Hear a track from Tyshawn Sorey's new album, 'The Susceptible Now' (original) (raw)

Published October 9, 2024 at 2:36 PM EDT

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Tyshawn Sorey upended some expectations a couple of years ago, when he introduced an acoustic trio with pianist Aaron Diehl and bassist Matt Brewer. Their debut studio album, Mesmerism, enacted a deep engagement with the jazz canon and its swinging tradition, with sublime focus and nary a trace of distance or detachment. The same was even more emphatically true about a sequel, Continuing, released last year.

Now comes a third album in the series: The Susceptible Now, available on Pi Recordings this Friday. Featuring a new version of the trio with Sorey, Diehl, and Harish Raghavan on bass, this recording consists of just four long pieces, one for each side of an LP. The opening track is “Peresina,” a composition by the late pianist and Philadelphia jazz hero McCoy Tyner, originally featured on his 1970 album Expansions. WRTI is proud to share Sorey’s version of the song as an exclusive premiere.

Expansions was the first McCoy Tyner album that Sorey ever heard, and it made a deep impression. It should come as no surprise, to anyone familiar with his working methods, that Sorey approached his interpretation of the song with a careful attunement to form, and a solemn respect for open space. Whereas Tyner’s original recording involves a septet — with Woody Shaw on trumpet, Wayne Shorter and Gary Bartz on saxophones, Ron Carter on cello, Herbie Lewis on bass and Freddie Waits on drums — this version leans into the pure sonic possibilities available to a piano trio.

Part of that palate involves the precise application of vibration and overtone: a compositional Sorey signature, and a pianistic Diehl specialty. This arrangement of the song highlights that expressive quality in a slow-gathering first movement, before a pause and a tempo upshift more than six minutes into the piece.

“The last eight bars of the third section in the song is what begins and ends our version,” Sorey explains in press materials. “We settle into those sections as extended areas for trio interaction (these ‘spaces,’ in turn, set up the overall zazen-like, immersive ethos of the entire album). The meat, of course, is in the ‘exposition’ — the second section of the song — in which three of the song's original motives (the bass line from the first section, the melody from the second section, and parts of the melody from the third section) develop concurrently, finally settling into the last four bars of the second original section (but in two cycles of 15 beats).”

Elsewhere on The Susceptible Now, Sorey’s trio reinterprets “A Chair in the Sky,” from Joni Mitchell’s album Mingus; “Your Good Lies,” by the R&B-chill group Vividry; and “Bealtine,” a piece from the Brad Mehldau Trio album House on Hill. As was the case in a stunning engagement at The Village Vanguard last year, Sorey, Diehl and Raghavan weave through the compositions as if navigating a single train of thought. The trio will perform select dates this fall, and appear as part of Sorey’s artist residency next spring at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn.

The Susceptible Now will be available on Pi Recordings on Friday; preorder here.