Ragtime piano youtube full#
Ragtime piano youtube series#

In the process, he upholds both the tropes of mobility (“keep them guessing”) and individualism (“that’s Tyshawn Sorey”) that have defined each step of his musical journey. As on the 2022 releases Mesmerism (Yeros7 Music) and The Off-Off Broadway Guide To Synergism (Pi), Sorey showcases his profound connection to the jazz timeline and his deep connection to the drummers who’ve fueled it. The spring 2023 release Continuing (Pi) is the final album of a trilogy documenting Sorey’s pursuit of that endeavor in conjunction with pianist Aaron Diehl, another distinguished pan-genre practitioner interested in connecting the languages of jazz and the Euro canon.

I’ll produce my own projects where I do that, I’ll do it my way, and I’ll do it well.” I won’t sit and cry by the phone, waiting for it to ring. Even though I’ve been known to do that extremely well, I haven’t gotten calls to do it. “Who knew what would happen?” Whatever the case, Sorey was determined to establish “a situation where I’m playing jazz standards - or jazz, period. “I’d been paid for two years of premieres that still had to be completed for performance,” Sorey said of his July 2020 mindset.

In the process, Sorey, raised in a Black working-class neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, became a celebrated, widely reviewed figure in highbrow contemporary music circles, even the subject of a 6,000-word profile in the New York Times Magazine.

He concomitantly broadened his scope, composing fully notated and improvisationally oriented works for orchestras of various sizes.

Ragtime piano youtube series#

Meanwhile, Sorey was presenting his beyond-category, transidiomatic compositions (as well as his skills on trombone and piano) on a series of recordings - That/Not (2007), Oblique–I (2011), Alloy (2014), The Inner Spectrum Of Variables (2016), Verisimilitude (2017), Pillars (2018) and Unfiltered (2020) - that spanned Anton Webern-esque spikiness, Morton Feldman-esque stillness, exhilarating outcat jazz, AACM-descended soundscapes and card pieces and collective improvisations.ĭuring the ’10s, Sorey earned a doctorate of musical arts in composition from Columbia University, a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and, in 2018, a tenure-track assistant professorship at University of Pennsylvania. His commanding execution of abstract, structurally cogent improvisational ideas conceived in service of the music earned him first-call stature during the ’00s through the ’10s with forward-thinking bandleaders like Butch Morris, Steve Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Vijay Iyer, Dave Douglas, Henry Threadgill, Steve Lehman, Michelle Rosewoman, Myra Melford, Kris Davis and Ingrid Laubrock.

Ragtime piano youtube full#

In a few hours, they’d engage in an improvised duo set on various drums and percussion, electronic processing and piano, and then guide the ensemble through a spontaneously directed piece.ĭuring the drum duo, Sorey displayed the full measure of his choreographic conception, his phrases sometimes tsunami-intense and overwhelming, sometimes delicate and spare. “COVID furthered my intention to make only the music I want,” Sorey said in late February in the basement of Roulette, Brooklyn’s venerable, essential experimental music venue - where he and Adam Rudolph, his partner in a recent spirit-raising trio album with Dave Liebman titled New Now (Meta) - had just rehearsed three accomplished percussionists in the highly calibrated gestures and symbols that constitute their respective extended improvisational conducting languages. When Tyshawn Sorey turned 40 a few months into the pandemic lockdown, he decided henceforth to focus on more explicitly foregrounding hardcore jazz roots within his musical production. “I’ll do it my way, and I’ll do it well.” (Photo: John Rogers) “I’ll produce my own projects,” says drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey.