When Max Roach released his 1968 album, Members, Don’t Git Weary, the broader Black political movement in America was undergoing a transformation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were recent enough for Black Americans to understand the nation’s possibility for change, yet the routine violence didn’t diminish, clouding the wave of optimism with grief and disillusionment. Martin Luther King Jr., the face of the movement, was assassinated before seeing his strides come to fruition, and over 100 cities became battlegrounds for racially fuelled faceoffs between apoplectic Black communities and overeager troops. Members Don’t Git Weary offered a snapshot of the period, reminding Black communities to keep fighting despite unrealized victories, while ushering in newer, hip Black aesthetics like funk beats and electric jazz piano.
Drummer, composer, and bandleader Tyshawn Sorey has been one of the most prolific and accomplished drummers of the past decade, churning out great releases with the likes of Linda May Han Oh and Vijay Iyer and winning the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for his saxophone concerto dedicated to Wadada Leo Smith. On his latest, Members… Don’t!, Sorey reimagines Roach’s landmark album, using the original tracks more as spiritual guideposts than repertoire. Recorded live as one uninterrupted suite at The Jazz Gallery in New York, the album is triple the length of the original, eschewing rigid form for dense feeling. Black musical codes bubble to the surface just as quickly as they disappear, an apt formula for a performance meant to encompass the contradictions of Black plight. Sorey’s Members…Don’t!, in all its sprawling glory, is a challenging yet immersive meditation on both Black jazz forebearers and the complex social movements of Black Americans. If Roach’s buoyant album insists we hold our chins high, Sorey’s moodier take begs us to dip our heads in contemplation.
“Abstrusions” lets you know immediately that the album isn’t just a collection of covers. Pianist Lex Korten and trumpeter Adam O’Farrill open freely, crash landing into the suite with cold, brooding interplay as opposed to the straightforward funk vamp of Roach’s version. The tempo is jagged and slow, and O’Farrill only teases out the melody throughout as if to question the jubilance of the original. At the track’s apex Korten explodes in and out of dissonant broken chords against Mark Shim’s angular saxophone lines, an unexpected development that sneaks up on you thanks to Sorey’s sticky, slowly evolving drumming. “Absolutions” has a similar disregard for expectation. After Korten’s shimmering, intimate Emahoy-esque piano intro, the quartet sounds tame and subdued, mostly playing off sparse block chords and swung hi-hats. Shim and O’Farrill build the tension through an exchange of solos that tug the tempo quicker here, slower there. When Sorey and bassist Tyrone Allen II add their own flurries to buff their exploration, the affair sounds like it wants to cave in on itself. Sorey’s compositions trek tedious paths to express the unresolved emotions of the subject matter, but the group’s close listening allows them to stay tight and composed without missing a beat.
The arrangements bring to mind the orchestrated chaos of David Murray’s octet albums, where free jazz and swing find common footing. At the beginning of “Effi,” one of the longer performances, the quartet gives the illusion of free improvisation: O’Farrill and Shim’s horns dance atop one another with enough melodic and rhythmic propulsion to start a riot; Korten intersperses grating shapes against delicate lyrical phrases at unsteady rhythms; Sorey’s drums are hitting so hard and unwieldy that you can almost see the sweat flying around his kit. It’s only around the two-minute mark that a decipherable, organized call-and-response line somehow appears out of thin air between the horns, acting as a head (if you can call it that). The album is full of these extraordinary moments where everything is so tightly packed that it’s hard to determine whether a section was improvised or planned. Sorey’s compositional hand is magical in the way that it promotes exploration while rewarding attentiveness to motifs.
While most of the set is acoustic, any electronics are more likely to disorient the listener than to add substantial timbral weight. Instead of the group employing electric keyboards, O’Farrill has his hand on live mixing techniques. Take “Equipose, Pt 1”: Toward the end, when the band is riding out a calm spiritual groove, the mix feels thinner, the low end slowly evaporating. The music starts to sound like it’s coming through a decades-old wax pressing, as if the live band were no longer present. O’Farill’s light touch feels like an eerie trick to make the musicians appear as if they’re a spiritual jazz combo tapping in from years ago.
Sorey’s decision to end the set with “Members, Don’t Git Weary” makes the long journey worthwhile. Vocalist Fay Victor’s scatting technique sounds like a dolphin’s burst pulse—choppy and whiny, but still containing the emotional heft of Big Mama Thornton. She sings the tune, carrying both hurt and triumph, flaunting low vibrato notes and belted gospel melismas. Shim accents her words with edge, accessing squeaky sax lines when Victor reaches the ends of phrases like he’s backing a pastor. When everything is coming to a climax in the middle, the band fizzles out through electronic whirrs, and Victor and Shin get into an intense atonal shouting match. Then everything erupts: the horns start blowing like hell, the keys are begging for mercy, the drums tired out, yet it all comes into place. Hearing the band fight its way through the disorder and back to the swinging bluesy theme marks the most euphoric moment of the entire experience, the ultimate release where clarity is found in a centuries-old tradition. The magnetic culmination of Members… Don’t! hints at a Black future that requires looking (but not dwelling) in the past to move forward.
