like blast through ‘Little Willie Leaps,’ or an utterly haunting Mingus rendition with exquisite tone control, or a selection from Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke.”
Iyer also knew of Sorey’s trombone playing, “which equally caught me off guard with its fluidity and clarity. As a performer [Tyshawn] could have chosen any one of these paths, to great success.” In a sense, he’s chosen all of them.
It’s something to see: A fired-up young sideman blossoms into one of the most multifaceted and restlessly evolving artists of our time at age 36. It’s hard to tally just the most recent accomplishments. In February at the Ojai Festival in California, Sorey, on piano and drums, premiered a work commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) called Perle Noire: Meditations on Josephine, a Josephine Baker-inspired song cycle in collaboration with famed opera director Peter Sellars, soprano Julia Bullock and poet Claudia Rankine. Another ICE commission is now in the works.
Meanwhile, Sorey’s Alloy trio with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Christopher Tordini has played weeklong stints at the Village Vanguard. In late July, the same trio premiered a work commissioned by the Newport Jazz Festival that Sorey plans to release soon, along with material from the Vanguard run. Sorey also appeared at the Vanguard in no less than three different bands, including a stupendously thrashing quartet led by trumpeter Peter Evans, during John Zorn’s Bagatelles week in mid-August.
Sorey’s new two-disc release for double trio, The Inner Spectrum of Variables (Pi), finds him, Smythe and Tordini joined by three additional string players. About 85 to 90 percent of the music, Sorey estimates, is either notated or “spontaneously conducted by myself using Conduction, with cards and things like that.” (Sorey wrote a touching remembrance of his mentor Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, creator of the system of gestural cues known as Conduction, in the April 2014 issue of JT.)
Meeting over coffee near his home in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, Sorey spoke more about Inner Spectrum: “This was the CD where I felt, coupled with my experience as a student working with [composer] Fred Lerdahl [at Columbia University], that I was really being myself and feeling I should embrace the difference between myself and my colleagues. And that I should embrace the connections that I have with other forms of music.”
In spring 2017 Sorey expects to complete his doctorate in composition from Columbia. The following fall he’ll return to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he received his master’s in 2011, to begin a tenure-track professorship in the wake of his mentor Anthony Braxton’s recent retirement. (Wesleyan is also where Sorey met his wife of five years, Amanda Scherbenske, an ethnomusicologist and scholar of Jewish music. The two are expecting a child.)
While busy with academic work, Sorey has remained just as committed to performing, applying his outsize drumming talent to the music of Fieldwork, Paradoxical Frog, Steve Coleman, Steve Lehman, Stephan Crump, Mario Pavone, John O’Gallagher and more. “I see Tyshawn as part of a cohort,” says veteran pianist-composer Myra Melford, who recruited Sorey for her magnificent Snowy Egret quintet. “You know, Kris Davis, Ingrid Laubrock, Mary Halvorson, Taylor Ho Bynum, that generation: Some worked with Braxton, some are likeminded peers, but what’s exciting is that they’re putting their own stamp on this lineage that I see coming from my mentors in the AACM. I see them as carrying this lineage forward into the 21st century.”
Crump, along those lines, describes Sorey as “a rocket ship into the future.” Here and there since the Blood Sutra days, the two had reunited, but on Crump’s profoundly swinging new quartet release, Rhombal, we hear them reach another level as a unit. “When I’m engaging with him in that swing mode,” the bassist remarks, “it feels so deeply rooted and loving of the tradition without being stuck in it in any way. It’s risky territory, that mode of playing, but [with Tyshawn] it feels very honest to me.”
Pianist Matt Mitchell, who has dealt with Sorey’s swing feel in bassist Mario Pavone’s Blue Dialect trio, ventures his own space analogy: “In Mario’s trio [Tyshawn] is playing time of various kinds, but even when it’s more or less ‘jazz swing,’ if you really listen you’ll hear all this other totally bizarre shit. You can zone in: It’s like those ‘powers of 10’ videos where it starts off in space and it moves in by powers of 10 and you’re gradually down to the subatomic level and then you zoom back out. If you do that with Tyshawn’s playing your perspective is like, ‘Holy shit, what is he doing?’ But then you zoom back out and it totally serves the music. … You’re sometimes distracted from how insane some of the things he’s playing are because of how beautiful it sounds.”
It all started with a toy drum kit around the age of 3. At 5 or 6, with his father’s encouragement, the young Tyshawn would put together makeshift kits “with cardboard and hangers, banging around with pencils.” By age 14 he’d shown enough lasting interest for his grandfather Edward Herman Sorey to buy him his first drum set. “He said, ‘I’ll warn you now, you better be playing those drums,'” Sorey recalls. “He wanted to see how serious I was. He wanted me to prove that.”
Sorey’s father and mother had split up when he was a toddler. “I grew up in my [maternal] grandparents’ house for a five- or six-year period,” he says, “then my mother and I moved out I think in ’88 or ’89. I lived with my mom for a few years, and then I lived with my [paternal] grandmother-she raised me for much of my adolescent life.”
Sorey’s uncle also played a key role early on, taking Tyshawn on his first trips to the record store: “I was maybe 7 or 8. He would let me pick a couple of records each time. Dizzy’s To Bird With Love was one I picked out. He had stuff by Wynton, he’d also have Herbie Hancock’s post-Headhunters music, or Grover Washington Jr., or things by David Sanborn as well as older recordings of Duke, Basie, Joe Williams. My uncle helped me understand the importance of having these recordings.”
Obsessively, Sorey began recording things off the radio as well. Columbia’s WKCR-FM expanded his horizons. “My grandfather would let me get up in the middle of the night. If I heard something cool I would get a cassette tape and record it,” he recalls. “I listened to a lot of country and bluegrass because they would broadcast that music early in the mornings. I dug how it sounded and I dug what it talked about, even though I was all of about 8, 9, 10 years old and didn’t really know too much. Also, at certain times they would play stuff from the Mississippi Delta for three hours. I recorded that, I made recordings of jazz vocalists, I recorded classical music programs. Also some contemporary stuff that I didn’t understand, but I loved it.”
In the basement, Sorey practiced drums day and night. He arrived early to Camden Street Middle School to practice more. His grandfather took him to play with bands in and around Newark, and to church functions with a distant cousin, Walter Sorey, a gospel organist and keyboardist. Along the way Sorey took trombone lessons as well. At 14 or 15 he was recruited for gigs by a local bassist: “I was underage but I still would play clubs and weddings. We’d play Motown, James Brown, gospel, stuff by Miles and Cannonball, Kool & the Gang, free stuff. From the get-go, this whole idea of participating in many genres was definitely stemming from those experiences.”
Sorey has perfect pitch and something close to a photographic memory; his associates all have stories about him being handed a complex chart, looking it over and then not even using it on the gig. A gift like that may have accelerated his progress, but his omnivorous aesthetic and high-level jazz sensibility evolved through contact with great teachers, both at William Paterson and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), including John Riley, Mike LeDonne, Michele Rosewoman, Bill Goodwin, Kenny Washington, Billy Hart, Ralph Peterson and Harold Mabern.
Interestingly, Sorey started at Paterson as a classical trombone major. “I was playing brass quintets, playing with the college orchestra, playing solo repertoire and stuff like that,” he says. But he switched and began to seek his place in the lineage of drummer-composers, including underappreciated ones like Freddie Waits and Joe Chambers. In part it was his interest in composing that led him to Wesleyan, where Braxton and others led the way toward a “trans-idiomatic” viewpoint.
“[Anthony] would let me conduct his ensemble classes and also the concerts,” Sorey says. “Sometimes he and I would split the conducting duties. I found a sense of freedom working with Anthony’s music, which is very highly structured. When I started to alter the structure of his pieces, he allowed me to have that flexibility even with his own music. I’d never seen a composer do that before. That gave me the opportunity to grow as a spontaneous composer.”
At Wesleyan Sorey also explored Japanese taiko drumming, music of Ghana and Togo, Klezmer music in an ensemble led by his future wife, and on and on. When he began his degree work at Columbia, however, he wasn’t as comfortable at the start. “I was trying to appeal too much to people in the program, to a certain ideal that I felt Columbia represented, which I was completely wrong about,” he says. “Because in fact it’s much more open than I thought.” George Lewis and Chris Washburne, two fellow trombonists, helped him find a foothold. But it was esteemed composer and music theorist Fred Lerdahl who gave Sorey a “third eye” in regard to scoring and form, rekindling his love for the tonal classical music he once taped from the radio as a kid.
“One of Tyshawn’s main challenges has been to make musical notation work for him and not against him,” Lerdahl says. “When he first came to me he was trying to figure out how to write complex harmonies that were still tonally based. His written music at first was much less coherent than his improvisations. Because he had learned four-part harmony, sometimes his textures started looking more like that, rather than what his real inspiration was. He’s made huge progress-he works hard and he always surprises you.”
Already on his 2007 double-disc debut, That/Not, Sorey made clear his interest in music that went well beyond the drums. Disc one includes a 42-minute Morton Feldman-inspired solo piano work performed by Cory Smythe, a player who has come to occupy a central place in Sorey’s oeuvre. Smythe is similar in his ability to move between the classical and improvised music spheres and to destabilize the boundary between them. He knew Sorey as a drummer, but was surprised to see him live on piano one night long ago-so astonished, in fact, that he asked Sorey then and there for a lesson. “I would do that again if that experience played out today,” Smythe insists.
Sorey remembers what he terms this “so-called lesson” that took place in Smythe’s Queens apartment around 2004. The two ended up chatting and sharing music for hours. “I’m like, you don’t need no lesson from me!” Sorey laughs. “You need to work with me!”
