In 2018, I met up with Tyshawn Sorey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for an interview that involved me playing a series of records for him and soliciting his thoughts.We listened to everything from Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Eric Dolphy to Metallica, Redman, and Autechre.
And at one point, after listening to a recording of Eric Dolphy’s “Jim Crow,” a piece that was more 20th century classical than “jazz,” we discussed something that has plagued jazz musicians for almost a century: the respective roles of composition and improvisation.Jazz musicians have been composing — and when I use that word, I mean more than just writing tunes — since the beginning of the music’s history.
Duke Ellington’s “Reminiscing In Tempo” is a through-composed piece from 1935.Anthony Braxton is 100% a composer; his pieces are written out, utilizing highly specific conceptual languages and strategies, and the performers execute them according to various methodologies, also designed and prescribed by Braxton.
There’s a whole school of performers active at the moment (see the Anna Webber review below) whose work is written with extraordinary precision and complexity.When writing my book In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music Of Cecil Taylor (available now!), I was astonished to discover just how much of Taylor’s music was written out, then transmitted to the other members of the ensemble through lengthy and rigorous rehearsal.
One of his groups might put in months of eight-hour days in order to learn a piece that was only to be performed a single time.As bassist Alan Silva said of Taylor’s 1966 Blue Note album Unit Structures, “Yes, there’s a score.
Nobody plays ‘Unit Structure’ in a jam session! That album took us four months of rehearsal.” Tyshawn Sorey is absolutely a composer, one who seems to enjoy working on a grand scale.His 2016 album The Inner Spectrum Of Variables, for piano trio and string trio, was a single ...