feature photo courtesy of PI Recordings
As one of the more progressive bandleader-composer drummers today, Tyshawn Sorey is naturally inspired by the original progressive bandleader-composer drummer, Max Roach. For his latest project Sorey honors the old master with a song-for-song recasting of Roach’s 1968 socially-conscious dispatch, Members, Don’t Git Weary, christened the shortened Members… Don’t! (PI Recordings).
Probably a less impactful record than Roach’s clarion call Freedom Now Suite that was released at the front end of the civil rights movement, this update was from the time that the fight was culminating into progress that nonetheless fell well short of the goals. But the album also boasted a band stocked with names who were fresh faces that year but would impact jazz in the following decades: pianist Stanley Cowell, saxophonist Gary Bartz and trumpeter Charles Tolliver. Veteran Jymie Merritt was also on board with his electric Ampeg bass.
The powerful, Roach-composed title cut sung by Andy Bey reflected frustration at the progress of the cause while exhorting the need to continue the fight. Aside from that, the songs were mainly modal and hard bop numbers composed by Cowell, Bartz and Merritt; the strength of all but one of the six tracks was not the message but the music.
Sorey’s Members is audacious on two counts; first, the theme of the album is maintained throughout, not with words but with the emotional punch of the topic being expressed in the combative energy put into all the songs, not just one. The arrangements he implemented sometimes make the songs unrecognizable, but it’s a byproduct of getting the vibe right.
Secondly, Sorey made this record live, with one song running right into another. It’s essentially the whole album done in a single take, in front of an audience. One thing that Sorey did do like Roach was to render this music as a sax/trumpet/piano/bass/drums quintet: Mark Shim (tenor sax), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet, electronics), Lex Korten (piano) and Tyrone Allen II (bass) accompany the drummer for this endeavor.
It starts off the same way Max’s album did, with the Cowell number “Abstrusions.” Originally, this is a hard-driving tune with a two-hit beat, almost a boogaloo. But Sorey makes the timekeeping ambiguous and Korten is only hinting at the melody while the horns gradually move toward more defined shapes. The Cowell-penned “Effi” — explosive in both forms — is an eighteen-minute feat of strength where everyone is just playing their tails off.
Merritt’s “Absolutions” is the most modern-sounding composition on Roach’s album, a song that would have been right at home on Miles In The Sky and did soon afterwards find a home on another trumpeter’s album, Live At The Lighthouse by Lee Morgan. In this current-day reading, O’Farrill’s piercing and predominant trumpet takes over the song and when he’s done, he douses the fire by sprinkling over some electronic fairy dust on his horn. Sorey, however, refuses to calm down and keeps pushing hard.
Cowell’s much-covered, magnificently elegant song “Equipoise” was first recorded for that Roach record; Sorey venerates it by devoting two tracks for it covering over twenty-four minutes. The familiar motif is made to fight to get heard through an alternative reading on “Equipoise (pt. 1)” — an entirely different long-form abstraction, actually. Korten’s ending looped figured becomes the starting point for “Equipoise (pt. 2)”, a calmed center around which the rest of the group agitates around it, falling away for a brief ‘sighting’ of Cowell’s theme. Thoughtful bass and piano ponderings follow, and Sorey appears to shape his rhythm around Korten, not the other way around. The Sorey/O’Farrill/Shim front re-enter to bring back Cowell’s conception in a loose form; loose enough to allow players wide berth as they get in their licks in succession.
For Bartz’s “Libra,” Shim emerges from a nasty honking presentation to end it on the theme. O’Farrill goes next and he uses Korten’s two-chord structure as a foundation for an imposing performance.
As the lone vocal number, it was important to get the right messenger for the message “Members, Don’t Git Weary.” Sorey stuck the landing by enlisting Fay Victor for the task. She pours every emotion into this, as the song evolves from a pall to a gospel to a freeform free-for-all and you better believe she can chop it up with the band when they go off rails. In doing so, the collectively portray how the gains of the civil rights movement often came by paying a violent price (Roach recorded this song merely two months after MLK was gunned down). The song reaches a triumphant resolution with a blues feeling, with Victor alone moaning the last phrases.
Tyshawn Sorey selection of a single entry in Max Roach’s historic discography speaks to Tyshawn Sorey’s focus and the ability to distill his hero’s overall genius into six songs the old master recorded over a couple of days in June, 1968. Moreover, it demonstrates how this present-day Max Roach can move jazz music forward using material originating in the distant past. That’s Sorey’s own genius.
Members… Don’t! is now available as a double-disc CD or digital files from Bandcamp.
- Tyshawn Sorey – ‘Members… Don’t!’ (2026) - June 8, 2026
- Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, “Chicken Leg” b/w “If I Could”: One Track Mind - June 5, 2026
- Claudio Scolari Project – ‘Lines Of Now’ (2026) - June 4, 2026
