By João Esteves da Silva
In order to fully appreciate the significance of composer-drummer Tyshawn
Sorey’s recent output with his jazz piano trio, one should consider it
within the context of his overall, wide-ranging body of work. Namely, I
believe it should be seen as yet another step in his thoroughgoing
dismantling of the jazz/classical music dichotomy, following up on the
efforts of the great AACM masters – creative musicians often barred from
the status of serious composers by the assumption of that very dichotomy,
embodying prejudices of all sorts, including racial ones. Sorey has
conducted such an endeavour on several levels, among which his explorations
of the classic piano trio format have been particularly noteworthy. As I
take it, they constitute a twofold attack on the aforementioned dichotomy.
(Crucially, and unlike crossover projects, Sorey’s goal is not to fuse two
worlds that are assumed to be fundamentally different. It is, rather, to
expose the boundaries often posited between them as idle or arbitrary.)
Throughout the past decade, Sorey lead a groundbreaking trio with pianist
Cory Smythe, a musician equally at home in classical and creative
contexts, and bassist Chris Tordini, releasing a couple of albums that made
us radically rethink the place of the piano trio in the whole music
spectrum. Sure, such instrumental configuration comes from the jazz
tradition, but the music Sorey composed for it drew heavily upon the
classical one (and beyond). So, in a way, he turned a jazz trio into a
chamber group performing music falling, broadly, under the contemporary
classical category. This was particularly evident in their first outing,
Alloy (2014), which featured thoroughly notated material, such as
the post-Feldmanesque piece “A Love Song”. Its sophomore, the seemingly
freer and timbrally more varied Verisimilitude (2017) strengthened
Sorey’s case further, calling the related improvisation/composition
dichotomy even more clearly into question: there, the boundary between
notation (or predetermined composition) and improvisation (or spontaneous
composition) becomes virtually indiscernible, for the spontaneously
composed passages display as much formal cogency and craft as the
predetermined ones.
For the present decade, Sorey assembled a new trio, with pianist Aaron
Diehl and bassist Matt Brewer. The main focus is now on the jazz idiom, but
Sorey’s engagement with the classical tradition is still felt, even if in
the subtlest of ways. Take, for instance, the spellbinding slow motion
version of “Angel Eyes” featured in their previous album,
Continuing
(2023): surely, such extreme choices of tempo, with the aim of yielding
revelatory results, are a more common practice within classical music
performance. (In a way, Sorey’s approach stands to certain standards
somewhat as Celibidache’s stands to Bruckner symphonies. But: somehow, the
music never drags.)
Released a year later, the trio’s latest album,
The Susceptible Now, this time with Harish Raghavan on bass, follows up on Continuing
’s distinctive sprawling approach. Some of its tracks are now even longer
(up to over 26 minutes) and, while the tempi are not always as slow, the
general mood is still an unhurried, immersive one. Diehl is as key to this
group as Smythe was to the former, displaying both tremendous swing and
something of a classical refinement – his gorgeous introduction to “A Chair
in the Sky” (from Joni Mitchell’s Mingus) being a case in point.
As solid a jazz bassist as any these days, Raghavan attends to Sorey’s
conception to the nth degree, grooving effortlessly throughout extended
periods. And Sorey’s drumming is itself a marvel, taking on genuine
orchestration and conducting functions, constantly propelling the music
forward, no matter the given tempo or dynamics, and with as deep a pocket
as one can think of. Overall, the trio operates at a remarkable level of
finesse, making this (nearly 80-minute long) album a delight to listen to
from start to finish.
Anyway, the crux of the matter, to me, lies in Sorey’s distinctive handling
of form, which struck me as partly indepted to a classical compositional
sense. Namely, he arranges the selected tunes (drawn from jazz and other
kinds of groove-oriented music, such as R&B) into
a four-movement suite
of monumental proportions, with each track smoothly transitioning into the
next, without breaks. And, for instance, when taken in the context of the
album as a whole, the more fast-paced, celebratory closer (Brad Mehldau’s
“Bealtine”, from House on the Hill) acquires something of a
symphonic finale feel.
In sum, while his chamber trio brought classical content to what had
originally been a jazz configuration, his jazz trio gives a broadly
classical form to groove-oriented content, the two trios thus amounting to
two (complementary) sides of a single, unified artistic practice.