Tyshawn Sorey

About

Tyshawn Sorey won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith), a fitting landmark for someone whose output cuts across contemporary classical, free jazz, and experimental music so fluidly that critics barely know which shelf to put him on. A composer, multi instrumentalist, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Sorey plays drums, piano, and trombone, and writes everything from improvised solo percussion pieces to full opera commissions. His 2018 work Cycles of My Being, starring tenor Lawrence Brownlee with poetry by Terrance Hayes, centers on what it means to be a Black man in America today, and his song cycle Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine, a tribute to Josephine Baker, was performed on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019. His trio records with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini are essential listening: The Inner Spectrum of Variables earned a spot on The Nation's ten best albums of 2016, and Nextbop called it the best jazz album of the decade. The New York Times named Sorey its composer of the year for 2020, a year in which he somehow kept premiering ambitious new work despite all the restrictions on live performance. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017, and has recorded or performed alongside Anthony Braxton, Vijay Iyer, John Zorn, Marilyn Crispell, and Wadada Leo Smith, among many others.