Track List
- Peresina
- 15:22
- A Chair in the Sky
- 22:34
- Your Good Lies
- 20:07
- Bealtine
- 15:24
The Susceptible Now is the new release from drummer and 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winner Tyshawn Sorey that features covers of a surprising set of some of his favorite music. Featuring his trio of Aaron Diehl on piano and Harish Raghavan on bass, the album follows on the heels of his masterful release Continuing, which was voted #4 release of 2023 by the Francis Davis Poll of over 150 jazz critics, and was hailed by The Guardian as “5-Stars: simmering with reinventions of old magic… One of the year’s special sets.”
The new release continues to expand on Sorey’s ongoing partnership with Diehl, now their fourth album together. Though it is, at face, another set of covers of compositions that make up what Sorey calls the “Living Great American Songbook,” he approached this music quite differently than with Continuing: The arrangements are far more elaborate through-composed forms, much like the music he created with his long-running trio with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini, which only featured his own compositions. As with that music, The Susceptible Now artlessly flows through a wide range of moods, from hard-hitting grooves to serene introspection, and back again. They present the McCoy Tyner classic “Peresina” from his album Expansions; “A Chair in the Sky” (composed with Charles Mingus) from the Joni Mitchell album Mingus; “Bealtine” from Brad Mehldau; and “Your Good Lies,” from the contemporary soul group Vividry. Here, Sorey completely deconstructs these compositions through extraction and shuffling of sections from the originals, changing keys, harmonic sequences and progressions, while arranging them into song forms that unpredictably take on a different shape. The program is played without breaks, magnifying its focused intensity while creating a prodigious sense of scale more akin to a symphonic poem than a standard jazz piano trio performance.
The trio honed their approach to this music during their November 2023 run at the Village Vanguard. The audience was treated to performances of quiet potency, full of risk taking and edge-of-the-seat anticipation for where the musicians were going next. The group’s concentration was palpable, guiding the music through successive waves of tension and release. The built-up intensity was such that there was an almost audible collective gasp of relief at the end of each set. Each performance was its own unique journey that traversed the terrain in different directions, often rising up to take a broad view before swooping back down to plant itself in an unexpected but completely logical place, limited by only the collective imagination of the three musicians. Diehl plays lyrically at times, conveying a Debussy-like lucid elegance. Raghavan provides a sympathetic narrative, never resorting to rote vamping. Even as the leader, Sorey never takes a solo, instead providing an endlessly imaginative commentary that subtly pushes the music forward and reins it back. Their performances are poetic, swinging, and – dare we say – romantic?
The choice of material for the recording might be surprising, but Sorey tells of how personally important each composition is to him:
“Peresina” is from Expansions, the first McCoy Tyner album Sorey was exposed to, which spoke to him in a deeply spiritual way. According to him, “The last eight bars of the third section in the song is what begins and ends our version. We settle into those sections as extended areas for trio interaction (these ‘spaces,’ in turn, set up the overall zazen-like, immersive ethos of the entire album). The meat, of course, is in the ‘exposition’ – the second section of the song – in which three of the song’s original motives (the bass line from the first section, the melody from the second section, and parts of the melody from the third section) develop concurrently, finally settling into the last four bars of the second original section (but in two cycles of 15 beats).”
During his teenage years growing up in Newark, NJ was when Sorey first heard “A Chair in the Sky” in the documentary film about Charles Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog. In one poignant scene shot from an apartment with a panoramic view of Manhattan, Sue Mingus spoke of Charles coming to terms with his own death and how she and Charles moved there “for [him] to die in… you only have a few months left to live, you don’t go to pieces; you do something that is as pleasurable as possible.” This was followed by a home recording of Mingus singing excerpts of the melody to “A Chair in the Sky,” which moved Sorey to tears. He later found the song in the Joni Mitchell album Mingus, with its refrain “But now Manhattan holds me / To a chair in the sky / With the bird in my ears / And boats in my eyes / Going by.” According to Sorey, he recounted this story to Diehl and Raghavan, which “was my way of ‘getting us in the room’ in order to execute this music in the spirit of that story, while imagining Charles being in this seemingly infinite ‘sky’ that is depicted by its always-changing solo form shared by Aaron and Harish. It is highly reflective and dream-like, and full of memory. Much of my own music also deals with these very real emotions, and I wanted to include it here.”
