Tyshawn Sorey Wishes You’d Just Listen
John Rogers
In 2018, I met up with Tyshawn Sorey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for an interview that involved me playing a series of records for him and soliciting his thoughts. We listened to everything from Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Eric Dolphy to Metallica, Redman, and Autechre. And at one point, after listening to a recording of Eric Dolphy’s “Jim Crow,” a piece that was more 20th century classical than “jazz,” we discussed something that has plagued jazz musicians for almost a century: the respective roles of composition and improvisation.
Jazz musicians have been composing — and when I use that word, I mean more than just writing tunes — since the beginning of the music’s history. Duke Ellington’s “Reminiscing In Tempo” is a through-composed piece from 1935. Anthony Braxton is 100% a composer; his pieces are written out, utilizing highly specific conceptual languages and strategies, and the performers execute them according to various methodologies, also designed and prescribed by Braxton. There’s a whole school of performers active at the moment (see the Anna Webber review below) whose work is written with extraordinary precision and complexity.
When writing my book In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music Of Cecil Taylor (available now!), I was astonished to discover just how much of Taylor’s music was written out, then transmitted to the other members of the ensemble through lengthy and rigorous rehearsal. One of his groups might put in months of eight-hour days in order to learn a piece that was only to be performed a single time. As bassist Alan Silva said of Taylor’s 1966 Blue Note album Unit Structures, “Yes, there’s a score. Nobody plays ‘Unit Structure’ in a jam session! That album took us four months of rehearsal.”
Tyshawn Sorey is absolutely a composer, one who seems to enjoy working on a grand scale. His 2016 album The Inner Spectrum Of Variables, for piano trio and string trio, was a single piece divided into eight sections — six movements, a “Reverie” and a closing “Reprise” — and spread across two CDs, delivering nearly two hours of music in all. The follow-up, 2017’s Verisimilitude, was by all appearances a more conventional piano trio disc, but it was anchored by the 31-minute “Algid November.” The shortest of the three tracks on his 2020 digital-only album Unfiltered. was still half an hour long, the longest more than 55 minutes. And his most expansive work to date, 2018’s Pillars, consisted of three nearly 80-minute pieces released as a 3CD set and a fourth piece released as a double LP. He even won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Music for his composition Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith).
In the last couple of years, Sorey has been doing a lot of composing for other people, and most of that work has been strictly for public performance, and has not been recorded. At the same time, he’s released a series of four albums to date engaging with jazz in a way that’s both unexpected (for him) and thoroughly in keeping with his character as a musician and a composer.
He told me in 2018, “the idea of improvisation existing within the African-American composition continuum… that’s a question that’s kind of irrelevant, in terms of what we’re dealing with now and also what we’ve been dealing with for maybe 80 years, so it’s kind of ridiculous that we’re still asking this question and that we’re still trying to sort of hear the seams, as it were.”
He added that to even ask about it seemed like impertinence on the part of critics and audiences, saying, “in one sense, you could say that the listener wants to know how involved you are when it comes to making music with your collaborators. However, for me, I still see it as kind of pointless, because it’s like, why not listen to the entire work and experience the nature of the work as it is? I don’t think it makes it any less valid as music if there’s no improvisation in it or if it’s all improvisation.”
To Sorey, the framing of the question implies “this stigma around improvisation, as though improvisation is inferior; like, spontaneous composition is inferior in some sense to formal composition. Which I’ve always thought was bullshit.”
And he’s not wrong! What matters about a record is how it sounds. The method(s) of its creation are primarily of interest to the people involved, and maybe to journalists tasked with writing about it, but ultimately the record is what’s important. Put it on, press Play; if you like it, great. Something else he told me in that 2018 conversation arose out of his admiration for Anthony Braxton.
“It doesn’t matter what it is you write, what style — there’s no such thing as ‘traditional’ or ‘avant-garde’ or anything like that. You write what you write…write it and try to get it played, and see if you can get people to come to the concert and check it out.” He explained that his own relationship to music was to not have a larger goal or even a plan for the creative journey. “The goal is in the pursuit itself, in terms of what you’re interested in and to what degree you want to pursue those interests, and how to go about getting them represented in the best possible way.”
