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.
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