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https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2017/11/tyshawn-sorey-b-july-8-1980-outstanding.html

PHOTO:  TYSHAWN SOREY  (b. July 8, 1980) 

“You really need to embrace everywhere you come from, and the difference between yourself and your colleagues.”


Tyshawn Sorey - JOHN ROGERS 
Tyshawn Sorey 
 
 
 
 


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.

That/Not

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.

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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.

The New Yorker
       
The prodigious drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey is currently in residence at the Stone.
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.”


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)

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

233: Tyshawn Sorey interview

October 3, 2022 
 
 

 
Multi-instrumentalist, composer and educator Tyshawn Sorey on his latest recordings (Mesmerism and The Off​-​Off Broadway Guide to Synergism), his recent composition “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)”, making work that defies category, growing up in Newark, comedy as a form of self care, the radical idea of blackness, exploring alternative musical models, his photographic memory, the interaction between improvisation and composition, processing ancestral trauma through music, and bad Italian food. 
 
 
 
 
DSC05746.jpg
Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey (b. 1980) is celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery and memorization of highly complex scores, and an extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work. He has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, as well as artists such as John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, George Lewis, Claire Chase, Steve Lehman, Jason Moran, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, 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 notes Sorey is, “a composer of radical and seemingly boundless ideas.” The New Yorker recently noted that Sorey is “among the most formidable denizens of the in-between zone…An extraordinary talent who can see across the entire musical landscape.”
 
Sorey has composed works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the International Contemporary Ensemble, soprano Julia Bullock, PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, the McGill-McHale Trio, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Alarm Will Sound, the Louisville Orchestra, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee with Opera Philadelphia in partnership with Carnegie Hall, as well as for countless collaborative performers. His music has been performed in notable venues such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Village Vanguard, the Ojai Music Festival, the Newport Jazz Festival, the Kimmel Center, and the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. Sorey has received support for his creative projects from The Jerome Foundation, The Shifting Foundation, Van Lier Fellowship, and was named a 2017 MacArthur fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow.
 
Sorey has released twelve critically acclaimed recordings that feature his work as a composer, co-composer, improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and conceptualist. His latest release, Pillars (Firehouse 12 Records, 2018), has been praised by Rolling Stone as “an immersive soundworld… sprawling, mysterious… thrilling” and has been named as one of BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction 2018 albums of the year. 
 
In 2012, he was selected as one of nine composers for the Other Minds Festival, 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 was also a 2015 recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Award. Sorey has taught and lectured on composition and improvisation at Columbia University, The New England Conservatory, The Banff Centre, University of Michigan, International Realtime Music Symposium, Harvard University, Hochschule für Musik Köln, Berklee College of Music, University of Chicago, and The Danish Rhythmic Conservatory. Sorey joined the composition faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2020.


The Composer Tyshawn Sorey Enters a New Phase

The Newark native has long been lauded for his brilliant abstractions. Lately he’s writing about something more concrete — and producing his most powerful music yet.

Tyshawn Sorey PHOTO: Tyshawn Sorey.  Credit: Sharif Hamza for The New York Times

by Adam Shatz
January 7, 2023
New York Times

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On March 6, hardly a week before the pandemic lockdown began, close to a hundred people packed into the Jazz Gallery in New York City to hear a new sextet led by the drummer Tyshawn Sorey. When seats ran out — maximum occupancy is 75 — people stood against the wall or huddled together on the floor by the stage. Rio Sakairi, the club’s artistic director, worried that the city would shut down the concert as she passed around hand sanitizer. The anticipation in the room was tinged with dread. The death of the great jazz pianist McCoy Tyner was announced that day, and as we waited for the band to go on, his 1967 album, “The Real McCoy,” played on the loudspeaker. The two musicians had never met, but Sorey was so devastated by Tyner’s death that he nearly canceled the concert.

By Sorey’s standards, the set was a short one: only two and a half hours. Sorey specializes in slow-moving “durational” music — on his first album with this sextet, “Unfiltered,” songs run as long as 55 minutes — and the music that evening flowed in a contemplative, somber vein, now and then building to moments of ferocious intensity. You could hear faint, beautifully modulated echoes of 1960s jazz: the dark modernism of Andrew Hill, the gnomic lyricism of Wayne Shorter, the gnarled intensity of John Coltrane, the raucous counterpoint of Charles Mingus. But what impressed me most was the confidence and authority of the orchestration. There were no breaks between songs, just an uninterrupted, seamless odyssey of music-making, anchored and steered by Sorey, in his signature Afro, sunglasses and a loose black button-down. Sorey is a big man, but he moved around his drum set with almost balletic grace, poise and concentration. As a coda, he led the band in a stirring rendition of Tyner’s ballad “Search for Peace.”

When the set was over, Sorey said, he could hardly speak; he wanted to “live in that experience longer,” not hang out. So he slipped out of the club, only to be accosted by a group of older white admirers in the elevator. He smiled politely at their praise, but it was clear he preferred to be left alone. “I’m sorry,” he explained, “but I’m just feeling emotional about McCoy.” After we said goodbye on the street, he drove through the Lincoln Tunnel to his hotel in New Jersey and, still thinking of Tyner, “cried for hours.”

Sorey who turned 40 over the summer, would be worth writing about for his drumming alone. The power, precision and inventiveness of his playing often draw comparisons with masters like Max Roach, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams. But Sorey refuses to play conventionally virtuosic drum solos — he prefers to play delicately and sparely, if at all — and he avoids being photographed with his sticks in the athletic poses that have defined the image of most jazz drummers. He is also a brilliant trombonist and pianist, and in the last few years he has become as arresting a figure in contemporary classical and experimental new music as he is in jazz: a favorite of The New Yorker’s classical-music critic Alex Ross; one of few Black composers ever to be invited to the new-music festival in Darmstadt, Germany; and a recipient of a 2017 MacArthur “genius” award.