“Tyshawn is brilliant and inscrutable to some extent,” Smythe muses, “and I revel in that mystery about him and his work. I think he does sort of delight in not being pinned down to any set of musical expectations. If you know his music from a few years ago, I don’t think you’d expect to hear some of what he’s writing now. He’s become more interested in some Romantic-era classical harmony, so there are bits of ‘Movement,’ from Alloy, that come off as almost Brahms-like. But even if he’s applying himself to that language he still does it in this idiosyncratic way.” On Inner Spectrum there are also episodes, for example “Movement IV” on disc two, where we hear a folkloric, almost dance-like melody-a result of Sorey’s deep affection for Ethiopian and Turkish music and the work of Béla Bartók.
On the 2009 release Koan, guitarist Todd Neufeld and bassist Thomas Morgan joined Sorey in a trio of a very different type. The three first came together working with trombonist Samuel Blaser, on a busy quartet tour and subsequent 2009 Clean Feed release, Pieces of Old Sky. “The trio moments [on that tour] were so special to me and I wanted to document it,” Sorey says. “I wanted to create music that was more like ‘tunes’ than these elaborate structures I’d been working on. I wanted to take a break from that element of music-making and just focus on our chemistry together as a trio by writing these one-page pieces.”
“Tyshawn chose to record the whole album tuned down,” Neufeld says of Koan. “Not quite a full half-step but pretty close. It’s almost like baroque tuning. It made the guitar and bass resonate in a certain way, darker and warmer. I think unconsciously it leaves a unique impression on the listener.”
This tuning wasn’t discussed ahead of time, Neufeld clarifies: “This is just like, ‘Oh yeah, right now, tune your bass and guitar down,’ just like that. That’s the way my man rolls, amazingly. That trio went into the studio one other time, earlier, and recorded an improvised session. I played only acoustic guitar. And for that one Tyshawn had us tuning every track differently. It’s almost undoable, but you don’t want to tell him that. I had certain strings down, certain strings up. Thomas, same thing.”
“It’s almost unlearning the instrument; that’s how I looked at it,” Sorey says. “I even set my drums up incorrectly [at the Koan session]. For something like this I didn’t think there was any wrong way of doing anything.”
During a weeklong residency at the East Village avant-garde hub the Stone, coinciding with his birthday on July 8, Sorey reserved one night for a rare solo concert. He played it all: first piano, then drums, then trombone, interspersing archival recordings from the Yiddish Radio Project via laptop. As he accessed and played this out-of-left-field sequence of voices in Yiddish and English-a clip from Rabbi Reuben’s Court of the Air, another from C. Israel Lutsky, a.k.a. the Jewish Philosopher, to name just two-Sorey built something like an interactive sound installation, improvised and fleeting yet strong in form. Later he mentioned Fluxus, the Dada-influenced art movement of the ’60s and ’70s, as an inspiration.
After a scintillating night with Mario Pavone’s trio, the final three Stone gigs showed Sorey in another light: not alone, but surrounded by a throng of musicians he calls the Banff/NYC Improvisers Orchestra, mostly students he’s taught at the Banff Summer Workshop. On the agenda was Conduction: a hybrid of Butch Morris’ system, Braxton’s system and Sorey’s own prompts.
The first Conduction fell on Sorey’s birthday, when spirits were high. Sorey joked with band members as they warmed up. You could tell he meant every one of his last four words before the downbeat: “Let’s have some fun!”
There were four upright basses, four electric guitars, drum set and drum machine, plus percussion, cello, violin, various reeds and brass, piano and keyboards, and three vocalists. The sound was otherworldly, experimental and, yes, fun. As the band played, my eye wandered to the mosaic of photographs on the wall of the Stone, similar in its way to the walls of the Vanguard. There in the middle, in perhaps the most arresting photo of all, is Butch Morris, poised with baton and looking determined Sorey remembers how Morris “made me learn something about myself: that I should be able to make music with almost anybody, at any time, and it shouldn’t really matter the level of the musician or the style or tradition they come from. What that told me was that if there were children up there, I should be able to make good music with them.”
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July, 2017
Tyshawn Sorey, multi-instrumentalist and composer
Newark-born multi-instrumentalist and composer Tyshawn Sorey (b. 1980) is celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery and memorization of highly complex scores, and extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work. He has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, as well as with such artists as John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, Steve Lehman, Evan Parker, and Myra Melford, among many others.
The New York Times has praised Sorey for his instrumental facility and aplomb, “he plays not only with gale-force physicality, but also a sense of scale and equipoise”; The Wall Street Journal has critically acclaimed Sorey as being, “a composer of radical and seemingly boundless ideas.” The Jerome Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, Van Lier Fellowship, Spektral Quartet, and International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) have commissioned and have supported his genre-crossing work. He also collaborates regularly with ICE as a percussionist and resident composer. As a leader, Sorey has released five critically acclaimed recordings that feature his work as a composer and performer including his newest release, The Inner Spectrum of Variables (Pi Recordings). In 2012, he was selected as one of nine composers for the Other Minds residency (2012), where he exchanged ideas with such like-minded peers as Ikue Mori, Ken Ueno, and Harold Budd. In 2013, Jazz Danmark invited him to serve as the Danish International Visiting Artist. He is also a 2015 recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Award. Sorey has taught and lectured on composition and improvisation at Columbia University, The New School, The Banff Centre, Wesleyan University, International Realtime Music Symposium, Hochschule für Musik Köln, Berklee College of Music, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Danish Rhythmic Conservatory. His work has been premiered at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Walt Disney Hall, Roulette, Issue Project Room, and the Stone, among many others.
Tyshawn Sorey: Verisimilitude
by Will Layman
22 August 2017
PopMatters
The composer and drummer at the forefront of the New Jazz presents his trio—but the slow, deliberate, brilliant music is much more "jazz piano trio" music. It is a soundscape of astonishing detail.
Tyshawn Sorey
Verisimilitude
Label: Pi
US Release Date: 2017-08-04
I have seen Tyshawn Sorey perform many times. Without fail, he dazzles and surprises me. We tend to think of him as a drummer in the New Jazz of this century, playing with pianist Vijay Iyer or saxophonist Steve Coleman or with any of many other musicians in New York over the last ten years. Each time you see him play, though, you are reminded that he is something beyond just a brilliant percussionist.
Sorey, now in his late 30s, recently completed a Ph.D. in music at Columbia University where he studied with trombonist and electronic music pioneer George Lewis. He also studied with Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he will succeed Braxton as a professor this fall. Sorey actually started his jazz studies in Newark, New Jersey’s Arts High School and then at William Paterson University’s impressive jazz program... as a trombonist. But the drums lured him along the way. He is also an accomplished pianist. And, most importantly, composer and musical thinker.
Sorey recently released his sixth recording as a leader, Verisimilitude, with his trio featuring Cory Smythe on piano (and electronics) and Chris Tordini on bass. Sorey is the percussionist and composer -- and somehow more than that. He seems like the sculptor of this music, the creator whose hands are on all its edges. Because, while you could hear Verisimilitude as latest from the Tyshawn Sorey piano trio, this is more like the latest from Sorey’s Beyond Category Ensemble.
“Obsidian” may be the best example. This 18-minute composition begins with pulsing electronics blended with percussive effects, which are soon joined by low rumbles on piano and very low, bowed tones from Tordini. Improvised or written? Does it matter? It is a mysterious soundscape that contains carefully constructed sonic details: the reverberation of a piano note is mimicked by an electronic sound; a chord from the piano contains overtones with which Sorey’s cymbal strike (a moment later) is in harmony; toy piano, percussion, grand piano, and cymbals play in as much precise coordination as any string quartet. But the composition develops into something colossal as well as Smythe’s piano plays crunching half-note chords below Sorey’s rolling toms, simulating a weather pattern that is both threatening and roilingly beautiful.
The pleasures of “Obsidian” will remind some listeners of the kind of all-ears-in collective improvisation The Art Ensemble of Chicago used to specialize in. And that is fair -- Sorey’s training, roots, and collaborations include not only Anthony Braxton but also Roscoe Mitchell -- founding figures in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians who did so much to make that kind of “jazz” into the highest art.
But here’s the catch: Verisimilitude falls just as easily into a different tradition -- the classical world’s “new music” that we associate, for example, with New York’s Bang on a Can ensembles. Indeed, pianist Cory Smythe is probably better known for his part in Bang on a Can, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and his duets with violinist Hilary Hahn than for his work with Peter Evans, Nate Wooley, and Steve Lehman. Bassist Chris Tordini frequents ensembles led by Andy Milne, Jim Black, and Greg Osby -- but he may be better known for playing particularly smart pop/jazz/folk with the Becca Stevens Band. This trio, simply put, has range. Sorey’s music is sowing a valley between different worlds. But it is doing it with such grace and substance that this New Jazz feels utterly convincing.
For “jazz” listeners who may find the tempos here very slow yet not sufficiently swollen with pretty chords or arcing melody, I recommend an attentive listen to the collection’s longest performance, “Algid November”. The spare opening, which contrasts high and low tones across the piano and bells, gives way to a section that -- relatively speaking -- grooves. Beginning around the seven-minute mark, Tordini is given leeway and rhythmic encouragement to goose the band, and at 10:45 or so the trio starts working out a ballad feeling that has the push-pull pliancy of swing. Sorey includes the kind of “military” snare patterns that once defined Tony Williams, and Smythe alters his phrasing so that he sounds lyrical like Keith Jarrett even if his note choices are less conventional. This material doesn’t convert Versimilitude into a “jazz” record, but it blends so seamlessly with the other material as to raise the question: what makes something “jazz” anyway?