Recently, Sorey has been collaborating with pianist Aaron Diehl on what’s now four sets of other people’s music. The tunes on 2022’s Mesmerism and The Off-Off Broadway Guide To Synergism (a triple live CD with saxophonist Greg Osby), 2023’s Continuing, and the new The Susceptible Now mix “standards” (“Night And Day,” “Three Little Words,” “Angel Eyes,” “It Could Happen To You”) with compositions by jazz royalty like Wayne Shorter, Ahmad Jamal, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, McCoy Tyner and others.
Diehl and Sorey are the only constant presences on these albums. On Mesmerism and Continuing, Matt Brewer was on bass, while on Off-Off Broadway, Russell Hall took over. And on The Susceptible Now, the bassist is Harish Raghavan.
Last year, Diehl told me that he and Sorey had first met virtually, during the pandemic. “I think both of us, we don’t necessarily see these boundaries in music [between ‘jazz’ and ‘classical’]; even though they’re established musical languages, we don’t see them as not able to be connected… he knows how to make connections… between purely improvised music and purely compositional music. They’re all one and the same in the hands of a musician like him.”
They recorded Mesmerism in May 2021, with very little preparation. “We had a rehearsal at my apartment the day before the session, and I was super nervous because I just didn’t know what he wanted, and he was very quick with spitting out the arrangements and nothing was written. It was all just him dictating, We’re going to play it in this key and then we’re going to modulate to this key, and so on and so forth… he could tell that I was someone that kind of liked to have things prepared in advance. And I think he purposefully didn’t do that. Because he wanted to see the kind of results that he got from it.”
Mesmerism was a fairly conventional piano trio record: six tracks in 47 minutes, the longest being a 14-minute version of the standard “Detour Ahead.” But by the time Diehl and Sorey reconvened at the Jazz Gallery in March 2022, with Hall and alto saxophonist Greg Osby, for four nights of concerts that became The Off-Off Broadway Guide To Synergism, things had changed. The shortest piece they played was a seven-minute version of Ornette Coleman’s “Mob Job” (one of five pieces they played twice), while the longest was a 20-minute journey through the standard “Three Little Words.”
In December 2022, Diehl, Sorey and Brewer recorded their second studio album, Continuing. It contained just four tracks, ranging in length from 10:25 to 15:43 and mostly written by jazz masters: Wayne Shorter, Ahmad Jamal, and Harold Mabern. The exception was a version of the standard “Angel Eyes.” In the press release, Sorey explained that Mabern had pointed him to Jamal’s music, and the lesson he took from it was “if you can’t even play music with some form of discipline, then you have no concept of so-called freedom whatsoever.” And indeed, the pieces on Continuing are fiercely disciplined, exercises in an almost Zenlike patience, maintaining a steady groove and never letting the music waver. It’s slow, but it’s not a ballad session; the whole album simmers.
That was the goal; Sorey sought to “focus more on the way that the three of us interact, with space for us to just sit for a moment,” and as with Mesmerism, the arrangements were relatively spontaneous, arrived at shortly before recording. Tracks were recorded only a time or two, and the first takes were usually the ones released.
So here’s what’s interesting about the fourth Tyshawn Sorey/Aaron Diehl collaboration. The Susceptible Now, recorded in June, is another collection of four outside compositions: McCoy Tyner’s “Peresina,” Charles Mingus and Joni Mitchell’s “A Chair In The Sky,” Daniel Gunnarsson’s “Your Good Lies,” and Brad Mehldau’s “Bealtine.” And as before, they are radically extended — the longest performances Sorey and Diehl have released to date, in fact. “A Chair In The Sky” lasts 22:34, and “Your Good Lies” runs a staggering 26:07. But there are crucial differences between this record and its three predecessors.
The first is that the pieces blend seamlessly together, effectively turning the album into a single 79-minute suite. The second is that unlike any of the previous records, these are not spontaneously crafted meditations on a tune. Instead, Sorey has taken the original pieces and written through-composed new versions of them. For example, he describes their interpretation of Tyner’s “Peresina” as follows:
The last eight bars of the third section in the [original] song is what begins and ends our version. We settle into those sections as extended areas for trio interaction… The meat, of course is in the ‘exposition’ — the second section of the song — in which three of the song’s original motives (the bass line from the first section, the melody from the second section, and parts of the melody from the third section) develop concurrently, finally settling into the last four bars of the second original section (but in two cycles of 15 beats).
