David Dalle
Thursday February 25th, 2021 with David Dalle
Black History Month: music from American composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey and a retrospective of Guinean kora master Djelimoussa Diawara.

Today we are going to hear from two great and different musical masters, American composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey, and Guinean kora player Djelimoussa Diawara. 40 year old Tyshawn Sorey grew up in Newark, New Jersey, learning the piano and the trombone before he was finally given the drum kit that he most desired. Though he started studying music at William Paterson University as a trombonist, he later switched to drums and majored in jazz. However, he felt the jazz program was too traditionalist and he found a home in the new-music program. He was finding inspiration from both Euro-American avant garde composers such as Mortan Feldman and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and experimental jazz musicians such as Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell. He saw a connection between the two traditions: "the more Sorey listened, the more he came to see each of these streams as a tributary of the same river of experimentation, artificially segregated by genre and race." (NYTimes). By the end of his time at William Patterson, he was already making a name for himself as a sideman in the New York jazz scene, and later started touring internationally with other musicians. He impressed many musicians not with just his drumming. When he first met pianist Vijay Iyer to plan some music together, Iyer was completely surprised to hear him play some of Iyer's music on the piano. By 2010, Sorey started focusing on leading his own groups. However, he went back to study composition in depth, attaining a Masters in composition from Wesleyan and PhD from Columbia, graduating in 2017. Since then he has been composing music furiously (especially during the pandemic) as well as continuing to perform and record. Much of Sorey's mature music is longform music, both composed and improvised, building huge structures of glorious sound! As the trauma of anti-Black racism exploded (again) into public consciousness last summer in the United States, he has focused mainly on vocal works about race in America, which I hope to feature on a later show. Today, we will hear the third part of his 2020 album "Unfiltered", which features long pieces for his sextet comprising Nathan Reising, alto sax, Morgan Guerin, tenor sax, Lex Korten, piano, Sasha Berliner, vibraphone, Nick Dunston, bass, and Sorey on drums.