Sorey is one reason the worlds of jazz and classical music — of music that’s improvised and music that’s notated — seem less and less separate today. He’s far from the first jazz musician to compose for the classical concert hall: In the 1950s, there were “Third Stream” composers (Gunther Schuller, Jimmy Giuffre, John Lewis) who wrote for ensembles of classically trained musicians and jazz improvisers. But Sorey is neither “combining” genres nor “crossing over” from one into another. He does not so much bridge genre divides as cast them aside, as if they were a vestige of a prehistoric era, before artists as versatile as himself walked the earth. He can memorize and perform a complex score after glancing at it for 30 seconds, but he has no interest in reproducing sheet music note for note — including his own compositions, on which he expects musicians to improvise. “Playing with Tyshawn is like being onstage with the ocean,” the flutist Claire Chase told me. “You’re there with the ocean, and it’s serene and also dangerous and terrifying.”

I remember feeling somewhat at sea myself the first time I heard him perform, in 2014 in a trio with the pianist Cory Smythe and the bassist Chris Tordini. The stage was so dark that I felt as if I’d wandered into a séance. For the next two hours, they performed a hauntingly ruminative suite of semi-improvised chamber music, upending the conventions of the “jazz piano trio,” in which a pianist leads a rhythm section. At times Sorey seemed to do little more than brush his cymbals, creating whispering sounds. At others he sat still while Smythe and Tordini interpreted his score, letting the music drift in near silence until it was shattered by the crash of his drums, so clear and so bright that the room itself seemed to light up. The music’s beauty lay in the fragile truce it achieved between calm and turbulence, between creating a mood of contemplative stillness and channeling all the forces that menace it.

Sorey sometimes says his work is about “nothing” other than itself, but also describes it as “the means through which I ‘talk’ about social issues and other matters.” Both are true at once: His music is formally abstract but also permeated by his experience, especially his experience of Blackness. This does not always express itself in obvious or even audible ways; until recently, it has tended to emerge obliquely, down in what Ralph Ellison called the “lower frequencies.” Lately, however, Sorey has become more explicit about the moral and political passions beneath the rarefied surface of his aesthetics, writing vocal music set to poetry about Black lives. Silence and abstraction may remain his pillars, but he has given them a more explicit context and grounded them in more accessible forms. A result is some of the most expressive and powerful music he has written so far.

When I first suggested a profile to Sorey last January, he was preparing for the Paris premiere of his oratorio about Josephine Baker, “Perle Noire,” which was written for the soprano Julia Bullock and set to texts by the poet Claudia Rankine. By the time we began talking in late March, all such events had been canceled. And as the pandemic unfolded its strange monotony and appalling casualties, the mix of stasis and upheaval in Sorey’s music struck me as almost eerily prefigurative of this era in American history. Performing artists were facing the literal cancellation of their culture; Sorey told me in April that he was afraid that he “might be looking at the end of my career as a performer.” A number of prominent jazz musicians would die of Covid-19: Ellis Marsalis, Henry Grimes, Lee Konitz, Wallace Roney. As an overweight Black man with asthma, Sorey was acutely aware of being at risk himself. He and his wife would eventually decide to home-school their young daughter, Naima, to help protect him from the virus. He was lucky to have plenty of high-profile commissions, but there was no telling when or how this new work would reach the public. “I’m writing music for the desk drawer,” he told me.

We spoke on Zoom almost every week for the rest of the year. He was invariably in his office, dressed in black, with the lights off, boxes of CDs on the shelves behind him. Our conversations sometimes lasted for hours. Interviewing Sorey is a bit like listening to his music: a plunge into the longue durée, an introspective anatomy of what he has called the “cycles of my being.” The latest cycle, from the pandemic to this year’s killings of Black people by the police, has felt especially unsettling to him. At first he calmed his nerves by watching comedy (the absurdist “The Eric Andre Show” is a favorite) and posting about racism on social media, updating his thousands of followers on his state of mind. “I’m just doing what I need to do to survive,” he told me. But as the pandemic wore on, the convulsions of the late Trump era would propel him to embark on his most ambitious work yet: a vast book of songs about his own survival, and the survival of other Black Americans in the land they call, for better or worse, home.

“You really need to embrace everywhere you come from, and the difference between yourself and your colleagues.”
Credit: Sharif Hamza for The New York Times

Sorey was born in 1980 in Newark. His parents, who mostly did odd jobs, split up when he was 3, and he and his mother were evicted from their apartment soon after. They moved into a housing project, but as the crack epidemic spread, life at home grew increasingly precarious, and Sorey preferred to stay with his paternal grandmother, Evelyn Smith, a day-care teacher who died in 2014. At 12, he moved into her apartment in Clinton Hill, among Newark’s most violent neighborhoods. Both parents remained in his life, but it was a “dark time,” he says, and he prefers not to talk about it.

By 7, Sorey had been making sounds on radiators and pots and pans and playing hymns from memory on a beat-up piano in the basement of the Catholic church he attended with his grandmother. He wanted to play drums, but there were no drum sets at his elementary school, so he took trombone lessons instead. Later, his maternal grandfather, Herman Edward Sorey, gave him his first set. He also remembers his paternal uncle Kevin Smith, who looked out for him during his father’s frequent absences, taking him on jazz-buying expeditions at a record store in Elizabeth, the next town over.

Like many Black children, Sorey was consigned for much of his youth to special education, possibly because of the slight lisp he still has. He was also bullied by other children, ridiculed as the overweight kid who walked around with a boombox listening to “white folks’ music.” (“It didn’t matter that it was Miles Davis,” Sorey recalls. “They didn’t know I was also very into hip-hop.”) His other comfort zone, besides music, was “Columbo,” the detective show; in Peter Falk’s character, he found a fellow oddball who cunningly took advantage of being underestimated. “I loved the pacing of each investigation,” he says. “Two hours is a long time for a kid to watch something like that. But a ‘Columbo’ episode is akin to a strangely modified sonata form — kind of like Beethoven’s mastery of it.”