There is invention and canny musical deliberation apparent in every minute of this recording. The superb, recent feature on Sorey in the New York Times by Giovanni Russonello talks about the composer and improviser's astonishing musical facility -- being able to "read over a score once and know it by heart” and therefore to ask his trio to reimagine the music in novel ways, including "to play certain measures backward, or in a scrambled order”. As you listen to “Flowers for Prashant”, for example, you can hear the way in which each gesture of melody is part of a system of interest. The simple tune that emerges on piano after the introduction has a childlike, sing-song quality, but Sorey asks it to evolve into a slow march of sorts, with Smythe's left hand playing a heavy, alternating set of chords. Could this have developed in the opposite direction?
The opening paragraph of the Russonello’s Times article quotes Sorey: “I never listen to music passively” and concludes that his own music “demands full engagement”.
I agree, but I feel compelled to add that Tyshawn Sorey’s music is not forbidding, not atonal , and not confusing. If you are tempted to hear this music, don’t worry that it will be noise or that it will -- to paraphrase every critic of modern art, ever -- sound like "my kid could do that”. Rather, it is precise and technically impressive. But it takes its time developing interest and it develops interest not by being catchy or danceable or connected to other things that you already love. It is art that connects different modes and emerges new, astonishing, but -- yes -- requiring your patience. Not patience to tolerate something bitter, but patience to think, and to remain open, and to feel things in the moment.
Be the tortoise, not the hare, to put it in archetypal terms. Let Tyshawn Sorey’s art catch up to your ears and then repay your patience a thousandfold.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Will Layman is a writer, teacher and musician living in the Washington, DC area. He has been a contributor to National Public Radio and WNYC's "Soundcheck" as a jazz critic. He plays rock, funk, and jazz in the bars and clubs in and near the nation's capital. His fiction and humor appear in print and online.
Everyone knew this Newark native was special. Now he's officially a genius
October 23, 2017
Newark native and musician Tyshawn Sorey was a recipient of the MacArthur "genius" grant. (Photo Credit: John Rogers)
NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
When talking about the newly minted MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" winner and Newark native Tyshawn Sorey, Mark Gross likes to recount his first meeting with Sorey.
The year was 1999. Gross -- a faculty member at New Jersey Performing Arts Center -- had been asked by legendary jazz musician Don Braden to work with an 18-year-old in their "Jazz for Teens" program. The teenager, Tyshawn Sorey, was readying to compete for the Star-Ledger Performing Arts Scholarship.
Sorey was then known as a trombonist, but on this day he came to the coaching session with music he composed for the piano.
Wait, actually he forgot his musical score at home.
He told Gross he thought he could go without.
"C'mon man, really?," Gross recalls saying. "What you got?"
Without a sheet of music in front of him, what Sorey had was 15 straight minutes of "unbelievably orchestrated" music. No improvising. What he had written at home was translating from his brain to his fingers to Gross' ears.
Gross was sent to coach Sorey, but "there was nothing I could really help with," he says.
So what could he do with a musician this talented?
"Just make sure he had a good suit and good shoes," Gross jokes.
To no surprise, Sorey was awarded the scholarship. After graduating from Newark Arts High School, he went to William Paterson in Wayne, then received his doctoral of music from Columbia University, all while making and composing transcendent music with a plethora of instruments.
"My style is that I don't have a style," says Sorey -- a true musical renaissance man, both composer and performer, who shuttles between the worlds of jazz and classical. "It's the idea of universality -- finding a connection to music throughout the world."
The New Yorker has described him as a "prodigious multi-instrumentalist and composer" that "transcends the borders of jazz, classical, and experimental music."
Now, add "genius" to his resume.
Earlier this month, Sorey was one of 24 people awarded the prestigious "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation -- a "$625,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative and creative individuals as an investment in their potential," according to the MacArthur website.
"I was in shock," Sorey says, about receiving the phone call that he was a recipient. "I just sat in my office for an hour with a blank stare, not knowing what to do."
"Everything I do is an extension of of growing up in Newark," Sorey says, reflecting on the singles he would get at the barber shops, the Jazz for Teens Program and the trips on the bus listening to his tape recorder.
Sorey, who is musical leader of six albums, scoffs at the idea of being a "genius," saying there is always another level to go to musically -- a mindset he established as a kid.
When others were playing in the nighborhood, whether it be sports or just hanging out, Sorey opted for the melodies of whatever he could get his hands on.
"I was always turning the radio dial," he says. ... "I was the odd person. I didn't do much socially. All I did was focus my energy on music -- practicing, listening and studying."
That included begging teachers at Arts High to open the doors at 5 a.m., so he could get three hours of work in before the school day even started.
Sorey, now an assitant professor of music at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, says that self-determination was one of his biggest gifts growing up. While Gross' (and surely others) jaw hit the floor wathcing Sorey as a teen, he didn't quite realize the talent he possesed.
"I never thought I had a gift," Sorey says. "But people were telling me that." ... "I never wanted to do things a certain way. I just did it how I wanted."
Now, at age 37, Sorey -- even with all the accolades -- gets most excited knowing there's a young musician right now in Newark who can point to him as inspiration.
"I hope I can be a beacon of hope for someone else," he says.
Joe Atmonavage may be reached at jatmonavage@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @jatmonavageNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook
A New Job At Wesleyan, A New Album And A New Direction For Drummer Tyshawn Sorey
Drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey talks about his latest music and teaching at Wesleyan. More here.
Contact Reporter
July 24, 2017
Hartford Courant
Before listening to drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey's music, check your expectations. Pulseless, drone-based passages stretch on for minutes, with shifting piano harmonies above. Spontaneous and notated passages continuously interact, directed by Sorey from the podium or behind the kit, where he will play with sticks or with his bare hands.
On "Verisimilitude," his latest album (to be released on Aug. 4) with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini, Sorey adds electronically manipulated textures and extended percussion techniques to an ever-growing bag of sonic resources.
Sorey is a new hire at Middletown's Wesleyan University, where he'll replace creative music master Anthony Braxton. His latest septet, Koan II — trombonist Ben Gerstein, trumpeter Stephen Haynes, guitarist Todd Neufield and three bass players: Mark Helias, Joe Morris and Carl Testa — performs at Real Art Ways in Hartford on July 29 at 7:30 p.m. Sorey talked at length about his new role and recent musical directions.
Q: What attracted you to the Wesleyan position?
A: It was the close proximity with [New York City], but it's also the fact that I came out of here, that I've learned so much from being here, working with Anthony [Braxton] and everything. I want to give that inspiration to other people who come here. That's why I wanted to do this.
Q: What will you carry on from Anthony Braxton's legacy, and what will you try to do that's different?
A: What Anthony provided was so important to lineage of not only creative music, but also black music generally. The idea for me would be to definitely continue it, but also to expand on that legacy, to get to more of what he talks about, which is "world creativity."
Instead of talking about the canonical figures all the time, without paying attention to what has been going on for the last 15 or 20 years. ... So much great music has come out of what I would call the post-genre era within creative music. I'd like to talk about that quite a bit, and also to investigate some of the issues with the work that's currently happening. It's a continuation, but I'd also like to add a few current topics to the canonical curriculum.
Q: What would you like to see happen in five or 10 years?
A: I'd like to expose some of the students here to the New York scene, as well as what's happening in the New Haven scene, all of the fresh music that's coming out of both of those places. … It's important that they see this stuff. It's sometimes hard to get some of those musicians up here to do stuff, but my plan is to hopefully contribute to making that happen, to get musicians up here that you might not otherwise see at all.
I'm a believer in accessibility. For me, that's the main goal, in terms of what I'd like students to pursue, to seek out information in order to develop their own language, their own musical or critical thinking skills, listening, that kind of thing. There's also the collaboration that can happen among the faculty. It's a really great department with a rich history, but I think it can be made even richer through cross-collaborative experiences with other departments. … The greater the collaborative experience we see in the department, the more students are going to be inspired to do the same thing.
As Muhal Richard Abrams once said, "When you make music with somebody, it creates a bond that can't be broken." I'm interested in building upon that, just taking that statement and running with it, at this institution or any institution, really. Coming out of certain institutions: I've seen a lot of division within the student body, and also among faculty. It's important to keep that spirit there, so that way it will encourage a lot of students coming in to be self-determined, to keep the musical and creative dialogue fruitful among their colleagues.
Tyshawn Sorey’s latest album, “Verisimilitude,” comes out on Aug. 4. (Courtesy of Tyshawn Sorey)
Q: You left Connecticut some time ago, but you've maintained musical relationships with improvisers in the state, including the musicians who'll join you at Real Art Ways.
A: That's really what it's all about for me. In fact, ever since leaving Middletown in 2011, as much as my wife and I were looking for jobs at other institutions, I always had a feeling that somehow I'd maintain all of my ties up here. I wanted to keep in touch with everyone in the musical communities in New Haven and Hartford. Those two years that I was here were so special to me. I had opportunities to collaborate with both Joe [Morris] and Stephen [Haynes], and also Carl [Testa] and [cornetist] Taylor Ho Bynum. When I lived in New York, every time I came up here felt like I still lived here. No matter how little we get to play together, we always pick up where we left off. It never stops, the chemistry that all of us share together.
The spirit of openness, to whatever colleagues you meet, wherever you go, maintaining that throughout your life: that's been modeled by so many different collectives and groups, even when people live far apart. ... The connection never ends.
Q: Aside from the same trio of musicians [Sorey, pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini] being involved, what's the relationship between your last three records: "Alloy," "The Inner Spectrum of Variables" and "Verisimilitude" [which comes out on Aug. 4]?
A: It's interesting how my music has changed over the last six or seven years, since arriving here at Wesleyan. A lot of what the trio did on "Alloy," I feel, is more closely related to "Inner Spectrum," in terms of the language I was using at that time. "Verisimilitude" departs from that a little bit. It's more like unfinished business, to me, the idea of integrating electronics into the work. That was inspired largely by my studies at Columbia, getting into computer music and understanding how it works, as well as developing an extended percussion setup, which extends from my experiences here at Wesleyan. It's all kind of tied together.
