The Deconstructor

Tyshawn Sorey is a musician who transcends cultural and genre boundaries. This award-winning multi-instrumentalist, composer and conductor is bringing two projects to the Turbinenhalle.

Text: Max Florian Kühlem

Anyone studying Tyshawn Sorey quickly realises that there must actually be two or three musicians with the same name — it seems so unlikely that such diverse artistic approaches could be embodied by a single individual. The Ruhrtriennale audience will have the opportunity to experience two of these projects: In a concert featuring Harish Raghavan on bass and Aaron Diehl on piano, Sorey will explore the classical repertoire of the jazz piano trio as a drummer. In Cycles of My Being / Save the Boys, he will conduct a performance of song cycles that he has composed in the Romantic tradition.

Sometimes, consulting the video portal YouTube can be helpful for entering an artistic cosmos. You can find completely uncurated professional TV snippets alongside private recordings of concerts, as well as all kinds of in between forms. A single click reveals the enormous range of Tyshawn Sorey's work: In a video stemming from Dutch radio dating back 14 years, the Newark-born musician explains his favorite way of playing the drums at the time: he likes to make the drums and cymbals sound in unusual ways by hitting them at the edges, stroking them or muffling them. This is his way of eliciting the overtones.

This demonstrates the mindset of an avant-garde musician who does not necessarily distrust conventional methods of using instruments and composing and performing music but rather wants to approach them in a completely new way. Deconstruction and reconstruction. After falling in love with the drums and the technique of great jazz drummers such as Max Roach, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams while studying, he soon began to admire avant-garde and new music composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Morton Feldman. "The dissonance of the European avant-garde spoke to him," writes Adam Shatz in a lengthy New York Times article about Tyshawn Sorey, quoting him as saying, "My whole being is dissonance".

This dissonance can be traced back to Sorey's experience of growing up as a Black person in the USA. Like many other Black children, Sorey received  learning support, 'possibly because of his slight lisp, which he still has', suggests Adam Shatz. He was also bullied by other children and mocked for being overweight and walking around with a boom box, supposedly listening to 'white music'. In reality, he listened to Miles Davis, and hip-hop was another of his passions.

Sorey grew up in precarious circumstances and, eventually moved in with his paternal grandmother. Life with her was better than with his parents, but she also lived in one of the most violent neighbourhoods in Newark. Nevertheless, he managed to develop his musical talent. By all accounts, he was something of a child prodigy: at the age of seven, he was eliciting sounds from radiators, pots and pans and playing church hymns from memory on a battered piano in the neighborhood. He is said to have a photographic memory to this day and can play a page of music if he looks at it intently for just a few seconds.

His talent was recognized and encouraged, enabling him to study jazz and performance at William Paterson University and Wesleyan University. Initially studying the trombone, he later switched to the drums, learning from teachers like Anthony Braxton and Jay Hoggard. Although he was already composing avant-garde music during his studies, paid gigs primarily pushed him into the role of jazz drummer, with which he struggled for a long time. He disliked the cliché image he was conforming to, especially when he sat behind the drum set as the big black man among white musicians.

Sorey empathized with the drama that Nina Simone suffered throughout her life — she wanted to be a classical concert pianist, but the white world only accepted her as a blues and jazz musician. Sorey was therefore highly critical when Kendrick Lamar won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2018. While he admires the Black artist, he felt that the award for a commercial hip-hop record was an insult to the many Black composers of concert music who were overlooked at the ceremony. He may therefore have experienced satisfaction in 2024 when he himself received the Pulitzer Prize in the music category for his work Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith), which premiered at the Lucerne Festival.

It’s a stroke of luck that Tyshawn Sorey remained loyal to the drums despite periods of doubt and inner conflict about his role. There are still plenty of live videos on YouTube of him improvising freely as an experimental drummer alongside the renowned pianist Vijay Iyer, for example. These videos are not always easy to follow and require a lot of patience. However, during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, when McCoy Tyner, the pianist of John Coltrane's band and a great hero of his, died, he (re)found his love for the classical jazz trio. Since 2022, he has been exploring its repertoire with pianist Aaron Diehl, and currently with Harish Raghavan on bass. Pieces such as the famous standard Autumn Leaves sound reborn in their hands. Sorey's drums sound extremely sensitive, rich in detail and bright. On his latest trio album, The Susceptible Now, he turns to a piece by McCoy Tyner: Peresina. One can only sense or feel the original which he has deconstructed and reassembled.

In his jazz compositions, the musician alternates between improvisation and fixed notation. He also expects the same from classical concert music, encouraging his musicians to interpret the scores in new ways. He does not concern himself with cultural or genre boundaries. This is why the main concert at the Ruhrtriennale, in which he appears as both composer and conductor, is once again taking place in an unusual location: With the song cycle Cycles of My Being and the twenty-minute countertenor aria Save the Boys, Sorey joins the ranks of great composers of songs. He uses the intimacy of the genre to convey what it is like to be a black man living in the USA today.

The article appears in Kultur.West as part of the Ruhrtriennale Special 2025.