At Newark Arts High School, he studied trombone but also listened to all the great drummers — especially Max Roach, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams — and fell under the spell of Coltrane’s late expressionistic period. When he was 17, one of his teachers introduced him to someone who’d been among Coltrane’s fiercest champions: the Black Arts poet and critic Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones. A native son of Newark, Baraka lived not far from Evelyn Smith’s house and ran a music-and-poetry salon called Kimako’s Blues People out of his basement. It was at Baraka’s salon that Sorey met generations of radical artists and visiting jazz ambassadors, including Max Roach himself, receiving an education in “the Black agenda” — lessons reinforced by his uncle Kevin, who taught him the history of Newark’s 1967 uprising and played him speeches by Malcolm X.

But Sorey’s strict adherence to this agenda was challenged when one of his teachers asked him if he’d ever listened to 20th-century music. Sorey assumed that meant R.&B. and hip-hop, but the teacher was actually referring to 20th-century modernist composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. Sorey listened and was riveted by what he heard. The dissonance of the European avant-garde spoke to him: “My very being is dissonance,” he told me. (He was delighted when I showed him Duke Ellington’s remark that, for Black people, “dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part.”)

The sounds of the classical avant-garde also felt strangely familiar. They reminded him of the albums he was borrowing from the local library by experimental Black artists, like those in the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (A.A.C.M.), especially the reed man Anthony Braxton. Braxton mentioned Stockhausen and John Cage alongside jazz players among his influences; he used numerical and visual symbols for titles; he appeared on album covers holding a pipe. Braxton shook up Sorey’s sense of what a Black musician could be, making him “more of a universalist,” he says, both in his person and in his sense of art.

In 1999, Sorey went to William Paterson University on a full scholarship, starting out as a trombone student before switching to drums. He majored in jazz, but he chafed at the traditionalist streak in the jazz department. He found a sanctuary in the new-music program, which introduced him to even more sounds he had not explored. In his first semester, he overheard one teacher, the pianist Anton Vishio, playing a brutally staccato piece by Bartok and rushed in breathlessly to ask what it was; the next time they met, Vishio remembers, “Tyshawn was playing the hell out of it on piano,” an instrument he’d never formally studied.

Vishio also introduced Sorey to the work of Morton Feldman, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Queens, who wrote some of the quietest and most ravishing music of the second half of the 20th century. “Feldman’s work made me want to be myself and to pursue beauty in a similar way,” Sorey told me. “I loved the fact that it was quiet. I loved the chromaticism, and I loved the use of gesture.” The composer held another attraction too: A tall, bulky man who weighed roughly 300 pounds, Feldman was the only Jewish member of the New York School of composers led by Cage. He considered himself an outsider, even a misfit, in “Western-civilization music.” His ancestors, he said, were “with me” — “I have the feeling that I cannot betray this continuity, this thing I carry with me. The burden of history.” For Sorey, Feldman suggested a compelling way of reconciling abstraction and collective memory, formal beauty and ancestral trauma.

Sorey also investigated his Black musical ancestors. Some came from the jazz avant-garde, like Braxton and the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, another leader of the A.A.C.M. Others were modernist composers who wrote for classical ensembles, like Hale Smith, Olly Wilson and George Walker. The two groups sounded as different from each other as they did from the Euro-American avant-garde. But the more Sorey listened, the more he came to see each of these streams as a tributary of the same river of experimentation, artificially segregated by genre and race. While Euro-American composers experimented with chance and “aleatoric” writing, Black avant-gardists invented their own nonstandard methods, from the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s painted “Ankhrasmation” scores to “conduction,” a system of hand signals for improvisers devised by the cornetist Butch Morris. There were many ways of arriving at the shore of new sounds. Sorey wanted to know them all.

While still at William Paterson, Sorey made a name for himself as a sideman on the New York jazz scene. He had a photographic memory for sheet music, perfect pitch and mathematical precision. His only liability was what Sorey himself calls his “very short fuse — there was a sort of arrogance mixed with a deep insecurity about what I was doing and who I wanted to be.” At one student recital, he stormed offstage, frustrated by his band’s performance. On his first European tour with the pianist Michele Rosewoman, he was at one point so insubordinate toward Rosewoman that after the tour, another sideman said, “If you were in my band, I’d have put you back on the plane.” “Tyshawn learned a lot of social skills later on,” says Rosewoman, who continues to have great affection for him. “He became someone who could work with other people.”

From top, a page from a draft copy of “The Inner Spectrum of Variables”; the 6th movement from “Perle Noire.”
Credit: Sharif Hamza for The New York Times

Rosewoman chose not to continue working with Sorey, who says, “I still recoil in absolute horror at my 21-year-old self.” But working with Rosewoman ended up connecting him with someone who gave him his next big break: the pianist and composer Vijay Iyer. When they met to explore playing together, Sorey stunned Iyer, who expected to hear him play only drums, by sitting at the piano and playing one of Iyer’s improvisations and a piece by Stockhausen, both from memory. Late in 2004, Sorey joined Fieldwork, a trio with Iyer and the saxophonist Steve Lehman, and before long he was writing half the group’s music.

Iyer sensed Sorey’s unease with the role of a drummer, “something that was both too much and not enough for him.” Sorey loved playing with Fieldwork, but it infuriated him that when they went on tour, people saw him as the large Black man pounding the drums — “someone who’s supposed to perform music designed to entertain,” he says, “because that’s one of the only two things we’re ‘really good at,’ other than sports.” (As much as he admires the rapper Kendrick Lamar, Sorey thinks awarding a 2018 Pulitzer Prize to a commercial hip-hop record was something of an insult to the many Black composers of concert music who have been overlooked for the prize.) He had similar misgivings during a 2009 European tour with Paradoxical Frog — a trio with two white women, the Canadian pianist Kris Davis and the German saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock — but he never shared them with his bandmates. Davis worried that Sorey was expressing discontent (or boredom) by playing loud or walking offstage, sabotaging the music, but Sorey felt he was simply “responding to the energy in the room,” reclaiming his power with wordless protests. “That question about sabotaging the music comes from a place of privilege,” he says. “They have the luxury of not being asked, ‘Did you write that?’ like it’s some kind of surprise.” After I told him about Davis’s remarks, he emailed her; they’ve since reconciled and made plans to play together again. But even today, Sorey confessed to me, “I sometimes think I’m being too careful or overly sensitive about how others might view me as a large Black man making music.”