But in terms of the musical and sonic language, "Verisimilitude" is much more arid, in terms of what sound worlds I wanted to investigate. I felt like I started to do that here [at Wesleyan], but I didn't really get to explore it much further.
"Inner Spectrum of Variables" while it uses a multitude of improvisational and conductive vocabularies. "Verisimilitude," I'd say, is a scaled-down version of that. The trio is part of both groups, obviously. It's almost like code-switching: with "Inner Spectrum," we're not necessarily in the foreground. It did it that way for a reason: It's too typical otherwise to have a string quartet paired with, say, a jazz group.
Q: You can hear the seams.
A: Yes, and I didn't want that. And with "Verisimilitude," we have another language, another syntax, where we go about dealing with musical form, whereas both "Alloy" and "Inner Spectrum" were very highly structured compositions. They're very lengthy, in terms of notated material, whereas "Verisimilitude" was almost not at all about that. The new group that's going to happen [Koan II] takes that even further: There's not a ton of notated material. There are a lot of directives and careful decision-making that we have to exercise on the spot. That's why I picked those players.
But with the trio: It's like going to different countries and speaking different languages. That's what I mean by code-switching. [In "Verisimilitude"] [w]e're speaking this very dark, atonal language in that music that integrates electronics and all kinds of different instruments and textures, whereas in "Inner Spectrum of Variables" we let some of the strings do some of the work in that field. With "Alloy," we're reading a lot of notated material and getting more into the relationship between notation and composition. We've done concerts in the past where we've only explored one piece, and we found all these different ways of navigating through the form, sometimes on the spot.
Q: The relationship between composition and improvisation always comes up in discussions of your music. It also sounds like you're heading more toward compositions without notated music.
A: Yes. I think it's clear now to the general public that composition and improvisation are equally important things to me. On my first record, there was so much compositional detail everywhere. Now, I want to get interested in the chemistry, but also to find compositional ways of dealing with that that don't necessarily always require the use of sheet music. For example, some of my conductive language techniques — that's one big thing I'm going to incorporate into this new project [Koan II], as well as some things on whiteboard, cues that I've developed myself that I'm going to integrate into the recording of Koan II.
Q: The conductive language is yours?
A: It derives from Butch Morris' language of conduction, Anthony Braxton's language/music signals, Walter Thompson's soundpainting signals, and to a degree what Muhal Richard Abrams was doing with the Experimental Band. I'm trying to contribute something that's original and historically pays tribute to all of these things, but also, at the same time, is something that is personal and unique to making music.
Q: To appreciate your music, is it important for listeners, to some degree, to know what is notated and what isn't?
A: I actually prefer that they not know. We have really fixed ways of how we think about music. We look at composition as this sort of upper partial of how we create or play music. We're in a culture that views that as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Then you look at improvisation as the opposite of that, this kind of lesser form of music-making than composition. We're in a society that looks at composition and improvisation as separate things, with composition being superior. In my music system, that's not how it works.
Even jazz musicians feel that way sometimes: when you're reading music, you're seen as being "white," or somebody who's "not playing the real music" or "real black music," or whatever. Even in that world, you see that happening. I wanted to avoid that in all of my work. For me, when I make a record or when I'm working on some music, sometimes it's best for me when nobody knows anything, for the audience to just appreciate the sounds. If people are curious about how much is improvised and how much is composed, I'll tell them. But when they're listening and coming to the music for the first time, I want to keep them guessing.
Quite frankly, I've encountered some better situations with improvisation. When I write composed pieces, I've decide to open up some sort of compositional parameters within that piece. Some of the best stuff comes out when we're improvising. The audience can choose to see it as a dialogical relationship between spontaneous and formal composition, but I'd rather they not look at it in any way, just listen. Sometimes it's best to have that mystery, to see how that inspires you.
Q: Mario Pavone told me you have the ability to scan a page of music and just know it. That either took a lot of work, or you just realized one day you could do that.
A: I guess it's a combination of both. I come from a classical background, playing classical trombone repertoire, so I was used to reading a lot of complex music. I've been doing it for a very long time. In my later teenage years, I realized, "Oh, wow, I can pick this up right away" and remember it. I guess I have some sort of musical photographic memory. Maybe it was something I've always had. I don't quite know, and I don't talk about it. But it wasn't until my later teenage years, and I thought: I can use this to learn music as quickly as possible, so I only have to focus on making music spontaneously, and just inspire the music in some form. I wanted to develop it further, to where I could just look at a piece of music and know what's happening. I hear it in my head as I'm looking at it, and I can dream up whatever's possible, what I can do.
Q: You just finished up a residency at the Stone in N.Y.C. What happens to your music over the course of five nights?
A: A certain kind of connection with myself that I could never get any other way. What I decided to do various small groups, not do some super-big project, just more on the casual side, but also very artistically serious, something I'm interested in this moment. In all of my curatorships, I want to give other people opportunities to present their music, people who've hardly been heard from. I can be part of the project, or somebody else could be part of the project, or whatever.
I don't really expect too much. The only thing I expect is to be one-million percent in tune with myself, to get more and more in tune with myself as the week goes on and with the musicians around me, to develop a very high state of consciousness every time, and to hopefully maintain that throughout the week, to not feel like I've had any off nights.
It's the Wu Wei principle, which is a tenet of Zen Buddhism. It talks about non-doing or effortless doing. Without actually trying to stay on top of my game or be highly conscious of what's happening musically, it's just natural for me to go there.
For me, it's about quantity as well as quality. The quantity being: to have more and more of those experiences, to have higher and higher and higher states of consciousness as it goes. It's been a blast.
Q: What can we expect at Real Art Ways?
A: I'm more interested in dealing things that are off the page, so we won't be seeing too much conducted stuff in the live concert. We'll be improvising, but I know just from the selection of these players: that's a compositional decision that I've made. We'll play some notated material, but nobody will know that. There will be improvisation happening, or one piece that's played underneath something else. A lot of these things can happen at any given time. I don't know myself.
TYSHAWN SOREY SEPTET performs at Real Art Ways in Hartford on Saturday, July 29, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free. realartways.org
dalvinyard via Flickr
Hailing from Newark, New Jersey, Tyshawn Sorey is a leading thinker, composer, and multi-instrumentalist in contemporary improvised music. As a drummer, he may be best known for his collaborations with Vijay Iyer (Fieldwork), Steve Lehman (Steve Lehman Octet), Kris Davis and Ingrid Laubrock (Paradoxical Frog), and Steve Coleman, but he is also critically acclaimed for his work on piano, trombone, and percussion.
In addition to his contributions as a performer, composer, and improvisor, Tyshawn is a scholar: he is currently a Faculty Fellow in Columbia University’s Doctor of Musical Arts program, studying with George Lewis, and has received degrees from Wesleyan University, where he studied with Anthony Braxton, Jay Hoggard, and Alvin Lucier, and William Paterson University.
This weekend, Tyshawn will perform back-to-back: first on Friday with Jonathan Finlayson’s Sicilian Defense, and then on Saturday night with his trio, which features Cory Smythe on piano and Chris Tordini on bass. This is the trio’s first performance in two years, according to Tyshawn’s website, and will feature older compositions alongside new ones. We hope that you’ll join us this weekend to hear one of today’s most in-demand improvisors collaboratively negotiate the sonic unknown in an intimate trio setting.
Tyshawn Sorey Trio performs at The Jazz Gallery this Saturday, April 5th. The trio features Sorey on drums, Cory Smythe on piano, and Chris Tordini on bass. Sets are at 9 and 11 p.m., $22 general admission ($10 for Members). Purchase tickets here.
Friday, September 15, 2017
Jazz / Music / Post No Bills Tyshawn Sorey’s compositional imagination blossoms on his new trio album Verisimilitude
by Peter Margasak
09.15.17
Chicago Reader
- John Rogers
- Tyshawn Sorey
Few configurations have produced music more starkly beautiful and quietly ruminative in recent years than Tyshawn Sorey's trio with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini. Last month the group released its third album, Verisimilitude (Pi), and while superficially less grandiose than last year's ravishing The Inner Spectrum of Variables, which added three string players to the fold, without reservation I would say it's the trio's greatest accomplishment. Two of the pieces were commissions premiered at the 2016 Newport Jazz Festival, so it's not surprising that the aptly titled opening track "Cascade in Slow Motion" features Sorey's elegant drumming, a dramatic, subtly surging presence that both lifts the simple, meditative figures elaborated by Smythe and offers a rich focal point on its own, mirroring the same sort tumble of sound voiced on piano. Sorey continues to be called a jazz percussionist first and foremost. Over the years he's been a crucial ingredient in bands led by bassist Mario Pavone, pianist Vijay Iyer, and saxophonist Steve Lehman, among many others that nominally play some strain of jazz, but an increasing amount of his time has been devoted to composition, such as his song cycle Josephine Baker: A Portrait. His music has been performed by International Contemporary Ensemble and next spring the prestigious violinist Jennifer Koh will also play a new work by him. This past spring he earned his DMA degree at Columbia University, studying under the tutelage of the great George Lewis, and he recently began teaching at Wesleyan University, filling the chair long occupied by Anthony Braxton, who has retired.
Another piece from the new album, "Flowers for Prashant," written for the late Chicago filmmaker Prashant Bhargava, is a duo for Smythe and Tordini—a gorgeous excursion into shimmering, rapidly cycling low-end piano notes and hydroplaning arco bass, and as it tapers off morphs into "Obsidian," in which Smythe uses electronics to expand both his piano and Tordini's strident bowed figures into billowing clouds of astringent sound before the piece moves into somber explication, with each halting passage spelled out with impressive precision, a shift away from the composer's Feldman-esque side toward something decidedly more sparse, varied, and thrilling. I often find it a waste of time to split hairs about whether a piece of music sits within this tradition or that—Sorey has carved out his own space throughout his career, and this piece proves it as beautifully as anything he's ever done. You can experience all eighteen minutes of it below.