All four pieces on the album have been deconstructed and reconstructed in this way — sections are extracted and reordered, and keys and harmonic progressions have been altered. For example, he describes reworking “Your Good Lies,” originally a fairly straightforward modern R&B tune, into 15 sections, “some of which are rigorously designed for different kinds of trio interaction.”
Now, the average person, listening to this album, would have no idea about any of this. That 26-minute version of “Your Good Lies,” for example, sounds to me like three men settling deep into a groove. About a year ago, I asked on Facebook how hardcore jazz players rated Questlove as a drummer. Sorey responded, saying in part, “This would be a LONG conversation. But suffice it to say, he is largely responsible for where so-called ‘pocket drumming’ has gone during the last 25-30 years. He almost singlehandedly advanced the concept. He is a true original in the game. Period. People think it’s easy to play in the way he does…it isn’t at all.” I thought about that when listening to “Your Good Lies,” because Sorey gets deep in the pocket here. What he’s doing reminds me of Willie Hall’s playing on Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul. But learning that it was all planned out forces me to reconsider what I’m hearing.
Or does it? Because unless you’re on Pi Recordings’ PR list, you would never know the story behind these pieces. Tyshawn Sorey does not include liner notes in his albums. Indeed, his records often come in extremely minimal sleeves, period; The Susceptible Now has a plain black cover with the group name and the album title written in gold, in a small and unassuming serif font.
What this album demonstrates, more than anything, is that what Sorey told me in 2018 was not just bluster. When he says the question of composition versus improvisation is “kind of pointless,” he means it. And when he asks, “why not listen to the entire work and experience the nature of the work as it is?”, well… with a record like The Susceptible Now, he’s effectively taking the decision out of the buyer’s hands, by choosing not to reveal his methods to the casual listener. On the back of the CD digipak, he’s credited with “drums” and “arrangements,” but that single word doesn’t tell you anything about what he’s actually done.
Is that deceptive? Does he owe us “the truth” about what he’s done, and how, and why? Or should we stop worrying, listen, and just respond to what we hear?
TAKE 10
Ezra Collective - "Expensive"
Back in the ’80s, the UK ska band Bad Manners used to perform a version of the theme from the 1950s Western The Magnificent Seven, grafting its heroic melody onto a rhythm that got the whole club jumping up and down in unison. There are tracks on this new Ezra Collective album that remind me of that ecumenical approach — whatever gets people dancing is worth doing, there are no genre boundaries when the party’s on. This roughly hour-long set, which features many tracks that bleed straight into one another, fuses funk, hip-hop, Afrobeat, reggae and dub, jazz, and the gospelized 4/4 of house music into a head-spinning, joyous sound that says, Dance! Their instrumental version of Fela Kuti’s “Expensive Shit,” here simply called “Expensive,” is faster than the original and leaves off the abstract, aggro organ intro, leaping straight to the hard-charging horn riffs as the drums clatter and bounce. (From Dance, No One’s Watching, out now via Partisan.)
Immanuel Wilkins - "Matte Glaze"
When modern jazz artists grapple with the blues, working to transform it into something that reflects 21st century existence, the results can be amazing. Albums like trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire’s On The Tender Spot Of Every Calloused Moment, alto saxophonist Logan Richardson’s Blues People, and JD Allen’s Americana (and its sequel) take feelings that are generations deep, and intensely diasporic, and reveal anew their continued relevance. On his third album as a leader, alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins is joined by pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Rick Rosato, and drummer Kweku Sumbry, but guitarist Marvin Sewell, drummer Chris Dave, and guest vocalists including Ganavya, June McDoom, Yaw Agyeman and Cécile McLorin Salvant make contributions as well. On “Matte Glaze,” June McDoom takes lead vocals, with Yaw Agyeman and Ganavya backing her up on a deep and beautiful ballad with an equally cool and meditative video. Thomas and Sumbry anchor the music, with Wilkins taking a long and gently exploratory solo. (From Blues Blood, out now via Blue Note.)
Darius Jones - "We Inside Now"
The issue of mental health has always had resonance in the jazz community, and occasionally it’s referenced in the music itself, from Charlie Parker’s “Relaxin’ At Camarillo” to Charles Mingus asking his therapist to write liner notes to The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady. Alto saxophonist and composer Darius Jones tackles the subject on the latest volume in his ongoing Man’ish Boy series (this is the seventh release of a projected nine). In the booklet, he discusses his own history with trauma and therapy, and gathers poems and short contributions from friends and peers as well. The music is entirely instrumental, but one track, “No More My Lord,” is a Jones arrangement of a prison song recorded by Alan Lomax. Make of that what you will. “We Inside Now” is a bluesy ballad, tough but tender; bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Gerald Cleaver provide a thick groove as Jones moans. (From Legend Of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye), out now via Tao Forms.)