By the end of the Paradoxical Frog tour, Sorey had grown tired of playing in other people’s groups. He had already released two albums of his own music, both quietly forceful declarations of artistic independence. The first, a two-disc set called “That/Not,” was full of long tones, with austere, almost ritualistic repetition and passages of silence; one piano piece had six notes sounded in an almost relentless variety of voicings and sequences for more than 40 minutes. The next, “Koan,” was even more abstract, a mesmerizingly atmospheric work for drums, bass and guitars.

Sorey’s career as a leader was beginning to take off, but he was still living from gig to gig. On his occasional visits to Newark, relatives would ask how he planned to make a living; his father thought he would be better off getting a job at the Essex County jail, where his uncle Kevin worked. Instead, he applied to the master’s program in composition at Wesleyan, where he studied under his hero Anthony Braxton and the experimental composer Alvin Lucier. He also met his wife, Amanda L. Scherbenske, a violinist from a German-Russian family in North Dakota who was writing her Ph.D. thesis in ethnomusicology and leading a klezmer group on the side. Sorey joined her band in part, he says, to win her over. They soon found themselves “exquisitely connected,” in her words, by their love of music and their experiences of family trauma. Scherbenske was dazzled, and a little intimidated, by Sorey’s musical facility, especially when he picked up an old violin and, within five minutes, taught himself to play a few things. But she also understood his insecurities in a way no one else had before, and she helped him wrestle with feelings of shame and lack of “self-love” that go back to his childhood in Newark. She was also instinctively pragmatic about his career. When Sorey considered doing his Ph.D. at SUNY-Buffalo, because Morton Feldman once taught there, she told him: “Buffalo is not going to do anything for you. Columbia is where you go.”

By way of introduction, first-year composition students at Columbia University are required to present some of their work. Sorey’s first presentation, in the fall of 2011, was such a flop that he nearly quit the program. The other students wrote in a more academic style; Sorey presented experimental jazz. At first no one said anything. Finally, someone asked about his approach to improvisation. “I made some kind of intellectualized comment, and then he said, ‘Can you say it in your own words?’ He might as well have said, ‘Speak Ebonics.’ So I spoke without intellectual poise, and he said, ‘That’s the answer I was looking for.’ I never presented a single other piece of music in that seminar.”

Still, he tried to fit in by writing his first piece of 12-tone serialism. At its premiere, he felt as if he’d betrayed himself. In 2012, at an artists’ residency in Northern California, he was explaining the formal devices he used to write the piece to a group of senior composers, when the ambient composer Harold Budd helpfully shouted, “I don’t give a damn how it’s made!” “Everyone laughed,” Sorey remembers. “I laughed, too.” Then he played a selection from “Koan.” “Now that sounds like you,” Budd declared. “Here I was trying to be this Princeton-Columbia type of intellectual composer,” Sorey says, “and everybody hated it. Even I hated it.”

Back on campus, he attended a performance at which Courtney Bryan, one of the few Black students in the composition program, played a piano solo inspired by an African-American spiritual. “It moved into a very dark area in terms of harmony, with a real acerbic sense. I heard the struggle that I was feeling at that time at Columbia in her left hand.” He started to work on a new piece for piano, vibraphone and alto flute, taking the opening chords of an obscure late composition by Coltrane, “Untitled 90320,” and radically slowing them down to distill their melodic essence. The language is classical, but the tone colors are steeped in the Eastern-tinged modal jazz Coltrane pioneered. Sorey called this beguiling piece “Trio for Harold Budd,” in homage to the composer who reminded him that the beauty of his music mattered more than the beauty of his ideas. Since that moment, he said, he lost interest in “being the most avant-garde person in the room.”

During his first year at Columbia, Sorey took classes with the composer, trombonist and musicologist George Lewis, a member of the A.A.C.M. But at Lewis’s urging, he worked most closely with the composer Fred Lerdahl, a specialist in tonal harmony, who advised his thesis. (“We’re going to work together beyond Columbia,” Lewis told him — and “you’re going to get so much from Fred that you’re not going to get from me.”) At their first class, Sorey listened to Lerdahl playing Brahms, and “a light bulb went off in my head — I felt at home there, with him playing this beautiful music.” He said he wanted to learn how to build larger forms with chromatic harmony; Lerdahl told him to return the next week having written something reflecting that. This was the beginning of Sorey’s “Slow Movement for Piano,” a work of wintry Romanticism later recorded by his trio. Lerdahl liked Sorey’s initial sketch but says he encouraged him to “make your compositions as coherent and logical as your improvisations. It almost sounds like you’re speaking two languages, and you need a unified language.” Sorey was so shaken by Lerdahl’s respect for him as a composer that “I literally broke down and told him some of my insecurities and issues. He said, ‘You really need to embrace everywhere you come from, and the difference between yourself and your colleagues.’”

He experienced a similar jolt when he read “In the Break,” an influential study of Black aesthetics by the cultural theorist Fred Moten. Sorey found an almost personal vindication in Moten’s argument that Black musical creativity isn’t an outgrowth of the blues or some other vernacular essence, but that it stems from a resistance to any kind of confining categorization. If Sorey wanted to write music influenced by Brahms or Feldman, that didn’t mean he was betraying his Black roots or his radical principles. On the contrary: He was expressing his freedom both as an artist and a Black man. All the music he’d studied, he realized, whatever its ethnic or racial identity, belonged to him. The way he interpreted it, and interwove it with his jazz background, ensured that his work would contain, like Ellington’s, “the sound of our experience, the sound of the Negro experience.”

This revelation led to new work of astonishing breadth and variety. There was “Alloy,” for his piano trio; “The Inner Spectrum of Variables,” a two-hour suite for the trio and three classically trained string players; “Perle Noire,” the evocation of Josephine Baker’s life as a Black artist in exile; and “Pillars,” a four-hour electroacoustic piece full of ominous drones and reverberations. These were followed by improvised duets of striking elegance and formal cohesion, plus “Unfiltered,” an immersive, richly melodic work of straight-ahead jazz.