The episodic sprawl of "Algid November" is even more magisterial, unfolding in 30 moments that balance a sense surprise and a sense of meticulous control. This trio represents just one thread in Sorey's ever-expanding arsenal, and like his AACM forefathers he's forcefully challenging standard practices in both improvised and contemporary classical music. Rarely has experiencing someone throw down the gauntlet been so rewarding.
Today's playlist:
Jennifer Koh, Alexander Vedernikov & Odense Symphony Orchestra, Tchaikovsky: Complete Works for Violin and Orchestra (Cedille)
Tags: Tyshawn Sorey, Cory Smythe, Chris Tordini, Verisimilitude, The Inner Spectrum of Variables, Obsidian, jazz, contemporary music, George Lewis, Image
Tyshawn Sorey: Verisimilitude
by TROY DOSTERT
August 1, 2017
AllAboutJazz
Given Tyshawn Sorey's propensity for shattering the boundaries between jazz, free improvisation and classical music, it's noteworthy that he decided to stick with just his regular trio for his latest release, Verisimilitude. His previous record, last year's Inner Spectrum of Variables (Pi), drew heavily from the streams of classical and new music, with the additional presence of a string trio essential in giving that music a chamber-like feel, albeit with a good deal of open- ended improvisational space and even an occasional groove. Despite the pared-down personnel of Verisimilitude, however, this album represents an even greater leap away from the constraints of idiom and tradition that had already become rather tenuous on Inner Spectrum. This is a more abstract, more imposing release, even harder to categorize. And for Sorey, a percussionist whose whole career has involved upending expectations of what a "jazz drummer" can or should do—and, by extension, how a "piano trio" can or should sound—that is truly saying something.
With titles like "Cascade in Slow Motion," "Obsidian" and "Algid November," it's clear that Sorey is hinting at natural, elemental forces in these compositions, with an impression of unyielding immensity even in those stretches of the music where openness and space reside. Aside from the relatively brief "Cascade," the pieces are sprawling and expansive: the longest, "Obsidian" and "Algid November," clock in at over 18 minutes and 30 minutes, respectively, and they unfold gradually, through gestures both minute and grandiose. As Sorey has frequently sought to blur the lines between the composed and improvised sections of his pieces, it's very difficult to locate those demarcations here. When the musicians perform these pieces live, they will sometimes play them backwards (!), or in modified form based on spontaneous instructions from Sorey—so in the end, it's an open question as to how much of the music was played as found on the page and how much was shaped in the moment.
Pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini, core components of Sorey's working trio since 2014's Alloy (Pi), are integral to the project. Smythe, a veteran of new music collectives like the International Contemporary Ensemble and a participant in recent improvisational outings with folks like Ingrid Laubrock, Peter Evans and Nate Wooley, brings a ruminative quality to tracks like "Cascade" and "Flowers for Prashant," where repeated piano figures and a classically-inflected style predominate. But he also generates immense power through bass-register rumblings and tectonic chordal blasts on "Obsidian," and his range of approaches on "Algid November," from subtle minimalist expressions to bold exclamations, are essential to the ebb and flow of the piece. Smythe also uses electronics, and even occasional toy piano, to terrific effect on "Algid November" and "Obsidian," enhancing the tracks' unsettling qualities and creating jarring juxtapositions. Tordini, who has appeared recently on Matt Mitchell's Vista Accumulation (Pi, 2015) and Theo Bleckmann's Elegy (ECM, 2017), possesses a similar versatility, as he often utilizes a massive arco bass sound in addition to his more conventional bass technique; the way his sweeping arco parts bookend Smythe's piano meditation on "Flowers" is a case in point, as are his titanic surges on "Obsidian."
As for Sorey, his role here is that of an equal contributor and a dynamic, expressive musical partner—not a timekeeper or rhythmic anchor. Even on a track like "Cascade," where the trio comes closest to jazz territory via a gentle strolling tempo and an implied sense of swing, Sorey's drums are really just a part of the conversation rather than a generator of fixed pulse or steady parameters to bind the music. And on the more abstract pieces, Sorey is often a muted presence, working as a colorist through a variety of percussion instruments or periodic interjections on toms or cymbals. But even so, his contributions are always effective and potent, perfectly appropriate in sustaining the feel of this mysterious, enigmatic music. He magnifies the brooding intensity of "Obsidian" with formidable, roiling crescendos, and his bursts of aggression on "Algid November" are gripping; but his impeccable restraint on the spare, haunting "Contemplating Tranquility" is just as powerful.
Notwithstanding the music's somber austerity, there are moments of surprising warmth as well. The minor-key coldness of "Cascade" gives way at the end to a gorgeous major-key resolution; and the recurring lyrical piano figure that shines through "Algid November" lightens the dark mood of the piece ever so slightly. But let's not mince words: this is challenging, even daunting music, and it's certainly not for casual listening. For those willing to commit themselves to it, however, the complexity and brilliance of Sorey's vision offers ample rewards, ones that repay multiple encounters.
Track Listing: Cascade in Slow Motion; Flowers for Prashant; Obsidian; Algid November; Contemplating Tranquility.
Personnel: Tyshawn Sorey: drums, percussion; Cory Smythe: piano, toy piano, electronics; Chris Tordini: bass.
Title: Verisimilitude | Year Released: 2017 | Record Label: Pi Recordings
Jazz Notes: Drummer Extraordinaire Tyshawn Sorey Impresses With His Trio at Village Vanguard
by Dan Ouellette
Senior Jazz Editor
ZEALnyc
November 13, 2015
What’s remarkable about Tyshawn Sorey’s philosophy and practice of drumming is that instead of bombastically digging deeper into an overwhelming groove, he’s stepping outside the typical pathways to embrace a broader view compositionally. “I wanted to express myself in my own terms,” says the artist who was awarded DownBeatmagazine’s Critics Poll Rising Star on Drums honor this year. “I set out to find ways of connecting the different avenues—gathering all kinds of material and making a powerful statement greater than the sum of its parts. I want to make the music visceral and personal.”
The 35-year-old leader and valuable sideman with the likes of Vijay Iyer, Steve Coleman and Roscoe Mitchell started listening as a youth growing up in Newark, N.J., to all stripes of musical expression. First he became a jazz purist, tuning in the city’s WBGO jazz station, and then he listened to Columbia University’s WKCR jazz programming. But soon he was stretching his appreciation, ranging from bluegrass and country to rock and metal.
“I just loved music,” Sorey says. “I always had an open ear. If I liked it, I embraced it for what it was. I got exposed to new music early on by accident. I must have been 8 or 9, and on the radio I started hearing this type of music that I was unfamiliar with. I didn’t realize until my mid-teens that I had been listening to 20th century music by challenging composers like Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Morton Feldman. I thought it was cool and meditative, which is the primary tenet of my drumming and composing today.”
All of that led Sorey to becoming a student of music, first at William Paterson University as a classical trombonist who wanted to study composition, followed by Sorey as a drummer attending Wesleyan University. “I wanted to master in composition and study ethnomusicology,” he says. “I wanted to expand my network too and take my composing to the next level. Anthony Braxton was important. He told me, ‘It’s a good thing you decided to come here. You can write in whatever context you want. You can find many ways to discuss your own work or others may define it for you.’”
In 2011, Sorey began doctoral studies in composition at Columbia University, with George Lewis being an important teacher who introduced to him “the idea of behavior where you don’t have to behave the same way as in a normal music group.” Case in point: the piano trio that Sorey has been using as his touchstone these days. Last year’s Alloy on Pi Recordings, with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini, stands as a spare, minimalistic, mysterious four-piece gem that goes against the grain of a standard jazz piano trio.
Impressed by Sorey’s compositional prowess, Tordini says that the music on Alloy “is extremely spacious and meditative and leaves so much room for anything to happen.” He adds, “Because of the meditative nature of the music, it requires all the players to be in the moment at all times in a subtler and more nuanced way…to be outside the comfort zone. He constantly wants the music to evolve, which makes new things happen all the time.”
In the big picture, Sorey says that he “problematizes” his drumming among a bundle of contradictions. “I have no problem being in a situation where I’m keeping time,” he says. “But at the same time I’m trying to find my own way to navigate through the form—to do it my way for it to make cohesive sense. I see myself as embracing both qualities—holding a groove but also being creative with it.”
Sorey and his trio perform at the Village Vanguard November 17-22.
Tyshawn Sorey: Verisimilitude
by Raul da Gama
August 8, 2017
Jazzdagama
Anyone who knows almost any earlier work by Tyshawn Sorey will be eager to hear him every time he performs live or when a new studio performance is released. Now there is an even greater reason for even an impatient enthusiasm to such to hear Mr Sorey: Verisimilitudeis here. This is – after The Inner Spectrum of Variables – establishes his unassailable position on a don’t-touch-me pinnacle all his own. It is a programme of characterful music and nervous systems go haywire when confronted with this committed performance by Mr. Sorey with the trio that includes pianist Corey Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini to share the remarkable vision of their drummer/leader.
Clearly balancing the early influences of the European avant-garde of the 19th century and the American avant-garde of the 20th century with his deeply reverent heartbeat that comes from being born of the eternal nature of the African diaspora, Tyshawn Sorey has created here, a repertoire that not only doffs a proverbial hat to the philosophical “truthlikeness” advanced by Karl Popper, but also uses the philosopher’s own word – “verisimilitude” – to give vent to his (Mr Sorey’s) music with its nervy gestures
and tricky-to-balance textures at once subsumed into a cumulative sweep of “le paysage artistique” and “vérité mathématique”; between the relative and apparent (or seemingly so) truth and falsity of (in this specific instance) artistic assertions and hypotheses of the neural and the aural faculties.
