Tyshawn Sorey is a Newark-born multi-instrumentalist and composer. Sorey has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles as well as with other artists such as Roscoe Mitchell, Myra Melford, Anthony Braxton, Julia Bullock, Jason Moran, George Lewis, Claire Chase, Steve Coleman, Vijay Iyer, and John Zorn, among many others. He also collaborates regularly with the Brooklyn-based International Contemporary Ensemble as a percussionist and resident composer. Sorey leads many different projects of his own—most notably the critically-acclaimed Tyshawn Sorey trio, whose musical expressions defy distinctions between genre, composition, and improvisation, celebrating alternative musical modeling within the improvisation-composition continuum.


Sorey is an advisory board member for The Kitchen and Composers Now, and serves as co-artistic director for the Banff Center International Workshop for Creative Music. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award recipient. He has released six recordings including Verisimilitude (2017); The Inner Spectrum of Variables (2016); and Alloy (2014) and has presented work at such venues as Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Hall, Newport Jazz Festival, Ojai Music Festival, and Berlin Jazz Festival. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, specializing in 20th century creative improvised and experimental music.


Portrait photo by John Rogers.