Five Things You Should Know About Tyshawn Sorey

1. He’s among the greatest musicians of his generation.
   More than any other instrumentalist working in improvised music, Tyshawn Sorey transcends labels and associations. Singling him out simply as a “drummer” is woefully inadequate. And yet, it is the medium through which he is most widely known and with which he has earned an indisputable reputation for sensitivity, dynamics, power, dexterity, and sheer musicality. Besides his working relationship with pianist Vijay Iyer, in both Iyer’s ensembles and the collective trio Fieldwork with saxophonist Steve Lehman, the Newark, New Jersey native has recorded and performed with many of the most visionary artists working today, including John Zorn, Myra Melford, Jason Moran, Steve Coleman, Joe Lovano, Wadada Leo Smith, Kris Davis, Roscoe Mitchell, Christian McBride, David Liebman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Butch Morris, Anthony Braxton, and Dave Douglas, among many others. In addition to being a world-class percussionist, Sorey is an accomplished trombonist and pianist.
   
   
2. He has distinguished himself as a bandleader.
   Since his 2007 debut That/Not, featuring a quartet including trombonist Ben Gerstein, keyboardist Cory Smythe, and bassist Thomas Morgan, Sorey has released 11 full-length albums that express his singular identity as a composer and instrumentalist. Earlier releases highlight a core trio of Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini augmented by various string players, pianists, and brass players. His 2016 trio+strings album The Inner Spectrum of Variables for the Pi Recordings label made The Nation’s “Ten Best Albums of 2016” list, and 2017’s Verisimilitude made “best-of-year" lists by NPR Music and The New York Times. His four most recent recordings, 2022’s Mesmerism and The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism, 2023’s Continuing, and 2024’s The Susceptible Now, feature the chemistry of his current working trio with piano master Aaron Diehl and SFJAZZ Collective bassist Matt Brewer.
   
   
3. Beyond his work as a performer, he is also an active composer and educator.
   After earning his Bachelor of Music degree in performance and jazz studies from New Jersey’s William Patterson University, Sorey studied composition with the legendary Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan followed by a doctoral program in composition at Columbia. His 2017 song cycle Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine was dedicated to Josephine Baker was performed by Sorey with soprano Julia Bullock and New York’s International Contemporary Ensemble at the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his 2018 work Cycles of My Being was a co-commission by Opera Philadelphia, Carnegie Hall, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. He has composed works for the Talea Ensemble, PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, cellist Seth Parker Woods, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, with performances at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Hollywood Bowl, the 92nd Street Y, and others. Sorey joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as Presidential Assistant Professor of Music in 2020 and was selected as a Peabody Resident at Johns Hopkins for Fall 2023.
   
   
4. He’s a 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” awardee, among other accolades.
   Sorey was a 2023 Pulitzer finalist for his work Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) for voices, viola, percussion, and piano, commissioned for the 50th Anniversary of Houston’s Rothko Chapel, and received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Music in recognition of his composition Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith) for saxophone and orchestra and dedicated to the avant-garde trumpet luminary. He received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2017 and was named at 2018 United States Artists Fellow. Other recognition includes the Fromm Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and the Koussevitzsky Prize.
5. He has a notable SFJAZZ history.
   These 2024-25 Season performances with Vijay Iyer’s trio mark the second time he has performed with Iyer’s trio, the first in Other appearances include Joe Lovano’s Trio Fascination in March 2019 as part of Lovano’s week as Resident Artistic Director, paying tribute to the iconic Paul Motian trio with guitarist Bill Frisell, and pianist Myra Melford’s exploratory Snowy Egret project in Joe Henderson Lab in November 2018 during the 2018-19 Season.
   
   

Tyshawn Sorey performs with the Vijay Iyer trio 11/2-3. Tickets and more information are available here.