“I often have the feeling of disbelonging, of not belonging to any particular place — even if, lineage-wise, I’m a Black man.”
Credit...Sharif Hamza for The New York Times

Sorey was finally writing the kind of music he wanted to hear, and being rewarded for it: He graduated from Columbia in 2017 with an appointment from Wesleyan, followed by the MacArthur. But not everyone could play Sorey’s scores. While he generally uses traditional Western notation, Sorey expects musicians to be able to move off the page and improvise, and collaborators have grown accustomed to showing up for a concert only to be told that they will be playing parts of the score in a different order, or backward. For most classical musicians, this is asking a lot. During the recording of one piece, when the string players were having difficulty keeping up, Sorey made no secret of his frustration, stomping out of the room. “Take a breath,” Yulun Wang, one of his producers, told him. “These people are only human. Hold them to the highest standards you want, but remember they’re not you.”

When he first met with the International Contemporary Ensemble, a group of new-music players that has performed many of his scores, to discuss a possible collaboration, he told them: “I’m not interested in fusing or dissolving or creating a hybrid. I want to start from a place where the lines between notated and improvised music have disappeared completely.” There was a hush in the room. “The way Tyshawn made the invitation gave us a choice,” the flutist Claire Chase remembers. “Stay where you are, or come with me.”

In spring 2019, Sorey and Chase performed a duet for a group of Columbia donors in East Harlem, where one guest told Sorey he liked his Afro and suggested that he would look even better if he wore a dashiki or kente cloth and did the “Black thing” onstage. Days later, they performed the same piece at a retrospective of Sorey’s chamber works at Columbia’s Miller Theater. Some of New York’s best-known composers and musicians turned up. Still, Sorey felt disappointed when he learned Fred Lerdahl had been in the audience but left without saying hello. He later told Sorey that he felt the “pieces were too long and repetitious” and didn’t want to “cast a shadow” — though, he said, “my admiration for you and your talent is undiminished.” Sorey felt punched in the gut. One of his most enchanting recent compositions is a shadowy, nocturnal work titled “For Fred Lerdahl.” He was “thrilled” and, I sensed, relieved when I told him that Lerdahl considers it a “lovely piece.”

Many of Sorey’s titles, like Feldman’s, are dedications to mentors: homages to composers, often older men, whom he describes with gratitude, even reverence. Relations with his own family remain complicated and sometimes stressful. And when he returns to Newark, Sorey says, he still confronts a perception that “Blackness is one mold, one box, and that if you don’t operate in that box, you’re trying to be white, or you think you’re better.” His aim as a composer is to “move between different worlds,” but, he says, “I often have the feeling of disbelonging, of not belonging to any particular place — even if, lineage-wise, I’m a Black man.”

Last summer, Sorey had a real conversation with his father, Otha C. Smith III, for the first time in six years. Although he welcomed the thaw in their relations, he soon fell into a “big depression.” He declared that he no longer wanted to write long-form pieces and instead churned out spiky little bagatelles for solo instrumentalists, one as short as 30 seconds — works that, he confessed, sounded surprisingly like the academic style he tried to emulate and then abandoned at Columbia. He didn’t have the attention span for anything longer; the double menace of racism and Covid-19, and then his father’s reappearance, had left him feeling vulnerable and agitated.

In the fall, he bounced back. He and Amanda were expecting their second daughter in January and were living in a new home in a suburb of Philadelphia, where he has taken a tenure-track chair in composition at the University of Pennsylvania. Since the fall semester began, he has been back at his desk, early in the morning, writing at such an accelerated clip that the Times music critic Zachary Woolfe declared November “the month of Tyshawn Sorey.” One of the two just-completed commissions he premiered that month — “For Roscoe Mitchell,” a 20-minute composition for the cellist Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony — felt like a milestone. While it begins in a hushed style reminiscent of Feldman, it travels into far more dramatic terrain, with gorgeously baleful writing in the lower registers of the cello.

Sorey’s most important project, however, has been a series of art songs about Black lives in America, building on his 2018 work “Cycles of My Being.” A brooding, 40-minute setting of poems by Terrance Hayes, “Cycles” was one of Sorey’s most traditional “classical” works: It drew inspiration from the 19th-century German tradition of lieder, songs for solo voice with piano accompaniment. Its singer was a classical tenor, Lawrence Brownlee, and the instrumentation paid homage to Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” With its nods to Brahms’s voluptuous writing for clarinet, Schoenbergian serialism and Steve Reich’s jagged strings, the music reveled in Sorey’s classical influences. Yet it was also Sorey’s most personal and most explicitly Black work — specifically, his most Ellingtonian work, insofar as it sought to create a musical parallel to the Black American experience.

Sorey says Ellington’s 1943 work “Black, Brown and Beige” weighed heavily on him as he wrote, especially its sorrowful “Come Sunday” section, which Mahalia Jackson sings with transcendent power on the 1958 recording. Like Ellington, Sorey wrote with his performers in mind, encouraging them to stylize his writing and “make that music yours.” He wanted to capture “the way we Black people like to do things, how our music depends on our feeling, our interpretation, at a given moment.” In an a cappella section toward the end, Brownlee embellishes the words “each day I rise,” while a male chorus solemnly exclaims “I know!” in a call-and-response; then comes an instrumental section in which the clarinet cries and screams over a piano tremolo. I wrote to Sorey that I felt as if he were saying: “This is where I come from. These are my people. This is who I am.” Indeed, he replied, “this is what I call the testifying section.”

Energized by the protests against racism and police brutality, Sorey initially set out to expand “Cycles” into a work of three or four hours. Instead, he has been writing new works for voice about race in America — works that he sees as an extension, rather than a part, of “Cycles.” Two of the compositions he wrote in the fall will premiere early this year: “Save the Boys,” for piano and countertenor, based on a poem by the Black abolitionist and suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; and a setting of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Death,” for piano and mezzo-soprano. “I’m talking,” Sorey says, “about the peril we continue to experience as Black men, and as Black women, too, as we saw with Breonna Taylor.”