Throughout the music is full of colour and the unique rhythms of Mr Sorey’s, advanced in sparkling cascades and swooning, seductively unfolding melodies in the face of wonderful harmonies redolent of muscular and earthy tones even in such work as “Flowers for Prashant” and “Contemplating Tranquillity” with their often delicious, un-portentous lightness of touch often announced not only by Mr Sorey but also by Mr Smythe’s piano. The faculties of the latter are simply outstanding on the beautifully pedalled cadenza in the crowded outhouse of music which reaches its quiet climax all-but-drowned by the orchestral timpani of “”Obsidian”.
Both Corey Smythe and Chris Tordini play their way through the music with wonderful intuition revealing a colourful and lively composer who is also deeply contemplative at the same time. This is a devastatingly powerful combination for Tyshawn Sorey to have and he makes full use of this gift by making the black dots of his music rise to eminence in wave after wave of music impelled by visceral energy, which in turn makes his drums thunder and roll while emitting its baritone roar that rises over and ducks under the bass and piano. The result is a performance by Mr Sorey that embraces judicious soli with ensembles that are hair-raising in the stabbing fortissimos on the drum skins and astonishing, sometimes barely audible pianissimos that echo and fade from lightly-brushed cymbals and faraway bells.
Such magnificence would surely be hard to top, though hardly ever, it would seem, for Tyshawn Sorey.
Track list – 1: Cascade in Slow Motion; 2: Flowers for Prashant; 3: Obsidian; 4: Algid November; 5: Contemplating Tranquility
Personnel – Tyshawn Sorey: drums and percussion; Corey Smythe: piano, toy piano and electronics; Chris Tordini: bass
Released – 2017
Label – Pi Recordings
Run time – 1: 18:57
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ocean Fanfare - "4 is 2 tight":
Published on July 4, 2014
Ocean Fanfare - "Imagine Sound Imagine Silence"
International Jazz Quartet releases debut album March 30th [Barefoot Records]
Ocean Fanfare is the name of an international quartet consisting of Tomasz Dąbrowski (trp), Sven Dam Meinild (sax), Richard Andersson (bs) and Tyshawn Sorey (drm). Together they created the record "Imagine Sound Imagine Silence", which is released on Barefoot Records March 30. On the record they explore the interaction between the rock solid rhythm section and abstract and evocative melodies. Without ever completely leaving the jazz ocean they set to the edge of what modern jazz sounds like in the new millennium.
The Polish trumpeter Tomasz Dąbrowski, who already have many albums as bandleader on his conscience, has developed his own personal sound on the trumpet. In Ocean Fanfare he creates, with Sven Dam Meinild on saxophone, a horn section that alternates from the euphoric to the dark melancholy. Danish Richard Andersson is known as a bass player with a solid grip on the jazz tradition, but also the will and the courage to point forward. Along with the American multi-talented Tyshawn Sorey on drums, they create both a raw swing and a free energetic drive. Tyshawn Sorey is a rising star on the international jazz scene. His numerous collaborations include among others Vijay Iyer, Steve Coleman, Dave Douglas, Steve Lehman and John Zorn.
Ocean Fanfare was formed in connection with Tomasz Dąbrowski received the award as “Funen jazz musician of the year 2012”. Richard Andersson received the same award in 2010.
Tracks:
1. 4 Is 2 Tight (Dąbrowski) 5.54
2. Lotus (Meinild) 8.33
3. Even Play It (Dąbrowski) 6:42
4. Soundclip 45 (Meinild) 4:37
5. US 12 (Dąbrowski) 20.07
6. I'll repeat Only Twice (Dąbrowski) 5:52
7. Horn Made (Dąbrowski) 8:02
8. 7 Days To Go (Dąbrowski) 07.14
9. Meditation (On A Visit From France) (Meinild) 03.25
TOTAL PLAYING TIME 58:00
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Based in Canada, Raul is a musician and an accomplished writer whose profound analysis is reinforced by his deep understanding of music, technically as well as historically.
https://www.arsnovaworkshop.com/blog/interview-tyshawn-sorey
Interview | Tyshawn Sorey
March, 2011
This Friday night, March 11, Ars Nova Workshop begins its three-day Composer Portrait: Fieldwork series with a performance of Fieldwork drummer Tyshawn Sorey’s composition, “For Kathy Change.” Inspired by Kathy Change, an American performance artist and political activist who killed herself in an act of self-immolation on the University of Pennsylvania campus in 1996, Sorey’s ensemble includes trombonist Ben Gerstein, pianist Kris Davis, cellist Okkyung Lee, and guitarist Terrence McManus. One of the newest stars of New York's creative music scene, multi-instrumentalist Sorey is an active composer, performer, educator and scholar who works across an extensive range of musical idioms. As a percussionist, trombonist and pianist, Sorey has worked nationally and internationally with his own ensembles and those led by Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Coleman, Wadada Leo Smith, and Dave Douglas. ANW caught up with Sorey to talk about the relationship between musical theory and practice, Fieldwork’s “open form” compositional approach, and his motivations for composing “For Kathy Change.”
One of the objectives you’ve articulated is the creation of a system where, simply put, academic theory and musical practice co-exist. Can you elaborate on this?
My body of works (as opposed to the term “system,” which has proven problematic for me, given its somewhat subjective nature) seeks to incorporate learned theory into the expression of life experiences. This most certainly isn’t the first time that this has happened; this is not a new concept – in fact, nothing’s “new” in my opinion. For, to understand what my work consists of, in terms of its objectivity, we have to look at the fact that since the beginning of time, this line of thinking has existed among many traditions in the East and in the West, if not all of them.
In my works, the “academic” musical axioms and the world of genres that defines the music of our time do not mean much to me; I never, ever compose works utilizing theory alone. Nor do I think of style when I am writing music. In other words, I do not compose works specifically for purposes of proving any theoretical arguments, or to invalidate any music that does not utilize “advanced” compositional principles. To put it simply, I like to compose music in the moment – in the way that I imagine and hear it. That is not to say, however, that there is no room for one to analyze my work in theoretical terms. In this sense, my music is no different from any other form of creative improvised music. All of my works employ an expansive range of compositional techniques ranging from twelve-tone theory to so-called “jazz” harmony – and nearly all of my works allow for performers to improvise (sonically expressed life experience shared in a given context) within varying contexts. So “free music” would be the best term for me to describe my work: composed and improvised elements in a composition are unified (this makes up for the “music” part). The “free” in free music would define the flexibility pertaining to contextual dynamics in the music; the music can function anywhere from a “jazz club” setting to a concert hall and can be performed by anyone. In my mind, there is no necessity for the venue, the type of musician, or the context to define how the work should be appreciated anyway.
Some of the music I compose is not necessarily performable only by trained musicians or any certain kinds of musicians. In fact, I have found that composing for such a musician sometimes has a tendency to invite unwanted limitations to the music due to the superimposition of tastes (and ego) on the part of the performer. That is to say, in these cases, the purpose and intent of the music often becomes misunderstood. My music is not classical, it is not jazz, it is not Western art music, and it is not Eastern art music. The music is not a style, in the way that we speak of what style “is.” However, it is a unification of concepts derived from these musics and their respective philosophies (most notably, Zen) in addition to my life experience – the human experience, both on a practical and metaphysical level.
If teaching a course on a single critical theory text chosen for its practical value for composers and improvisers, what would the text be and why?
It would be the Tri-Axium Writings, a three-volume series of texts on music by Anthony Braxton. These books discuss many of the common misconceptions inside and outside of the marketplace that surround creativity in manifold ways based on gender, and race, as well as the reality of what has been going on in the music business during the past several decades. Here we are in 2011, nearly 30 years after these books were published, and amazingly (and perhaps unsurprisingly) enough, these misconceptions remain with us, for the most part, anyway. As far as I am concerned, this collection of books is very relevant to what is going on today, which is what I think the music itself is about anyway.
You’ve spoken about how particular ensemble arrangements and modes of writing open unique “area space logics.” Can you say more about this concept and how it’s realized specifically in Fieldwork?
When we speak of area space logics, we could be referring to a number of things. “Area space logics” would therefore not be the correct term to define my way of composing pieces for Fieldwork. I think that what you are referring to is the concept of “open form,” which applies in nearly every single composition in the Fieldwork book of works. By open form, I am referring to working with a set of materials while incorporating improvisation in real time. The music is largely improvisatory in its very nature, in that even the “forms” for the compositions vary from performance to performance. We compose music having this aspect of form in mind. Sometimes we do not even play full versions of certain compositions. Concerning my music for Fieldwork and other groups that I compose for that navigate through open forms in this manner – this is okay, because even if all of the composition hasn’t been performed, the composition’s identity remains the same – not only in sonic terms, but also in terms of the meta-reality that exists in each experience of the performance. By this, I mean that the assemblage of Fieldwork in and of itself is a significant compositional means for the development of these works. I consider this as much a part of anyone’s composition as the schematic material that we utilize creatively in real time, which is only one aspect of the work.
Often thought of as being sidemen, sidewomen or mere time-keepers, drummers are under-represented as composers. Do you think this bias is rooted in the jazz tradition? Can you name one contemporary drummer-composer whose work you think is forcefully dismantling this structure?
