When the pandemic drove the MacArthur award-winning African American drummer and composer/improviser Tyshawn Sorey online, he unveiled an astonishing diversity of new works – including violin and cello concertos, string quartets, live-streamed improvisations with chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound. He also recorded a genre-hopping run of albums, of which this latest set by his trio with pianist Aaron Diehl and bassist Matt Brewer – covering original jazz themes by Wayne Shorter, Ahmad Jamal and others – is a startling standout.
Sorey doesn’t much care about where the crossovers between improvised and composed music begin and end. A gifted state-educated music student (collaborators have noted his ability for memorising complex notation on sight), he switched from classical trombone to jazz drums at college, soon bent the tradition his own ways and by 2003 was accompanying star leaders such as pianist Vijay Iyer. But avant-jazz restructuralists Anthony Braxton and Butch Morris, and the sound-centred, time-bending patience of contemporary-classical composer Morton Feldman, were as important to him as the regular jazz tradition. That’s why standard-song jazz interpretations by Sorey’s trio don’t sound like anybody else’s.
Brewer’s bass is powerfully foregrounded and Sorey’s wide-spaced drum-hits are unflinchingly blunt. The three compellingly unpick Shorter’s Reincarnation Blues (a smoulderingly slow bass groove underpinning pianist Diehl’s shifts from rough chording to playful dances) and Jamal’s Seleritus (a hypnotic bass-throb that gradually nurses the slow-blooming melody into life); give a sleepy awakening to 1940s/50s singer/songwriter Matt Dennis’s Angel Eyes that soulfully coaxes the song out and turn hard-bop pianist Harold Mabern’s What Direction Are You Headed? into a jagged cruiser that uncorks Sorey’s punchy groove-power. One of the year’s special sets, Continuing simmers with reinventions of old magic.
Also out this month
Passage (Blue Note) features American drummer Johnathan Blake’s A-list postbop lineup including saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, vibraphonist Joel Ross and Cuban pianist David Virelles, in a homage to his jazz-violinist dad John Blake Jr: a vivacious set humming with tender ballad-playing, the odd 1980s McCoy Tyner reference (the elder Blake played with Tyner), ducking-and-diving postbop tunes, and headlong improv agility. Acclaimed young Greek pianist/composer and improviser Tania Giannouli plays 24 brief piano vignettes on Solo (Rattle Records), balancing songlike melodiousness and rhythmically-driving percussive effects. And Noah Stoneman, a 22-year-old Londoner, makes his Kit Downes-produced album debut with Anyone’s Quiet: Let It Rain to You (Fresh Sound New Talent). There’s a precocious wisdom (and a feel for insinuating nuances distantly reminiscent of the great Bill Evans via Keith Jarrett) to Stoneman’s effortless virtuosity that suggests we’ll be hearing plenty from him soon.