Ever since the protests last summer, the classical-music world, like other spheres in American life, has been reckoning with its history of anti-Black racism, from orchestras’ exclusion of Black musicians to the neglect and erasure of Black composers. “I personally think it’s a day too late and a dollar too short,” Sorey says of classical music’s “awokening,” but it has sharpened his sense of urgency around the vocal music he has been writing. “As an artist and as a Black man,” he told me, “I have a responsibility to put this work out, and time is of the essence.” He now plans to dedicate himself to vocal writing, seeing it as the culmination of his work as a composer. But this work is also something of a departure: Unlike his more abstract writing, it is plainly “about something.”

The original musical spark for “Cycles of My Being” did not come from the blues or spirituals. It came from Schumann’s “Dichterliebe,” a sequence of 16 songs about love and betrayal composed in 1840. The romantic theme of Schumann’s cycle is personal, not political, but its ironic libretto is based on poems by Heinrich Heine, a German Jew who knew too well how it feels to love a country that doesn’t love you back. That bitter tale of unrequited love seems to be at the heart of Sorey’s new work; he listened to “Dichterliebe” obsessively while writing “Cycles,” drawn to the “simplicity of the writing and the clarity of the texts.” He realizes that there’s nothing simple about his love for them, at least not to others, but “why is it OK for white people to listen to Coltrane or Miles Davis but not OK for me to listen to Stockhausen or Feldman? It’s an age-old problem — and one that I continue to ignore.” When someone asks him, he told me, why a Black man like himself would write lieder, “my answer is: ‘Who owns music?’”

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Adam Shatz is a contributing editor for The London Review of Books and a contributor for the magazine. He last wrote about the musician Craig Taborn. 

 

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 10, 2021, Page 35 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Pieces of a Man. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
 

The Pace Report: 

"The Composing Educator" The Tyshawn Sorey Interview

November 30, 2018


Tyshawn Sorey - Pillars (2018)

April 25, 2023 
 
 
Get ready for an extraordinary listening experience with Tyshawn Sorey's latest album, Pillars. A true virtuoso, Sorey has created a three-CD/two-LP masterpiece featuring a top-flight electro-acoustic octet. The album is a seamless blend of composition and improvisation that takes you on a journey through ritual, drone, and volatile atmosphere. The multivalent sound world of Pillars is inspired by Tibetan ceremonial music, African-American experimentalism, and the extended avant-jazz rituals of Roscoe Mitchell. As The New Yorker recently noted, Sorey is "among the most formidable denizens of the in-between zone... An extraordinary talent who can see across the entire musical landscape." Even though the album consists of three tracks, the first track, Pillars I, is a mesmerizing 01:17:15 long composition that showcases Sorey's visionary gifts. Pillars is available in full-length triple-CD and digital download versions, and a different, re-edited edition for vinyl double-LP (titled Pillars IV). 


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.

When we meet, he's known that he was being given a MacArthur fellowship for nearly a month already, but he says it wasn't hard to keep it under wraps. "I'm a very private person anyway," he observes, "so it was it was no problem for me to keep it a secret."

And Sorey definitely doesn't want to be labeled as a jazz musician: He is a composer, drummer, percussionist, trombonist and conductor who has collaborated with a huge range of performers, from the International Contemporary Ensemble to Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Coleman, Dave Douglas, John Zorn, Roscoe Mitchell, Vijay Iyer and Anthony Braxton, a predecessor at Wesleyan.

Ojai Music Festival 2017: The Inner Spectrum of Variables, Friday  (Composition by Tyshawn Sorey)

 
June 20, 2017

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."


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

Tyshawn Sorey - JOHN ROGERS 

  • 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:

Alexander Melnikov, Schumann: Piano Concerto (Harmonia Mundi)
Roky Erickson, Don't Slander Me (Light in the Attic)
Apartment House, Laurence Crane: Chamber Works 1992-2009 (Another Timbre)
Agostino DiScipio, Hörbare Ökosysteme (Edition RZ)
Eddie Gale, Ghetto Music (Blue Note)


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.


Zen-informed musician Tyshawn Sorey wins $625,000 “Genius Grant”

October 13, 2017
LionsRoar

Tyshawn Sorey playing drums.
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.”

Tshawn Sorey album cover.
“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.
 

Vision Festival 20 | Roscoe Mitchell: Two Trios & Combined Quintet Pt I

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
  
 
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."
 

Tyshawn Sorey: Bertha's Lair (2016)

 
March 16, 2017
   
For contrabass flute and drums Claire Chase, contrabass flute Tyshawn Sorey, drums


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.

Live In Studio: Tyshawn Sorey


Composer, multi-instrumentalist and 2017 MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey stretches boundaries and defies casual listening. He leads an electro-acoustic ensemble that includes a gong snare, in-studio.
 
Tyshawn Sorey:  Drums and Composer,  
Brandon Ross: Guitar, 
Graham Haynes:  Trumpet and cornet
Val-Inc (a.k.a. Val Jeanty): DJ mixmaster and sound architect

 


JazzTimes

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

Tyshawn Sorey

Tyshawn Sorey performs at the Newport Jazz Festival in July

Tyshawn Sorey's Alloy, featuring pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Christopher Tordini, performs at the Newport Jazz Festival in July
  
by David R. Adler
11/25/2016
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.”
 

Tyshawn Sorey: Full Performance, Conduction at Banff Centre

 
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:    
 
 • Open Studio: Musi...   Learn more about Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity: http://www.banffcentre.ca
 




July, 2017

Tyshawn Sorey, multi-instrumentalist and composer

 

Tyshawn-Sorey-325

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

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.


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 SoreyTyshawn 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

Meinl Cymbals Tyshawn Sorey Drum Video "Template"

 
August 19, 2016 
 
http://meinlcymbals.com Meinl Cymbals Tyshawn Sorey Drum Video "Template" 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. 
 
