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Ted Panken interviews Tyshawn Sorey for an article with DownBeat. Below is an excerpt from that article:
Drumming News Network – About Tyshawn:
Tyshawn Sorey, born on July 8, 1980, stands as an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, and professor of contemporary music. His musical prowess knows no bounds, earning him recognition and acclaim for his performances, compositions, and recordings that span a wide spectrum, from improvised solo percussion to captivating operas. Notably, The New Yorker consistently featured Sorey in their annual “Notable Performances and Recordings” lists from 2017 to 2020, with a pandemic-era highlight praising his innovative premieres cast in unconventional concerto form. In 2020, The New York Times hailed him as the “composer of the year” for his remarkably prolific output during a time of challenging restrictions on live performances.
Sorey’s impact extends beyond accolades, as he was honored as a MacArthur Fellow in 2017 and a United States Artists Fellow in 2018. In 2019, his mesmerizing song cycle, “Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine,” dedicated to Josephine Baker, graced the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His life and groundbreaking work have captured the attention of esteemed publications like The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, NPR Music, and The Brooklyn Rail. Throughout his journey, Sorey has collaborated and shared his musical genius with legendary artists such as Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Coleman, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, and many more. In 2020, Tyshawn Sorey joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as a Presidential Assistant Professor of Music, further cementing his influence in the world of contemporary music and education.
Tyshawn SoundCloud: HERE
DownBeat Excerpt:
When Tyshawn Sorey turned 40 a few months into the pandemic lockdown, he decided henceforth to focus on more explicitly foregrounding hardcore jazz roots within his musical production.
“COVID furthered my intention to make only the music I want,” Sorey said in late February in the basement of Roulette, Brooklyn’s venerable, essential experimental music venue — where he and Adam Rudolph, his partner in a recent spirit-raising trio album with Dave Liebman titled New Now (Meta) — had just rehearsed three accomplished percussionists in the highly calibrated gestures and symbols that constitute their respective extended improvisational conducting languages. In a few hours, they’d engage in an improvised duo set on various drums and percussion, electronic processing and piano, and then guide the ensemble through a spontaneously directed piece.
During the drum duo, Sorey displayed the full measure of his choreographic conception, his phrases sometimes tsunami-intense and overwhelming, sometimes delicate and spare.
His commanding execution of abstract, structurally cogent improvisational ideas conceived in service of the music earned him first-call stature during the ’00s through the ’10s with forward-thinking bandleaders like Butch Morris, Steve Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Vijay Iyer, Dave Douglas, Henry Threadgill, Steve Lehman, Michelle Rosewoman, Myra Melford, Kris Davis and Ingrid Laubrock. Meanwhile, Sorey was presenting his beyond-category, transidiomatic compositions (as well as his skills on trombone and piano) on a series of recordings — That/Not (2007), Oblique–I (2011), Alloy (2014), The Inner Spectrum Of Variables (2016), Verisimilitude (2017), Pillars (2018) and Unfiltered (2020) — that spanned Anton Webern-esque spikiness, Morton Feldman-esque stillness, exhilarating outcat jazz, AACM-descended soundscapes and card pieces and collective improvisations.
During the ’10s, Sorey earned a doctorate of musical arts in composition from Columbia University, a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and, in 2018, a tenure-track assistant professorship at University of Pennsylvania. He concomitantly broadened his scope, composing fully notated and improvisationally oriented works for orchestras of various sizes. In the process, Sorey, raised in a Black working-class neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, became a celebrated, widely reviewed figure in highbrow contemporary music circles, even the subject of a 6,000-word profile in the New York Times Magazine.
“I’d been paid for two years of premieres that still had to be completed for performance,” Sorey said of his July 2020 mindset. “Who knew what would happen?” Whatever the case, Sorey was determined to establish “a situation where I’m playing jazz standards — or jazz, period. Even though I’ve been known to do that extremely well, I haven’t gotten calls to do it. I won’t sit and cry by the phone, waiting for it to ring. I’ll produce my own projects where I do that, I’ll do it my way, and I’ll do it well.”
The spring 2023 release Continuing (Pi) is the final album of a trilogy documenting Sorey’s pursuit of that endeavor in conjunction with pianist Aaron Diehl, another distinguished pan-genre practitioner interested in connecting the languages of jazz and the Euro canon. As on the 2022 releases Mesmerism (Yeros7 Music) and The Off-Off Broadway Guide To Synergism (Pi), Sorey showcases his profound connection to the jazz timeline and his deep connection to the drummers who’ve fueled it. In the process, he upholds both the tropes of mobility (“keep them guessing”) and individualism (“that’s Tyshawn Sorey”) that have defined each step of his musical journey.
On Mesmerism and Continuing, Sorey, Diehl and bassist Matt Brewer function as a standalone trio, exploring deep cuts by Horace Silver, Ahmad Jamal, Wayne Shorter and Harold Mabern as well as songbook chestnuts like “Detour Ahead,” “Autumn Leaves” and “Angel Eyes.” Russell Hall plays bass on The Off-Off Broadway Guide To Synergism, a triple CD culled from a five-night run at the Jazz Gallery led by protean alto saxophonist Greg Osby, with whom the trio functions as an exuberantly freewheeling, interactive rhythm section. It dropped in late 2022, contiguous to a much-lauded, sold-out run of Sorey’s multidisciplinary Mark Rothko tribute Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) at Park Avenue Armory, directed by Peter Sellars.
On the surface, Sorey and Diehl might seem an oil and water matchup. Now 37, Diehl toured with the Wynton Marsalis Septet directly after graduating high school. On three Mack Avenue albums, he interrogates ragtime and stride piano, bebop, the blues and the classical orientation of John Lewis and Roland Hanna on their own terms of engagement, showcasing his thorough, individualistic assimilation of Marsalis’ “all jazz is modern” mantra. Diehl has also sustained a flourishing career concertizing on repertoire spanning Philip Glass to Prokofiev to Gershwin.
In late 2017, Diehl heard Sorey play drums with pianist Vicky Chow, a respected contemporary classical specialist, in a concert of John Zorn’s music. Not long thereafter, he sent Sorey a complimentary note on Instagram. Dialogue ensued. In the spring of 2020, Diehl publicly interviewed Sorey (via Zoom) for the Phillips Collection.
Read the full article: HERE
