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]
In 2004, Sorey completed a B.Music in jazz studies and performance at William Paterson University,[23] where he began as a classical trombone major before transferring to jazz drumming.[15]
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.[24] 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.[24] 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.[25]
Sorey released his second album, Koan, in June 2009.[26] 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[27] and the BBC,[28] included in the 2009 Village Voice Jazz Critics’ Poll,[29] and praised in NPR's "Take Five's Top 10 Jazz Records Of 2009".[30]
In the fall of 2009, Sorey enrolled in a master’s program at Wesleyan University to study composition with Anthony Braxton.[31] He completed his M.A. in the spring of 2011[32] 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.[33]
During the six years of doctoral study that followed, Sorey worked closely with George E. Lewis and Fred Lerdahl;[34] 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.[35] 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",[36] and The Nation included the album in their "Ten Best Albums of 2016";[37] Nextbop's Rob Shepherd named it the best jazz album of the decade.[38] The following year, Sorey returned to the trio format for Verisimilitude, which was listed third in both the 2017 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll[39] and The New York Times Best Jazz Albums of 2017.[40]
In 2017, Sorey also completed his Doctor of Musical Arts in composition at Columbia.[41] 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";[42] in 2019, these artists joined Sorey in performing the piece on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[14]
After receiving his DMA, Sorey began his appointment as Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University,[43] 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.[12]
In March 2020, just before the pandemic hit the Northeastern United States in full force, Sorey self-released his sextet's Unfiltered.[48] That fall, he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as Presidential Assistant Professor of Music.[20]
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.[49] 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.[50]
Musical style
Sorey's work is broadly experimental, drawing on a wide variety of influences, practices, and traditions.[12] He opposes the categorization of music by distinct genres,[51] and in interviews[1] and his doctoral thesis[42] has critiqued notions of improvisation and composition as mutually exclusive.
Described as a musical shapeshifter,[18][52] 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."[51]
John Zorn is an American composer, conductor, saxophonist, arranger and producer who "deliberately resists category". His avant-garde and experimental approaches to composition and improvisation are inclusive of jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and world music. Rolling Stone noted that "[alt]hough Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".
The Pulitzer Prize for Music is one of seven Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually in Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first given in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year, and this was eventually converted into a prize: "For a distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year."
Annie Gosfield is a New-York-based composer who works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. She composes for others and performs with her own group, taking her music to festivals, factories, clubs, art spaces and concert halls. Much of her work combines acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, incorporating unusual sources such as satellite sounds, machine sounds, detuned or out-of-tune samples and industrial noises. Her work often contains improvisation and frequently uses extended techniques and/or altered musical instruments. She won a 2012 Berlin Prize.
Alarm Will Sound is a 20-member chamber orchestra that focuses on recordings and performances of contemporary classical music. Its performances have been described as "equal parts exuberance, nonchalance, and virtuosity" by the Financial Times and as "a triumph of ensemble playing" by the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times said that Alarm Will Sound is "one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene."
Vijay Iyer is an American composer, pianist, bandleader, producer and writer based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway". Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, he received a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, where he was jointly appointed in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.
Craig Marvin Taborn is an American pianist, organist, keyboardist and composer. He works solo and in bands, mostly playing various forms of jazz. He started playing piano and Moog synthesizer as an adolescent and was influenced at an early stage by a wide range of music, including by the freedom expressed in recordings of free jazz and contemporary classical music.
Sylvie Courvoisier is a composer, pianist, improviser and bandleader. She was born and raised in Lausanne, Switzerland, and has been a resident of New York City since 1998. She won Germany’s International Jazz Piano Prize in 2022 and was named Pianist of the Year for 2023 in the international critics poll of Spanish jazz publication El Intruso. NPR’s Kevin Whitehead has encapsulated the distinctive character of Courvoisier’s art this way: “Some pianists approach the instrument like it’s a cathedral. Sylvie Courvoisier treats it like a playground.”
John Escreet is an English pianist, composer and improviser. He has lived in the United States since 2006 and currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
Du Yun is a Chinese-born American composer, performer, vocalist and performance artist. She won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her opera Angel's Bone, with libretto by Royce Vavrek. She was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Du Yun was named as one of the 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2018, and received a 2019 Grammy nomination in the category of Best Classical Contemporary Composition for her work Air Glow. In its decade review, UK's Classic FM listed Du Yun's winning of the Pulitzer as No. 6 in "10 ways the 2010s changed classical music forever." Rolling Stone Italia named her as one of the women composers who defined the 2010s.
Kris Davis is a Canadian jazz pianist and composer.
Paradoxical Frog is the eponymous debut album by a collective trio consisting of Kris Davis on piano, Ingrid Laubrock on tenor sax and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. It was recorded in 2009 and released on the Portuguese Clean Feed label.
Timuçin Şahin is a Turkish jazz guitarist and composer. He was awarded first prize at the Dutch Jazz Competition in 2001 and second prizes at the Jur Naessens Music Award in 2002, and the Deloitte Jazz Award in 2006. He has so far released five contemporary jazz albums, including solo releases, as part of the contemporary jazz trio On the Line, and as part of the Timucin Sahin Quartet and the Timucin Sahin Quintet.
Flaga: Book of Angels Volume 27 is an album by pianist Craig Taborn, bassist Christian McBride and drummer Tyshawn Sorey which was released in 2016 on John Zorn's Tzadik Records as part of the Zorn's Book of Angels Series.
Thomas Morgan is an American jazz bassist.
Linda May Han Oh is an Australian jazz bassist and composer. She is currently Associate Professor at the Berklee College of Music and is also part of the Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice.
Duets with Tyshawn Sorey and Special Guest Hugh Ragin is an album by American jazz saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, which was recorded in 2012 and released on Wide Hive.
Fay Victor is an American musician, composer, lyricist and educator. Originally a singer in the traditional jazz field, she has been working in jazz, blues, opera, free improvising, avant-garde, modern classical music, and occasional acting since re-settling in New York in 2003.
Noah Flynn Kaplan, known professionally as Noah K, is an American composer, saxophonist, and record producer.
The Adornment of Time is a live album by percussionist Tyshawn Sorey and pianist Marilyn Crispell. It was recorded at The Kitchen in New York City in October 2018, and was released in 2019 by Pi Recordings. The album features an hour-long piece that was freely improvised; nothing was determined or discussed beforehand.
Stephanie "Steph" Richards is a Canadian-American composer, trumpeter, bandleader and producer known for her contributions to the contemporary jazz and experimental music scenes. Her multidisciplinary approaches to composition, including her Supersense project for scent and music with Jason Moran, Kenny Wollesen and Stomu Takeishi, have earned critical acclaim. In 2014 Richards was appointed to the music faculty at the University of California, San Diego.
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