"Template" - composed by Tyshawn Sorey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyshawn_Sorey

Tyshawn Sorey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tyshawn Sorey (born July 8, 1980) is an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, and professor of contemporary music.[1]

Sorey has received accolades for performances, recordings, and compositions ranging from improvised solo percussion[1] to opera,[2] with work in best-of lists for both classical[3] and jazz music.[4][5] The New Yorker included Sorey in their annual "Notable Performances and Recordings" lists for 2017,[6] 2018,[7] 2019,[8] and 2020; the pandemic-era entry was for premieres "cast in unconventional concerto form".[9] His prolific output during a time of heavy restrictions on live performance led a New York Times critic to call him 2020's "composer of the year".[10]

Sorey was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017,[11] a United States Artists Fellow in 2018,[12] and in 2019 his song cycle for Josephine Baker, Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine, was performed on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[13] His life and work have been the subject of features in publications including The New York Times,[14] The New Yorker,[15] The Wall Street Journal,[16] NPR Music,[17] and The Brooklyn Rail.[18]

Sorey has recorded or performed with Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Coleman, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Steve Lehman, Joey Baron, Muhal Richard Abrams, Pete Robbins, Cory Smythe, Kris Davis, Vijay Iyer, Myra Melford, Dave Douglas, Butch Morris, and Sylvie Courvoisier.

In 2020, Sorey joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as Presidential Assistant Professor of Music.[19]

Early life and career

Sorey grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and attended Newark Arts High School.[20] As a teenager, he participated in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center Jazz for Teens program, through which he was awarded a Star-Ledger Scholarship.[21]

In 2004, Sorey completed a B.Music in jazz studies and performance at William Paterson University,[22] where he began as a classical trombone major before transferring to jazz drumming.[14]

After a number of years recording and performing as a sideperson for artists including Vijay Iyer and Steve Lehman, Sorey's first album as leader was released on Firehouse 12 Records in 2007.[23] The 2-CD That/Not features various configurations of Sorey, trombonist Ben Gerstein, pianist Cory Smythe, and bassist Thomas Morgan performing an extensive array of works, from "Seven Pieces for Trombone Quartet" to the forty-three minute "Permutations for Solo Piano." Sorey primarily plays drums, but also makes appearances on piano, including on the album's opening track.[23] The material recorded for the album exceeded even the constraints of a two-disc set: a subsequent digital release of That/Not includes five additional pieces from the same sessions, including two "4 Hands" piano tracks.[24]

Sorey released his second album, Koan, in June 2009.[25] Featuring Todd Neufeld (on electric and acoustic guitar) and Thomas Morgan (on bass and acoustic guitar), the 482 Music release was reviewed favorably by All About Jazz[26] and the BBC,[27] included in the 2009 Village Voice Jazz Critics’ Poll,[28] and praised in NPR's "Take Five's Top 10 Jazz Records Of 2009".[29]

In the fall of 2009, Sorey enrolled in a master’s program at Wesleyan University to study composition with Anthony Braxton.[30] He completed his M.A. in the spring of 2011[31] before beginning a doctoral program at Columbia University in the fall. His enrollment at Columbia coincided with the release of his highly-lauded Oblique – I.[32]

During the six years of doctoral study that followed, Sorey worked closely with George E. Lewis and Fred Lerdahl;[33] off-campus, he recorded three albums with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini. The first of these, Alloy, was released on Pi Recordings in 2014.[34] For The Inner Spectrum of Variables, the trio was joined by three string performers: violinist Fung Chern Hwei, violist Kyle Armbrust, and cellist Rubin Kodheli. The Chicago Reader called The Inner Spectrum of Variables "one of the year's most arresting and ambitious recordings",[35] and The Nation included the album in their "Ten Best Albums of 2016";[36] Nextbop's Rob Shepherd named it the best jazz album of the decade.[37] The following year, Sorey returned to the trio format for Verisimilitude, which was listed third in both the 2017 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll[38] and The New York Times Best Jazz Albums of 2017.[39]

In 2017, Sorey also completed his Doctor of Musical Arts in composition at Columbia.[40] His dissertation comprises scores for his song cycle Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine and an essay on the aesthetic practices and critical reception of the composition, its subject Josephine Baker, and the composer himself. Sorey cited Julia Bullock and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble as integral to his endeavor to "challenge the improvisation/composition binary and celebrate collaborative modeling";[41] in 2019, these artists joined Sorey in performing the piece on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[13]

After receiving his DMA, Sorey began his appointment as Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University,[42] where he established the university's Ensemble for New Music and taught courses on composition and improvised music. In the fall of 2017, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work in music performance and composition.[11]

In 2018, Sorey premiered Cycles of My Being commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Carnegie Hall starring Lawrence Brownlee with poetry by Terrance Hayes. This song cycle centers on what it means to be a Black man living in America today and in 2020 was made into a film with Opera Philadelphia and released on their Digital Channel. In 2018 he also released Pillars on Firehouse 12.[43] The following year he was named Composer in Residence for the Seattle Symphony[44] and Opera Philadelphia,[45] and his duo album with Marilyn Crispell, The Adornment of Time, was released on Pi Recordings.[46]

In March 2020, just before the pandemic hit the Northeastern United States in full force, Sorey self-released his sextet's Unfiltered.[47] That fall, he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as Presidential Assistant Professor of Music.[19]

Beginning in 2019, Sorey embarked on several musical projects with Alarm Will Sound including For George Lewis, a through-composed composition scored for sinfonietta commissioned by the ensemble, as well as several versions of autoschediasms, spontaneous compositions led by Sorey drawing on the improvisational abilities of the instrumentalists. For George Lewis was premiered in 2019 at Washington University in St Louis and released on an album with two versions of autoschediasms in 2021. While one autoschediasm came from a live performance in St Louis in 2019, the other was recorded completely remotely with musicians performing from five states during the COVID-19 pandemic.[48] Additionally, Sorey recorded a holiday-themed autoschediasm based on Coventry Carol and Sussex Carol with Alarm Will Sound.

In 2022, Sorey’s composition Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), commissioned for the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel premieres there, followed by performances at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The piece has similar instrumentation to Morton Feldman’s 1971 composition Rothko Chapel.[49]

Musical style

Sorey's work is broadly experimental, drawing on a wide variety of influences, practices, and traditions.[11] He opposes the categorization of music by distinct genres,[50] and in interviews[1] and his doctoral thesis[41] has critiqued notions of improvisation and composition as mutually exclusive.

