Tyshawn Sorey

Members… Don’t! is the tour-de-force new release by acclaimed drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey that offers a bold reinterpretation of Max Roach’s potent album Members, Don’t Git Weary, connecting its message of resilience in the face of struggle to the present day. It follows on a string of albums from Sorey that feature pianist Aaron Diehl, the latest of which – The Susceptible Now (Pi 2024) – received 5-Stars from Downbeat, which describe it as “a garden of sonic ecstasy… Sorey’s trio conjures a spell that enchants throughout the entire album…. Each [track] seduces with the power of sauntering dance, flickering melodicism and emotional immediacy.”

Roach’s album – recorded during the turbulent year of 1968 and shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and amid widespread social unrest – served as a call for perseverance in the fight for justice. Its title track, drawn from the Negro spiritual “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning,” serves as both admonition and encouragement. Coming eight years after the release of his landmark We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, with the murders of John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X, the escalation of the Vietnam War and even the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 occurring in the intervening years, the album serves as a resolute reminder of continued, collective commitment.

Nearly six decades later, Members… Don’t! returns to that gesture. Expansive in scope and searching in intent, Sorey reimagines Roach’s work, not as repertoire, but reframed through a contemporary lens, reshaped and reimagined for our own turbulent time. He magnifies the original – with compositions by pianist Stanley Cowell, alto saxophonist Gary Bartz, and bassist Jymie Merrit, joined by trumpeter Charles Tolliver – into a lengthy suite. He cites the extended works of Charles Mingus such as The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and Epitaph as particular inspirations. Like much of his recent works – best exemplified by performance practices with his trio and on the Pulitzer Prize-finalist Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) – Sorey invites listeners into immersive environments that unfold gradually, revealing their logic and emotional core over extended duration. It’s music that resists excerpting; asking for patience and a willingness to give oneself to the narrative’s unfolding. Sorey re-sequenced the original’s compositions so that the title piece “Member, Don’t Git Weary” becomes the work’s denouement. “For me, it’s the apex,” Sorey said. “Everything else leads to that moment.”