Tyshawn Sorey is one of contemporary music’s most adroit thrashers. To hear him in an ensemble led by saxophonist Steve Lehman or pianist Vijay Iyer is to enter a mind-altering rhythmic chamber. The tempo of a song may start out at a swinging pace. Then you hear a pivot that sounds like a reference to a Dilla motif. Next, it’s being spun through the wringer of free jazz. It’s easy to understand why lots of elite musicians like to have this guy in a band or why Questlove calls Sorey one of his “drumming heroes.”
As a composer, Sorey is no less bold. But his adventurism has adopted a different profile on his most recent albums for the Pi label. The Inner Spectrum of Variables, a double-disc set from 2016, used an unconventional string quartet to fill out some of Sorey’s contemporary classical designs. On 2014’s Alloy—a trio recording with pianist Corey Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini—the finale was a half-hour composition titled “A Love Song.” Over its first half, the way Smythe meditated over some of Sorey’s modes encouraged you to forget the piece’s claim to jazz-born tenderness. This hint of misdirection allowed the gradual entry of Tordini and Sorey himself to sound all the more ravishing.
Verisimilitude is this trio’s follow-up to Alloy. While it can fit on a single CD, it has an epic scale that follows from the wide-ranging air of Inner Spectrum. And though it never strays from its languid style, the brief opening track “Cascade in Slow Motion” reveals how Sorey can put his compositional materials under pressure. At first, Smythe’s piano picks over the scalar melody, while Sorey accompanies, quietly. Gradually, the drummer puts some more tumult into the ensemble’s texture. Still, it’s the softest kind of full-boil imaginable. If his work in other bands often suggests an irrepressible mania, the goal here seems to be delicate chaos.
Most of the following track, “Flowers for Prashant,” is similarly pensive—until a figure that sounds descended from Middle Eastern music sweeps into frame in the final minutes along with airy wisps of electronic processing. The third movement, “Obsidian,” flows without interruption from this same digital environment. That vibe is interrupted only when Smythe moves over to produce stark, plinking lines from a toy piano. (John Cage liked the instrument, too, but the use of it in a trio format presents new expressive possibilities.)
By the time of the centerpiece, the half-hour long “Algid November,” Sorey’s group makes the most of its deep experience together. Smythe knows how to uncork a fiery line of pianism—bringing a spare section to an unceremonious end—at just the right moment. Throughout, the use of electronics is so restrained that it can be easy to miss. But a gorgeous new melody in the tenth minute refreshes the listener’s patience, with its assurance that not every change in the music is going to be about such fine-grain distinctions. Even as the group recoils from seeming overbearing or obvious, its use of textural opposites—like sustain and dryness—creates a powerful narrative. That all the variety here comes from the work of three players is a marvel. It’s almost frightening to imagine what Sorey could conceive, with a full orchestra at his disposal. The right experimental music impresario should give him the chance.
