TYSHAWN SOREY
When Tyshawn Sorey was a student at Newark Arts High School in the late 1990s and rumors began to swirl about NJPAC’s Jazz for Teens arts education program, he followed them eagerly. “That was an automatic thing that I said I have to apply for: ‘I have to be there for that,’ ” he says. And he did.
Almost three decades later, the gifted multi-instrumentalist and composer has redefined classical contemporary percussion music with an individualistic style that blends super-complex scores with spontaneous compositions. He will return to Newark with his eponymous trio (featuring him on drums, Aaron Diehl on piano and Harish Raghavan on bass) alongside Sandbox Percussion, in a program honoring jazz pioneer Max Roach.
The concert, “Max Roach at 100: Tyshawn Sorey Trio + Sandbox Percussion,” will take place Nov. 15 at NJPAC’s Victoria Theater, as part of the 13th annual TD James Moody Jazz Festival. (There will be more than a dozen events in the festival, at NJPAC and other Newark venues, from Nov. 7 to Nov. 24; for an overview, visit njpac.org/series/td-jazz-series.)
For Sorey, it will be homecoming as well as a celebration of Roach, who died in 2007 at the age of 83. When NJPAC approached him with the idea, he jumped at it. “It was an absolute yes,” he says. “Max Roach is a heavy inspiration to me. He always has been, and will remain such for the rest of my life.”
Like Sorey, Roach was a broadly talented, genre-defying composer who revolutionized the jazz art form and set a new standard of excellence with his mastery of drumming.
“The thing about Max is that he was a complete musician,” says Sorey. “He wasn’t just a jazz musician but a total artist whose work stood for revolution, self-determination and going deeper inside and outside of yourself by taking from different influences and integrating that into your work. We’ve seen that in his entire body of work, from the things he did during the bebop era with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and all the bebop school, to his own compositions.”
MAX ROACH, 1924-2007
Though Roach was one of the first jazz drummers of note to write music, his compositional output is often overlooked, even among drummers.
“He has done such groundbreaking work as a composer and as a percussionist, and not just as a so-called drummer behind a drum set,” Sorey says. “He really took the art form and expanded it in a remarkable way, and in a way that I wish I would hear more people talk about.”
One of the reasons Sorey took the project on was to gain a greater understanding of Roach’s compositional work. In anticipation, he revisited Roach’s creative output on albums including Percussion Bitter Sweet (1961), Drums Unlimited (1966), Members, Don’t Git Weary (1968) and We Insist! (1960).
Sorey, who graduated from William Paterson University in Wayne in 2004, says Roach’s music influenced his decision to pursue advanced degrees in composition from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut (where he studied with the legendary Anthony Braxton), and Columbia University in New York.
Earlier this year, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Music for Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith), an introspective concerto for saxophone and orchestra, after being named a finalist in 2023 for his Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).
KJELL VAN SICE
Sandbox Percussion (from left, Jonny Allen, Terry Sweeney, Victor Caccese and Ian Rosenbaum).
The first half of the Nov. 15 program will feature Sorey as an ensemblist with his trio, followed by the chamber percussion quartet Sandbox Percussion, comprised of Ian Rosenbaum, Jonny Allen, Terry Sweeney and Victor Caccese. Each group will perform its own set, centered on Roach’s indelible impact across musical worlds.
The second half will feature both groups in the East Coast premiere of a multi-movement, untitled piece, co-commissioned by NJPAC, that pays tribute to M’Boom, which Roach founded in 1970 as an all-percussion jazz ensemble exploring musical traditions from around the world.
“The piece really centers on that area of what he did with M’Boom, which was to create a really beautiful collective of musicians who had this strong belief to see these drummers not necessarily think of themselves as drummers, but as composers who were spontaneously composing music, and as drummers who played each other’s compositions,” said Sorey.
“The music will not exactly sound like Max’s music, but it will be something that is a great tribute to what he’s produced and the avenues that he was able to open up for people like myself and other drummer-composers who are pursuing similar things.”
Sorey participated in NJPAC’s Jazz for Teens program in 1998 and 1999 — initially as a trombonist, and later as a percussionist — and then served as an intern. The program provides high schoolers from Newark and beyond opportunities for artistic exchange, and access to musical training and study with world-class, working artists. Since 2015 it has been led by NJPAC’s director of jazz instruction, Mark Gross.
“I was already well-versed in playing jazz and that kind of stuff in high school, so it was a no-brainer for me to apply to that program, seeing all the different current living legends who were involved in the instruction,” Sorey says. “It was something I looked forward to every weekend: being there and seeing what the other students were doing, and being surrounded by such amazing people who were very much like-minded and serious about pursuing the art form of jazz and pursuing creativity and improvisation. That’s the thing that really kept me going.”
JOHN ROGERS
TYSHAWN SOREY
Some of the legendary faculty and guest teachers during Sorey’s time included Luis Bonilla (trombone), Rufus Reid (bass), Kenny Washington (percussion) and Mike LeDonne (piano), who was his first ensemble teacher. “I have learned so much from LeDonne about the tradition of the music and how to properly play within an ensemble context and how to improvise,” Sorey says.