Sorey happened upon “Your Good Lies” while browsing for music on YouTube to play for his oldest daughter. Not only did the song strike him immediately, but he also he found the lyrics to be apropos to the music created by this group: “So tell your good lies, because I’ll buy no matter what / Susceptible now, before the moment flies.” According to Sorey, “‘Now’ is always susceptible to transformation. Each composition we’ve explored in this set has its own ‘now’: it is never permanent or stagnant in the way that we approach the interpretation. The susceptibility is always present at every flying moment in myriad ways. Parts of the original song have been recomposed, arranged, reharmonized, melodically altered, and adapted for spontaneous composition by all three of us. The overall form is through-composed in fifteen sections – some of which are rigorously designed for different kinds of trio interaction – and shifts through many different feelings and moods, building over an extended period of time into a climax before finally settling into a stately reading of the final chorus.”
“Bealtine” is dedicated to drum historian and collector Anthony Amodeo, a dear friend of Sorey’s. The song happened to be playing in the background of a video that Amodeo made about the Rogers Drum Company, a shared passion for both men. Sorey found out later that the song was by the Brad Mehldau Trio, from their album House on Hill. He proceeded to make a descriptive transcription of the composition exactly as Mehldau played it (along with Larry Grenadier’s exact bass lines). Sorey was enamored with the song to the point of wanting to play it and has stated that he wanted to do so “in an entirely different treatment that is evocative of John Coltrane Quartet’s readings of ‘My Favorite Things’ and Muhal Richard Abrams and Malachi Favors’ reading of Abrams’ ‘Two Over One.’ This is perhaps the least ‘arranged’ of the four songs on this album, but I thought that it’s a really great song that made for a great fit in our existing repertoire as a trio and that it would be an excellent closing track for the set.”
The last year continued Sorey’s run of recognition for his accomplishments: After being named a Finalist in 2023 for his composition Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), he was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his work Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith), which the Pulitzer committee called “an introspective saxophone concerto with a wide range of textures presented in a slow tempo, a beautiful homage that’s quietly intense, treasuring intimacy rather than spectacle.” 2024 also saw the premieres of For Ross Gay by Yarn Wire at the Donaueschingen Festival; For Alvin Singleton by Hub New Music at University of Houston and the Kennedy Center; For Anthony Braxton by pianist Jonathan Biss; rearrangements of the Max Roach album Members Don’t Git Weary for The Winter Jazz Festival in New York City; and new works for PRISM Quartet. Premieres include Longing to Tell, an operatic collaboration with hip hop artist Akua Naru for Ensemble Resonanz that will be performed in 2025 in Hamburg; larger work for the Tyshawn Sorey Trio + Sandbox Percussion honoring the Max Roach Centennial, commissioned by Wexner Art Center, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the Library of Congress, and 92NY; piece for the American Brass Quintet at Juilliard; major solo piano composition for Sarah Rothenberg in Los Angeles, Houston, and New York; work for Trio Nebbia; and piece for solo guitar for Shaun Shibe at London’s Wigmore Hall. He will also be touring with his trio, with electronic music producer and composer King Britt, and performing solo piano and electronics at the Venice Biennale, in addition to continuing to tour with the Vijay Iyer Trio.
The Susceptible Now hopefully puts to rest once and for all the notion that Sorey is only an “avant garde” artist. He came up playing standards, and that language is as much to do with his creativity as his most modernist statements. Anthony Braxton has spoken often of being a trans-idiomatic artist who refuses to be limited to categories, instead fluidly moving between musical genres. Sorey is the 21st Century archetype of this figure, and this album is yet another manifestation of his multi-faceted wonder.