I can name many drummer-composers who are not only under-represented as composers, but who are also under-represented as complete musicians. This bias, for a long time, has existed not only in the so-called jazz tradition – but also within that, this argument is applicable to bassists. However, very briefly, to answer the second part of your question, one drummer-composer who for decades has consistently dismantled this structure is Jack DeJohnette. He is a prime example of a complete musician in the highest order. This great man has quite an extensive compositional output – a huge catalogue of works, and I find it a bit disturbing that there are hardly any opportunities to see him performing his own music. Here is a contemporary musician whose catalogue of works extends all the way to the mid-1960s, and we still do not get to hear enough of his own music. I have no idea as to the reason for this, but I think that the fact that we as drummer-composers still face such predispositions in 2011 is incredible.
However, the good news is that we are now in a period where there is a fast-evolving lineage of contemporary drummer-composers who write just as well as anybody, if not better than those who are not drummers! People like Marcus Gilmore, Ches Smith, Tomas Fujiwara, Joey Baron, Kevin Norton, Mike Reed, Susie Ibarra – they, among many others, are producing some fresh and vital music that is relevant for our time (not to mention how brilliant they are as human beings and as musicians). We can also see that there is a growing community of drummers who play more than one instrument, which I especially value. Multi-instrumentalism informs their playing and their compositions on a musical level, which contributes to their brilliance.
I look forward to seeing more drummers’ music released and documented as correctly as possible. I hope to see the day when a lot of these drummer-composers get to take their groups on the road and/or are able to perform their work as often as they can, so that they can continue to evolve their body of works – even if it is for a single context, that’s fine. I am not saying that all drummers must write a symphony or an opera or anything, but if that is what they want to do, that is great! What I am saying is that drummer-composers should perform more of their work (or have their music performed by other groups) as often as possible. Speaking for myself, I have no intention on leaving this planet with nothing to show, as far as my work goes. I have been composing for well over ten years now, and I cannot afford to continue being limited by the “drummer-as-sideman” trap. It is a tough fight, but someone has to go through with it. How else can people become familiar with the totality of the drummer-composer’s output?
Tonight you’ll be playing a piece called “For Kathy Change.” When did you first hear about Kathy Change and how did she inspire this piece?
For Kathy Change is a work performed in one movement, totaling around three and a half hours in length, and I feel that this is probably some of my strongest work yet. I can get into the technical details about the composition, but I would rather not because I think it’s besides the point of the piece and I would prefer having the listener create their own emotional experience when listening to the work. Kathy Change is an inspirational figure for me, and I wanted to dedicate my composition to her for that reason. During my studies at William Paterson University, I became aware of Kathy Change’s work. At that time, I had been studying drum set and composition with Kevin Norton, a fabulous drummer-composer whose work I greatly admire. Actually, he was one of the first people at the University to encourage me to compose and perform my own music and to present it as correctly as possible. Anyway, he composed an extended work in 2001 that was also dedicated to Kathy Change – Change Dance: Troubled Energy (incidentally, this extended work also features Steve Lehman on saxophones). Coupled with the fact that I loved the music, I also became interested in learning about Change’s life – to find out what her vision was for the world and her vision was expressed in manifold ways. And since I feel that music is reflective of experience, the work that Change put forth is no different from this line of thinking; her art and writings also reflects her experience – not only her experience, but she shared the opinions of many people on this planet. She had a unique way of demonstrating how she viewed the world and its complexities through her performances and demonstrations.
People all over the world who have learned of Kathy Change, especially Pennsylvanians, know that Change was never afraid to stand for what she believed in; she was a true lover of freedom. She only wanted the world to improve for the benefit of humankind. Kathy Change was a genius, in my opinion. She believed in transforming the nation and the world in a positive direction – her beliefs were only for the good of the people. And I think it’s quite surprising that in 2011, 15 years after her death, not that many people know much about the contributions brought about by this courageous woman. So for me, music is not separate from any other art. Nor do I feel that it is separate from the reality of what we experience, and Change is a perfect example of that.
What about the ensemble members and their group dialogue made them the right choice for this performance?
My collaborations with all these members go back over 10 years. I met Terrence during the first year of my studies at William Paterson University, who is a few years older than I am. His knowledge of different musics and guitar playing inspired me in some way to continue in the musical direction I was headed at that time. But we never got to play together until a few years later, and since then we have played many projects together – some of his and some of mine. This brings me to Ben Gerstein, with whom we also have a collaborative project, 3-O. It’s an improvising group featuring Terry on guitars and electronics along with Ben and me on trombones (sometimes on other instruments).
Gerstein was someone I knew about through my relationship with the drummer-composer Dan Weiss (another one of the most brilliant musicians of my generation). I met Ben in 2002 at the 55 Bar in New York City, where I heard his Collective play concerts of all-improvised music. Ben and I share extremely similar values as regards improvisation, composition, art, film, and other matters. Through my knowledge of musicians, composers, and filmmakers he was interested in at that time (him and I share a deep appreciation of Morton Feldman and Elliott Carter), we would usually talk about music and whatever musical projects we were up to after his sets. Then we finally got to play together for the first time in August 2004 with saxophonist/composer Tony Malaby. We collaborated on many occasions since then (Ben is also a member of my quartet w/ Cory Smythe and Thomas Morgan). And, until summer 2009 when I moved up to Connecticut, there would be times where we would spend all day in his apartment listening to and playing music together. I miss those days because this was a great period of study and musical growth for me and I’ve never really had the chance to initiate this kind of study with other people. It’s always a pleasure to have him as a colleague and as a friend.
I first began playing with Okkyung in Butch Morris’ New York Skyscraper concerts that were held in the summer months of 2002 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We have been playing together in various configurations since then, and besides her wonderful musicianship, she is an amazing human being, which manifests itself in the music!
Kris Davis is one of my more recent collaborators and I had no doubt whatsoever that she would be the perfect fit for interpreting this composition. We have a collaborative trio, Paradoxical Frog, which also features Ingrid Laubrock on saxophones (we also have a CD released with the title of the same name). Actually, I think it has been over two years since we’ve first played together. Moreover, in my history of working with her in Paradoxical Frog, I never had to communicate anything to her about how to play my music. She always plays it correctly, and she never plays it too correctly, which I love! I, too, share the sentiment with Anthony Braxton that if the music is played super correctly, without any kind of risk or fun in it, without the musicians putting themselves into the work, then it was probably played wrong.
Kris and all of the other musicians I mentioned above are all very sensitive to the needs of the music and they serve the music ego-free and agenda-free. They are all very easy to work with, and they bring a lot to the music, not to mention the fact that they are all brilliant composers in their own right. So, I am very fortunate to be in good company.
How do you think Composer Portrait: Fieldwork is important for the trio and also the larger narrative of contemporary music?
This composer portrait series is very important because I think that it represents a broader spectrum of the work that we do as composers and improvisers. This will serve as a demonstration to the fact that it is valid to have an extensive musical makeup and to not produce work confined to a particular frame. We, as a collective, celebrate an approach to music that transcends genre – which I think has a lot to do with our musical makeup. It almost seems that even the term “contemporary music” is becoming a genre, and how this is being defined is problematic. In this way, I do not see my work in any context as such. Nevertheless, besides that, I think this will be a great event for the music community in general. Not often is it the case, especially in “creative music,” that young artists in this field can have their works performed on this level. I mean, to have works performed by ensembles like Wet Ink, ICE, JACK Quartet – this is quite an amazing thing, and it is rare that events like this happen for young composer-performers like us who are working in multiple fields. But, we know now that in 2011, where it seems nearly impossible to put together a weekend of concerts like this, it can be done. On that note, much gratitude and thanks to Mark Christman and Ars Nova Workshop for making this event possible. I am most certainly looking forward to next weekend!
To learn more about Tyshawn Sorey and Fieldwork, please see the event pages on our website, where you can also choose between two ticket options: $12 for single events and $30 for a 3-Concert Pass. Below is a summary of the events, all of which will take place at Old City's Christ Church Neighborhood House Theatre (20 North American Street).
Composer Portrait: Fieldwork
March 11, 2011, 8pm | Tyshawn Sorey’s For Kathy Change
March 12, 2011, 8pm | Fieldwork
March 13, 2011, 6pm | Free Public Discussion with Fieldwork + The New York Times’ Nate Chinen
March 13, 2011, 8pm | An evening of chamber works by Vijay Iyer and Steve Lehman performed by JACK Quartet
Composer Portrait: Fieldwork has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Music Project with support from Chamber Music America’s Presenting Jazz Program, funded through the generosity of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
THE MUSIC OF TYSHAWN SOREY: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH TYSHAWN SOREY:
Composer and Musician Tyshawn Sorey | 2017 MacArthur Fellow
macfound
Published on October 10, 2017:
Tyshawn Sorey is assimilating and transforming ideas from a broad spectrum of musical idioms and defying distinctions between genres, composition, and improvisation in a singular expression of contemporary music.
The MacArthur Fellowship is a $625,000, no-strings-attached grant for individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more. Learn more at www.macfound.org/macfellow and explore their stories on social media with the hashtag #MacFellow.
Tyshawn Sorey - Full Performance, Conduction at Banff Centre
Published on September 13, 2017
Tyshawn Sorey is a composer and multi-instrumentalist. While at Banff Centre as faculty for our summer music programs in 2017, he lead a group in a performance of conduction, or "conducted improvisation." Watch the whole performance here.
Watch a video that explains the concept of conduction here: https://youtu.be/BjxIGJDeEmI
Learn more about Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity:
Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey's Duet for piano and drums:
Published on April 24, 2017:
On Thursday, April 13 at 7 pm, Q2 Music and host Helga Davis presented a live show from The Greene Space at WQXR as Vijay Iyer — the pianist-composer whose music is “at once provocative and accessible, intellectually substantive and sensually attractive” (Chicago Tribune) — shared the stage with a diverse array of musical collaborators. Watch the complete show below.