“We were really fortunate to be around teachers who believed in us and what we were doing, with the understanding that of course we’re going to make mistakes early in our career but also it’s how we learn and benefit from those mistakes that’s going to determine whether or not we’re successful at what we’re doing. These types of things are of importance, especially if one is a teenager and first entering into the field, because you also have to know the ins and outs and some of the frustrations and misunderstandings that can come with pursuing such a career. When you have such a well-grounded understanding of yourself and a knowledge of what you’re after as an artist, then you can do no wrong.”
He credits the program with inspiring him to continue along the same path. In addition to teaching and lecturing on composition and improvisation, he has been an assistant professor at The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia since 2020.
“That was a good thing about being part of that program (at NJPAC),” he says. “I said, ‘Someday I’d like to be at a point in my life where I can share that with other students who might be inspired and who might want to do this.’ They led me to a place where I thought, ‘That might be a career I might want to pursue into the future,’ and here we are! Now I’m doing the same thing they were doing for me and hopefully inspiring students to continue in this media.”
MARIA JARZYNA
AARON DIEHL
Sorey initially formed his trio during the pandemic with bassist Matt Brewer, whom he has collaborated with for more than 20 years, and Diehl. In 2022, they released the critically acclaimed Mesmerism, which was followed by Continuing in 2023.
“I had wanted to work with Aaron for a number of years before we finally got to interact together on a real level,” Sorey says. “He’s very much like a brother to me because we have similar interests in music and we look at music in a very similar way, where there’s no musical boundaries. We like to engage with the music that we like: classical, jazz and different aspects of jazz. We’re interested in everything and share that passion.
“When we first played together, it was like an ‘aha moment’ where I found somebody who I could play music with and feel like there could be no wrong done or anything. There was a trust, from the very first notes: That whole thing where musicians, from the first note on, everything is very much in sync. That seldom happens.”
Raghavan was also a past collaborator of Sorey’s. He joined the trio for a performance that Brewer was unable to attend and started to become a regular part of it. He played double bass on their latest recording, The Susceptible Now, which was released in October.
The album grew out of a weeklong, sold-out series of shows at The Village Vanguard in New York, in November 2023. The sets delved into the potent kind of music that Sorey had wanted to play at first with the trio: standards with some of his own compositional and creative aesthetics already set in place, alongside more jazz-related selections. “That was the idea: to have a trio in which we could employ these different compositional devices that I had developed in my career to be a part of what’s going to be setting the music in motion,” he says.
EMRA ISLEK
HARISH RAGHAVAN
Prior to that, the trio leaned more into contemporary classical music. “Or ‘new music,’ if you will,” Sorey says. “So I wanted to change gears a bit, and with Aaron being the gifted pianist and person he is, he’s able to take this stuff and really run with it and make the music feel as if he’d been playing it his whole life. And Harish is the same way.”
The set of covers, played without breaks, features some of Sorey’s favorite pieces by his compositional heroes, including “A Chair in the Sky” from the Joni Mitchell album Mingus (co-written by Mitchell and Charlie Mingus) and “Bealtine” by Brad Mehldau.
“The songs are radically rearranged and recomposed in interesting ways where there’s a lot of sections for creative exploration by all three members of the trio,” Sorey says. “There are times where the musicians are improvising over song forms that do not repeat and times where you have a lot of composed material where every note is written out, and that kind of thing.”
Sorey calls the selections part of the “Living Great American Songbook” because the idea of the Great American Songbook, to him, is a living document. “This is not a finite document, I mean, but something that’s going to continue to evolve over this decade or the next decade or the next century, or however long this all continues. That’s always been my attitude. We’re seeing so much creativity being poured into this music to the point where that, too, should be considered as part of an evolving catalog of work that basically has as much to do with America’s classical music as anything else.”
Sorey has always sought out alternative musical models. In 2017, he was awarded a prestigious “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in recognition of his accomplishments in defying distinctions between musical genres.
Impossible to categorize, he moves fluidly between jazz and classical, and finds great rewards in exploring both traditions.
“The benefit of participating in both is that there are some things you may find in classical music that you might not necessarily get to explore in so-called jazz, and yet the beauty about so-called jazz is that you’re open to including these influences in what you’re playing, as long as you approach it with the right sensibility and the right personal attitude that is as much of yourself as possible.
“You can negotiate these different influences in interesting and beautiful ways, and that’s what I think the benefit is with regards to whatever vocabulary you have that’s influenced from classical that you can incorporate into your jazz playing and stuff like that. The thing is, for me: learn as much music as possible and have all of that be integral to your development as a musician, and it will come out some kind of way. Don’t be afraid to let it come out!”
The Tyshawn Sorey Trio and Sandbox Percussion will pay tribute to the late Max Roach at The Victoria Theater at NJPAC in Newark, Nov. 15 at 7:30 p.m. Visit ticketmaster.com.
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