Newark-Born ‘Genius’ Musician Pushing Boundaries Of Sound

NEWARK, NJ — Chameleon-like master musician Tyshawn Sorey’s journey through life has taken him from his native Newark to the campus of Columbia University to his current job at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

But through his journey, one thing remained constant: his inimitable defiance of musical boundaries.

The 37-year-old Sorey, who grew up in Newark and attended William Paterson University, was among 24 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipients for 2017.

This year’s class, which also included fellow Newarker Damon Rich, will receive a $625,000 “no strings attached” award from the MacArthur Foundation to help them pursue their own creative, intellectual and professional inclinations.

• See related article: Newark’s ‘Genius’ Urban Planner Earns MacArthur Fellow Grant

According to the MacArthur Foundation:

“A virtuosic percussionist and drum set player who is fluent in piano and trombone, Sorey is an ever-curious explorer of the nature of sound and rhythm, ensemble behavior, and the physicality of live performance… He explores various World and Eastern musical and philosophical concepts on his albums Koan (2009) and Alloy (2014), employing musical languages that range from slowly developing tonally and pantonally based music to free atonal pieces that contain irregular rhythms, lyrical phrasing, and distinctive pacing. Inner Spectrum of Variables (2015) features an extended composition in six movements that merges the harmonic and melodic vocabularies of Western classical, American, and Ethiopian creative expressions, free improvisation, and twentieth-century avant-garde musical traditions. In his song cycle Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine (2016), Sorey reimagines the legendary Josephine Baker's works; his original recreations of songs sung by Baker reflect both the context of her contributions to the civil rights movement and contemporary incidences of racial injustice. Sorey challenges expectations of jazz piano trio performance on Verisimilitude (2017), a set of five abstract, enigmatic, and austere pieces in which the delineation between spontaneous and formal composition is even more obscured.”

Sorey has also presented work and given lectures at such national and international venues as Lincoln Center, the Village Vanguard, Walt Disney Hall, the Danish Rhythmic Conservatory, the Newport Jazz Festival, Ojai Music Festival, the Banff Center, Cité de la Musique, Hochshule für Musik in Cologne and Nuremberg, and at Wesleyan University, where he recently was appointed an assistant professor of music specializing in creative improvised and experimental music traditions, according to the foundation.

Sorey wrote on Facebook that he was “incredibly honored, humbled and empowered for the future” by the honor.

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Photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation