Dec 24 2017
Best of 2017 #23: Tyshawn Sorey – “Verisimilitude” (Pi Recordings)
Verisimilitude is a piano trio recording. It makes its intentions known in the opening notes of composer Tyshawn Sorey’s latest. Pianist Cory Smythe offers up some thoughtful phrases. Bassist Chris Tordini takes advantage of the open range by augmenting the rhythm with some melodic contributions. Sorey, on drums, adds nuance with a restrained patter and tasteful cymbal crashes. But Sorey’s creative impulses lean heavier toward forward-thinking expressionism, even as it goes about honoring that which has come before. And that marks where Verisimilitude ends its phase as a classic piano trio recording and becomes something else. Classical, electronic, ambient, avant-garde and any number of other influences become ingredients for an album that doesn’t exclusively cozy up to any one. And, intriguingly, the album never fully manifests into a final stage. It is music that is undergoing evolution while the tape is rolling. It’s a seed undergoing self-realization as the bloom is underway. That quality is what renders the album’s opening notes as the most intriguing moment of the Sorey’s latest project. Sorey’s trio rehabs the state of transformation into a permanent resting point, where everything changing is everything staying the same. Fans of Bill Evans are going to say this is the good stuff. Fans of Debussy are going to say this is the good stuff. Fans of Nils Frahm and Hauschka and Andrew Hill and Matthew Shipp are all going to say this is the good stuff. At least for a little while, until everything changes again. And that’s a good thing. Because Tyshawn Sorey is currently traveling a creative arc where every new change has the potential to be the most wonderful thing ever heard.
Music from NYC.
Read more on Bird is the Worm.
Jan 17 2018
Recommended: John Zorn – “The Interpretation of Dreams”
These pieces are uneasy dreams, where scattered thoughts leads to frayed nerves and apprehensive motions. The melody of “Naked Lunch” is battered and bounced around, its shape formed less by melodic intent than rhythmic consequence. The interplay between piano and string quartet on “Obscure Objects of Desire” sometimes manifests as a wary harmonic embrace and other times as a violent outburst of dissonance. When the trio opens final piece “The Exterminating Angel” where they left off on “Naked Lunch,” a sense of coming full circle is juxtaposed with a sense of stopping somewhere quite new… especially when it leads to introspective interludes of momentary peace followed by the rich melodicism more closely associated with Zorn’s Dreamers ensemble.
The Interpretation of Dreams is yet another example, one of many, why the Tzadik label has earned its reputation as an incubator of the most imaginative projects on the scene.
Your album personnel: Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz (bass), Tyshawn Sorey (drums), Sae Hashimoto (vibraphone), Stephen Gosling (piano), and the Jack Quartet of Jay Campbell (cello), John Pickford (viola), Austin Wulliman (violin) and Chris Otto (violin).
Released on Tzadik Records.
Available at: Amazon | eMusic
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By davesumner • Jazz Recommendations, Jazz Recommendations - 2017 releases • 0 • Tags: Jack Quartet, John Zorn, Sae Hashimoto, Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz, Stephen Gosling, Tyshawn Sorey, Tzadik label