Described as a musical shapeshifter,[17][51] Sorey says he is invested less in "combining" genres than in movement across varying musical terrains: "For me, mobility represents not adhering to any particular musical model or institution. Unlike hybridity, mobility isn’t about fusion so much as the freedom to move between different models from moment to moment."[50]

Awards and honors

 
Discography

As leader/composer


2007 That/Not Firehouse 12 Sorey (drums, piano), Ben Gerstein (trombone), Cory Smythe (piano, Wurlitzer), Thomas Morgan (bass) 

2009 Koan 482 Music Sorey (drums and cymbals), Todd Neufeld (electric and acoustic guitar), Thomas Morgan (bass, acoustic guitar) 

2011 Oblique – I Pi Sorey (drums, percussion), Loren Stillman (saxophone), John Escreet (piano), Todd Neufeld (guitar), Chris Tordini (bass) 

2014 Alloy Pi Sorey (drums, percussion), Cory Smythe (piano), Chris Tordini (bass) 

2016 The Inner Spectrum of Variables Pi Sorey (drumset), Cory Smythe (piano), Chris Tordini (contrabass), Fung Chern Hwei (violin), Kyle Armbrust (viola), Rubin Kodheli (cello) 
 
2017 Verisimilitude Pi Sorey (drums, percussion), Cory Smythe (piano, toy piano, electronics), Chris Tordini (bass)
 
2018 Pillars Firehouse 12 Sorey (conductor, drum set, dungchen, percussion, trombone), Stephen Haynes (trumpet, flugelhorn, cornet, alto horn, small percussion), Ben Gerstein (trombone, melodica), Todd Neufeld (electric and acoustic guitar), Joe Morris (electric guitar, double bass), Carl Testa (double bass, electronics), Mark Helias (double bass ), Zach Rowden (double bass) 

2020 Unfiltered self-released Sorey (drums), Nathan Reising (alto saxophone), Morgan Guerin (tenor saxophone), Lex Korten (piano), Sasha Berliner (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass) 

2021 For George Lewis_Autoschediasms Cantaloupe Music & Alarm Will Sound 

2022 Mesmerism Yeros7 Music Sorey (drumset), Aaron Diehl (piano), Matt Brewer (contrabass)

As co-leader/composer

Release year Artist Title Label Personnel 

2008 Fieldwork Door Pi Vijay Iyer (piano), Steve Lehman (saxophone), Sorey (drums) 

2010 Paradoxical Frog Paradoxical Frog Clean Feed Kris Davis (piano), Ingrid Laubrock (saxophone), Sorey (drums)
2012 Paradoxical Frog Union Clean Feed Kris Davis (piano), Ingrid Laubrock (saxophone), Sorey (drums) 

2018 Angelika Niescier / Christopher Tordini / Tyshawn Sorey The Berlin Concert Intakt Angelika Niescier (saxophone), Christopher Tordini (bass), Sorey (drums) 

2019 Tyshawn Sorey & Marilyn Crispell The Adornment of Time Pi Sorey (drums, percussion), Marilyn Crispell (piano) 

2019 Brad Barrett / Joe Morris / Tyshawn Sorey Cowboy Transfiguration Fundacja Słuchaj Brad Barrett (double bass, cello), Joe Morris (guitar), Sorey (drums, percussion)
 
2020 Jennifer Curtis & Tyshawn Sorey Invisible Ritual[58] New Focus Jennifer Curtis (violin), Sorey (piano, percussion) 

2020 Mike Sopko / Bill Laswell / Tyshawn Sorey On Common Ground M.O.D. Reloaded Mike Sopko (guitar), Bill Laswell (bass), Sorey (drums)
 
2021 Vijay Iyer / Linda May Han Oh / Tyshawn Sorey Uneasy ECM Records Vijay Iyer (piano), Linda May Han Oh (double bass), Sorey (drums)

As sideman and/or composerWith Alarm Will Sound For George Lewis / Autoschediasms (2021, Cantaloupe Music)[59][60] 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 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)

Uneasy (ECM, 2021) 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 Lage Lund Terrible Animals (2019) With Roscoe Mitchell Duets with Tyshawn Sorey and Special Guest Hugh Ragin (Wide Hive, 2013)
Bells for the South Side (ECM, 2017) With Hafez Modirzadeh Facets (2021) With Pascal Niggenkemper Pasàpas (2008)

Urban Creatures (2010) With Timuçin Şahin Bafa (2009)
Inherence (2013) With Samo Šalamon Kei's Secret (2006) 
 
With Som Sum Sam Beauty Under Construction (2005)
 
With Angelica Sanchez Trio Float the Edge (Clean Feed, 2017) With Sirone and Billy Bang Configuration (Silkheart, 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.


Macnie, Jim (2010-08-04). "Tyshawn Sorey". Village Voice. Retrieved 2016-12-05.

  1. Ben Ratliff (2009-08-07). "Improvised Silence Amid the Sounds at the Stone". The New York Times. Retrieved 2016-12-05.

External links:


 
 
 
 

Alarm Will Sound: Soundbites

"For George Lewis" by Tyshawn Sorey

April 4, 2023 
Follow AWS on Instagram @alarmwillsound 
 
"For George Lewis" is available from Cantaloupe Music. https://alarmwillsound.bandcamp.com/a...


Tyshawn Sorey Talks Drumming as a Composer


We asked Tyshawn Sorey how being a composer influences his drumming. You can find all of the cymbals Tyshawn played here: http://memphisdrumshop.com/cymbals/my...
 

Bang on a Can - Long Play- Vijay Iyer - Linda May Han Oh - Tyshawn Sorey

 
Streamed live on April 30, 2022 
 
 
 
Vijay Iyer’s elegant, subtle improvisatory style has made him a dynamic crossroads between many musical worlds. His musical language is grounded in the rhythmic traditions of South Asia and West Africa, the African American creative music movement of the 60s and 70s, and the lineage of composer-pianists from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk to Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen. Here he’s joined with his stellar trio that includes standout players and composers Tyshawn Sorey (drums) and Linda May Han Oh (bass). This performance is presented live from Roulette’s theater in Downtown Brooklyn. #RouletteIntermedium