[Dixielandjazz] Tyshawn Sorey - Drummer

[Steve Barbone]

For Drummers and Banjoists: (slightly off topic)

Sometimes folks overlook the drummer, but not when the drummer is Tyshawn
Sorey. I saw him about 6 months ago and he puts on a great show, in addition
to being a fine drummer.

Also heard the group "Oblique" several months ago. (see last paragraph) You
ain't heard nothing yet until you hear a virtuoso banjo player in an avant
garde jazz band, playing free jazz.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Dismantling the Beat to Get to the Heart of It

NY TIMES - By BEN RATLIFF - January 4, 2007

All good musicians have a physical relationship to their instruments, but a
few make it really apparent. They tend to be big people with big
instruments. Charles Mingus was this way, as are the Brazilian percussionist
Carlinhos Brown and the trombonist Wycliffe Gordon. And so is the drummer
Tyshawn Sorey, who isn¹t yet so well known outside inner-circle jazz
audiences, who may have heard him play in bands with Dave Douglas or Vijay
Iyer or Steve Coleman.

During his set at Bowery Poetry Club on Tuesday night with his one of his
own bands, Oblique, Mr. Sorey picked up two drumsticks and threw them hard
against the side wall of the club, without grimacing or changing his
expression. This happened not at an ending or a climax, but somewhere in the
middle of everything.

He did many other things too. He did something like a photographic negative
of drumming, by putting his fingertips on the drum, weighing down on them
and then rhythmically pulling his fingers off. He picked up his snare drum,
overturned it and blew and sucked at the metal snares. Then he placed the
snare drum on top of his floor tom and maneuvered the top half in circles,
scraping metal on metal, maneuvering and listening. Eventually he undid the
high-hat cymbal, manhandling and playing its parts and hardware.

>From a distance this isn¹t so unusual. Drummers like Andrew Cyrille and
Milford Graves and Han Bennink have been doing these kinds of things for 30
years or more. Some of them have become devices, or techniques. And a
technique is an outside thing; you can buy it off the rack.

But there was something proprietary about the way Mr. Sorey was going about
his business ‹ enveloping his equipment, almost inhaling that snare drum
when he put it to his mouth ‹ that made it all seem like an inner
imperative. One wants to say that if Mr. Sorey weren¹t otherwise such a
technically competent and powerfully rhythmic drummer, fluent in broken funk
rhythms and swing feeling, these little episodes of wild stagecraft wouldn¹t
have been of much interest. But that isn¹t true because with him it¹s all
connected, organized into one big style.

The show was a double bill. Oblique, a project with revolving personnel,
played free-improvisation pieces, with Terry McManus on guitar, banjo and
autoharp; Chris Tordini on bass; and Pete Robbins on alto saxophone. Mr.
Sorey controlled the shape of each piece by speeding up and slowing down, or
developing patterns that started crisp and spare and grew to be dense and
loud. In other hands this sort of thing could be dry: the other musicians
busied themselves with single notes or textures rather than developing
melodic shapes. But this performance was hot with its own life force. . .


Tyshawn Sorey and Oblique will perform on Tuesday and Jan. 24 at the Stone,
Avenue C and Second Street, East Village, thestonenyc.com. Pete Robbins and
Centric will play Friday at Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia Street, West
Village, (212) 989-9319, corneliastreetcafe.com.