Masahiko Satoh & Takeo Moriyama - "Chiasma" (Feat. Leon Brichard & Idris Rahman)
Pianist Masahiko Satoh and drummer Takeo Moriyama are Japanese jazz royalty. Emerging in the late ’60s as part of that country’s avant-garde scene, they recorded some of the most balls-out free jazz from any country, Satoh under his own name and Moriyama with the Yosuke Yamashita Trio. On this album, recorded at noted London venue Café OTO in 2019, they’re joined by saxophonist Idris Rahman and bassist Leon Brichard, both of whom were members of Ill Considered at the time. (Brichard has since left the group.) Some of the pieces performed here are known to fans of these artists; “East Plants” comes from a Moriyama album, and “Chiasma” was one of the Yamashita trio’s show-stoppers. Here, it’s the closing blowout, so fierce it may remind you of turn-of-the-millennium free jazz by David S. Ware or even Charles Gayle. Rahman absolutely unloads as the piano and drums erupt into furious storms. (From Live At Café OTO, out now via BBE Music.)
Anna Webber - "Movable Do (La-La Bémol)"
Back in August, pianist, composer and sometime critic Ethan Iverson wrote a really thoughtful and useful guide to a genre Vijay Iyer has dubbed “New Brooklyn Complexity.” They’re not exactly jazz, not exactly New Music in the modern-composition sense — they’re a carefully thought-out and rigorously composed third thing. Two of the artists discussed in that piece, saxophonist Anna Webber and pianist Matt Mitchell, have been working together for a long time; Webber’s Simple Trio, which also features drummer John Hollenbeck, a composer himself, has been together since 2013. “Movable Do (La-La Bémol)” is the last track on the group’s new album, and it’s built around a long, repetitive, cyclical horn melody that may remind you of Tim Berne or Anthony Braxton, but Mitchell and Hollenbeck lock into a clockwork groove that repeats in an intricate enough manner to make you think they’re improvising more than they are. Which is the trick. (From simpletrio2000, out now via Intakt.)
Daniel Sommer/Arve Henriksen/Johannes Lundberg - "Hey, Superhero"
Danish drummer Daniel Sommer is midway through a trilogy of albums intended, in his words, “to shed light on Nordic improvisation today from various angles and perspectives.” The first, As Time Passes, was released in April and featured British guitarist Rob Luft and legendary Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen. This second volume is a collaboration with Norwegian trumpeter and electronic musician Arve Henriksen and Swedish bassist Johannes Lundberg. I’ve been a fan of Henriksen’s for a long time, both with the improvising group Supersilent and his own records. He’s a fantastically subtle player, capable of making the trumpet sound like a flute, or like a whisper, but also deeply melodic. On “Hey, Superhero,” he’s doubled, in conversation with himself, and surrounded by a corona of electronics, as Lundberg and Sommer create an ever-shifting background pulse that reminds me of Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell’s work with Ornette Coleman — abstract, but swinging. (From Sounds & Sequences, out now via April Records.)
Aaron Parks - "Sports"
I’ve been a fan of pianist Aaron Parks since 2008, when he was first signed to Blue Note. His debut for the label, Invisible Cinema, was a highly compelling blend of jazz chops and indie-rock songwriting dynamics. It’s still very much worth your time, as are his two albums — a solo recital and a trio set — for ECM, and the two by James Farm, his band with saxophonist Joshua Redman and Invisible Cinema bassist and drummer Matt Penman and Eric Harland. Since 2018, though, his band Little Big has been his primary outlet. The quartet includes guitarist Greg Tuohey and bassist David Ginyard Jr., and they made two studio albums for Ropeadope with Tommy Crane on drums. But he left, and now Little Big is on Blue Note, with Jongkuk Kim behind the kit. “Sports” is like Vince Guaraldi or Bob James in dub, and I mean that in the best possible way. (From Little Big III, out now via Blue Note.)
