Drummer Tyshawn Sorey has it good. On the one hand, the Pulitzer Prize-winning MacArthur Fellow is one of the most acclaimed composers walking the Earth. On the other, he’s also an excellent musician with a deep love of jazz and its traditions, which leads him to albums like The Susceptible Now. Joined by regular partners Aaron Diehl (piano) and Harish Raghavan (bass), Sorey lets his hair down, so to speak, and just plays music he likes, without having the weight of having written them be part of the conversation. Thus he and his pals can simply swing at will through McCoy Tyner’s “Peresina” and Brad Mehldau’s “Bealtine.”
But the band truly glows when it lets the song lengths stretch. The band almost casually saunters through twenty-six minutes of Swedish guitarist Daniel Gunnarson’s “Your Good Lies,” letting the catchy melody and Sorey’s funky backbeat carry the performance, adding accents when and where they feel it. For the Joni Mitchell/Charles Mingus co-write “A Chair in the Sky” (from Mitchell’s underrated Mingus LP), Sorey leads the trio in exploratory mode for twenty-two and a half minutes, casually poking at the tune’s border, shining light in every corner and under every edge, checking out what’s there and filtering their reports through their own talents. It’s a tour-de-force performance that brings out not only the sublime aspects of the song, but also the trio’s empathic improvisation skills. If this is Sorey’s idea of rest and relaxation, it makes a lot of other folks’ work look stunted by comparison.