Included on the program were solo piano music by Iyer, and duets with the dynamic drummer-composer Tyshawn Sorey and with Iyer's longtime performing partner saxophonist-composer Rudresh Mahanthappa.* Acclaimed violinist and champion of new music Jennifer Koh performed Esa-Pekka Salonen’s lyrical Lachen Verlernt, while George Lewis, the pioneering composer, scholar and member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, joined Ms. Davis on stage for a conversation.
Click here to enjoy the complete show: http://bit.ly/2pB
Published on August 19, 2016
Meinl Cymbals Tyshawn Sorey Drum Video "Template":
Meinl Cymbals Tyshawn Sorey Drum Video “Template"
"Template" - composed by Tyshawn Sorey
Meinl Cymbals set up used by Tyshawn Sorey -
- 18" Byzance Traditional Medium Thin Crash as bottom hihat
- 18" Byzance Dark Crash as top hat
- 22" Byzance Big Apple Dark Ride with four rivets installed by Tyshawn
- 24" Byzance Big Apple Dark Ride
- 16" Byzance Vintage Trash Crash with eight rivets installed by Tyshawn
- 17" Byzance Traditional Medium Thin Crash as bottom hihat
- 17" Byzance Dark Crash as top hat
Tyshawn Sorey also uses Aquarian drum heads.
Ojai Music Festival 2017: The Inner Spectrum of Variables:
Friday, June 9, 2017: 2:30pm-3:30pm
Libbey Bowl
TYSHAWN SOREY: The Inner Spectrum of Variables Movement II Movement III Movement IV Movement V + VI + Reprise
TYSHAWN SOREY DOUBLE TRIO
Tyshawn Sorey, drums | Kyle Armbrust, viola | Fung Chern Hwei, violin | Rubin Kodheli, cello | Cory Smythe, piano | Chris Tordini, bass
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Program Notes: http://www.ojaifestival.org/2017-ojai...
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Tyshawn Sorey: http://www.ojaifestival.org/tyshawn-s...
Kyle Armbrust: https://iceorg.org/about/artist/kyle-...
Fung Chern Hwei: http://chernhwei.webs.com/
Rubin Kodheli: http://www.rubinkodheli.com/
Cory Smythe: http://corysmythe.com/
Chris Tordini: https://pirecordings.com/artist/Chris...
Ojai Music Festival: http://ojaifestival.org/
Tyshawn Sorey: Bertha's Lair (2016):
Discover Jazz - Tyshawn Sorey Quartet:
Published on October 26, 2016:
Through
percussion, trombone, piano and composition, Tyshawn Sorey describes
his work as “intuitive music,” navigating through space and sound
without a roadmap. With his quartet, Sorey picks apart complexity to
study the tonal capacity of each note and nuanced beat. Sorey’s
influences trace not only to the great jazz predecessors but also to the
innovators of 20th century classical music, such as Morton Feldman,
Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez. Last November, Sorey wrapped
up a week holding court at the legendary Village Vanguard in New York, a
series of performances that earned high praise from the New York Times
for his “flowing sense of ritual and constant alertness.”
Drums, piano – Tyshawn Sorey
Trombone – Ben Gerstein
Viola, violin – Mat Maneri
Guitar – Todd Neufeld
Amirtha Kidambi & Tyshawn Sorey - at The Stone, NYC - July 5, 2016:
Published on May 19, 2017
Amirtha Kidambi - voice
Tyshawn Sorey - drums, piano, trombone
Tyshawn Sorey Quartet--Acts--October 29, 2010:
Tyshawn Sorey Talks Drumming As a composer:
Tyshawn Sorey - solo piano - at JACK, Brooklyn - July 20 2015:
Jen Shyu & Tyshawn Sorey - at The Stone, NYC
August 3 2014:
Jen Shyu - voice, percussion, objects
Tyshawn Sorey - drums, percussion
Marilyn Crispell & Tyshawn Sorey - Duo/Quartets/Sextet - CMS Workshop - Big Indian, NY
Published on July 14, 2014:
Recorded June 12, 2014
at the Creative Music Studio Workshop
Camera - Don Mount
1) Crispell/Sorey Duo
Marilyn Crispell - piano
Tyshawn Sorey - drums
2) Crispell/Sorey/Tamez/Filiano Quartet
Marilyn Crispell - piano
Tyshawn Sorey - drums
Omar Tamez - guitar
Ken Filiano - bass
3) Crispell/Berger/Tamez/Filiano Quartet
Marilyn Crispell - piano
Karl Berger - vibraphone
Omar Tamez - guitar
Ken Filiano - bass
4) Crispell/Sorey/Berger/Sertso/Tamez/Filiano Sextet
Marilyn Crispell - piano
Tyshawn Sorey - drums
Karl Berger - vibraphone
Ingrid Sertso - voice
Omar Tamez - guitar
Ken Filiano - bass
Vision Festival 20 | Roscoe Mitchell: Two Trios & Combined Quintet Pt I
Published on January 13, 2016:
Trio One
Roscoe Mitchell - alto, soprano, sopranino
Hugh Ragin - trumpet piccolo trumpet, flugelhorn
Tyshawn Sorey - drums, trombone, piano
Trio Two
Roscoe Mitchell - alto soprano, sopranino saxophones
Craig Taborn - piano, electronics
Kikanju Baku - drums, percussion
Combined Quintet: Roscoe Mitchell, Hugh Ragin, Craig Taborn, Tyshawn Sorey, Kikanju Baku
Tyshawn Sorey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tyshawn Sorey
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Tyshawn Sorey, Mœrs festival, 2010
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Background information
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Birth name
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Tyshawn Sorey
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Born
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July 8, 1980 (age 37)
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Origin
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Newark, New Jersey, United States
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Genres
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Jazz, avant garde, classical, klezmer
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Occupation(s)
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Drummer, composer
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Years active
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2001–present
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Labels
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Tyshawn Sorey (born July 8, 1980) is an American musician and composer who plays drum set, percussion, trombone and piano.
Since graduating from William Paterson University, Sorey has been a sought-after musician in many different musical idioms. He is both a performer and composer, and has had works reviewed in The Wire, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Modern Drummer and Down Beat. In August 2009, Sorey was given the opportunity to curate a month of performances at the Stone, a New York performance space owned by John Zorn. He was selected as an Other Minds 17 (2012).
Sorey holds a Master of Arts in composition from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and a D.M.A. from Columbia University. He began an assistant professorship at Wesleyan in the fall of 2017. In October of 2017 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
To date, Sorey has released four albums as a leader: That/Not (2007, Firehouse 12 Records), Koan (2009, 482 Music), Oblique (2011, Pi Recordings) and Alloy (2014, Pi Recordings). He has recorded or performed with musicians including Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Coleman, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Steve Lehman, Joey Baron, Muhal Richard Abrams, Pete Robbins, Vijay Iyer, Dave Douglas, Butch Morris, Samo Salamon and Sylvie Courvoisier, among many others.
Contents
Discography
As leader
- That/Not (2007)
- Koan (2009)
- Oblique – I (2011)
- Alloy (2014)
- The Inner Spectrum of Variables (2016)
- Verisimilitude (2017)
As co-leader
With Fieldwork
- Door (2008)
As sideman
With Samuel Blaser
- Pieces of Old Sky (2009)
With David Binney
- Lifted Land (2013)
With Anthony Braxton
- Trillium E (2011)
With Steve Coleman
- Harvesting Semblances and Affinities (2010)
- The Mancy of Sound (2011)
With Kris Davis and Ingrid Laubrock
- Paradoxical Frog (2010)
- Union (2012)
With Armen Donelian
- Leapfrog (2011)
With Alexandra Grimal
- Andromeda (2012)
With Henry Grimes, Roberto Pettinato and Dave Burrell
- Purity (2012)
With Vijay Iyer
- Blood Sutra (Artists House, 2003)
- Far From Over (ECM, 2017)
With Max Johnson
- Quartet (2012)
With Lauer Large
- Konstanz Suite (2009)
With Ingrid Laubrock
- Serpentines (2016)
With Steve Lehman
- Demian as Posthuman (2005)
- On Meaning (2007)
- Travail, Transformation and Flow (2009)
- Mise en Abîme (2014)
With Roscoe Mitchell
- Duets With Tyshawn Sorey and Special Guest Hugh Ragin (2013)
- Bells for the South Side (ECM, 2017)
With Pascal Niggenkemper
- Pasàpas (2008)
- Urban Creatures (2010)
With Timuçin Şahin
- Bafa (2009)
- Inherence (2012)
With Samo Salamon
- Kei's Secret (2006)
With Som Sum Sam
- Beauty Under Construction (2005)
With Craig Taborn
- Flaga: Book of Angels Volume 27 (Tzadik, 2016) composed by John Zorn
With John Zorn
- In the Hall of Mirrors (Tzadik, 2014)
- Valentine's Day (Tzadik, 2014)
- Hen to Pan (Tzadik, 2015)
References
Blumenfeld, Larry (2011-10-15). "A Thinking Man's Drummer - WSJ". Online.wsj.com. Retrieved 2016-12-05.
Williams, Gray (2009-08-16). "Tyshawn Sorey". Allaboutjazz.com. Retrieved 2016-12-05.
"Artistdata is No More — Use Sonicbids To Publish Your Shows". Artistdata.com. Retrieved 2016-12-05.
Macnie, Jim (2010-08-04). "Tyshawn Sorey". Village Voice. Retrieved 2016-12-05.
- Ben Ratliff (2009-08-07). "Improvised Silence Amid the Sounds at the Stone". The New York Times. Retrieved 2016-12-05.
External links
"Ten Questions with Tyshawn Sorey | Glowing Realm". Glowsinthedark.wordpress.com. 2009-05-05. Retrieved 2016-12-05.
"Tyshawn Sorey on Composition As A Drummer". YouTube. Retrieved 2016-12-05.