Charlie Parker - "I've Found A New Baby"
More than 100 years after his birth on August 29, 1920, nearly 70 years after his death on March 12, 1955, people are still grappling with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker’s legacy. After developing his style in bands led by pianists Jay McShann and Earl Hines, he teamed up with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianists Thelonious Monk and Mary Lou Williams, and drummer Max Roach, among others, and together they invented bebop. The recordings on the new Bird In Kansas City predate much of that; some of the tracks are previously unreleased work by the McShann orchestra, but others are studio recordings from 1944 and still others are private tapes from 1951. “I’ve Found A New Baby” is from 1944 and features Parker with guitarist Efferge Ware and drummer Edward “Little Phil” Phillips. Parker described bebop as “trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes,” and that’s what he does here. (From Bird In Kansas City, out now via Verve.)
JD Allen - "Code (Switch)"
https://open.spotify.com/track/4hKUro18yc8l7JDg0Q0YhF?si=89457d15348346f2
For a long time it might have been easy to assume you had tenor saxophonist JD Allen pegged. His trio with bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston played short, bluesy, hooky tunes; his solos were in the burly tradition of John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Dexter Gordon. But then he started to swerve. He formed a new, much freer trio with bassist Ian Kenselaar and drummer Nic Cacioppo. He made a solo album, and an album slathered in electronics. Now, he’s combined his old and new groups into a two-bass quartet featuring August, Kenselaar, and Cacioppo, and each bassist switches from acoustic to electric, sometimes deploying a ring modulator for eerie electronic effects. The result is one of his most exploratory records yet; the two bassists dance independently of each other, Cacioppo plays rubato, and Allen himself is deep in thought. It’s a 50-minute sustained mood, each track a piece of the whole. (From The Dark, The Light, The Grey And The Colorful, out now via Savant.)
Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few - "The Time Is Now"
If you’re not paying attention to Chicago-based saxophonist Isaiah Collier yet, you’re not paying attention, period. He’s an absolute flamethrower who’s put together a shockingly strong and deep body of work despite being several years shy of 30. He made his debut as a leader at 20, with his self-released 2018 album Return Of The Black Emperor. His music was a mix of spiritual jazz, deep blues, and almost rock-like riffing from sax, piano and guitar, all performed with a homemade, raw/DIY energy. (Some tracks sounded like they could have been recorded on a phone.)
A year later, he returned with The Unapologetic Negro, a live trio set. Collier was already starting to make waves in the Chicago avant-garde scene, as Unapologetic featured Marcus Evans, a veteran of Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble, on drums, and Angel Bat Dawid wrote the liner notes. It was somewhat John Coltrane-ish, but the Coltrane of 1961, which is not the Coltrane most players seek to draw inspiration from.
On Sept. 23, 2020, Collier entered the Rudy Van Gelder Studio with pianist Mike King, bassist Jeremiah Hunt, and drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode. They recorded the third Chosen Few album, Cosmic Transitions, along with a version of the spiritual “Lift Every Voice and Sing” that was released later. The album was a five-part suite, so again with the Coltrane thing, but it never felt like imitation, or schtick. And the band was on fire throughout, especially Ode. It was no surprise that the two of them, Collier and Ode, released a duo album in 2022, but the form it took was definitely unexpected. The music was trancelike, and slathered in dubby echo, but Ode’s drumming often had a punk-rock intensity.
Collier has released two more Chosen Few albums this year — The Almighty in March, and The World Is On Fire this month. Both feature the core lineup of Hunt and Ode, plus new pianist Julian Davis Reid, but The Almighty also included a slew of guests, putting his music onto a much wider, more colorful canvas.
The new album does the same — in addition to the quartet, we hear flute, trumpet, harp, cello, and four vocalists, all in the service of a very heavy and serious artistic mission. The World Is On Fire grapples with the social turmoil of the pandemic and the years since, in particular the Black Lives Matter movement and the police killings that made it necessary. Collier layers voices from news broadcasts about the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and others into the music, but there are also references to the January 6 congressional hearings, the economic turmoil of recent years, and more. It can be pretty harrowing, but the music is ecstatic jazz with a surprisingly retro feel (Hunt’s bass tone is straight out of the 1970s) and passionate intensity. This is apparently Collier’s final album under the Chosen Few banner, and he’s going out really strong. I can’t wait to hear what he does next. (From The World Is On Fire, out now via Division 81.)
