Jennifer Curtis & Tyshawn Sorey: Invisible Ritual
[Tundra; Jan. 24]
Jennifer Curtis and Tyshawn Sorey’s new album grew out of a bad gig.
The two were playing Sorey’s monodrama Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine with the International Contemporary Ensemble at the 2016 Mostly Mozart Festival in New York City. They were trying to cram the 90-minute piece into an hour, and the space and audience were awkward.
“We walked off feeling really weird,” Curtis says.
But after the show, Curtis and Sorey were approached by producer Randy Ezratty. Even in the cramped confines of the show, he had been struck by the semi-improvised duos the two played throughout the work and wanted to help them make an album. The eventual result was Invisible Ritual, which was released by Tundra on January 24. As its title suggests, it draws forth a hidden stratum of shared personal history from the pair’s musical friendship.
Curtis and Sorey already knew each other well through their collaborations with International Contemporary Ensemble, in which Curtis, a Chapel Hill native, is a longtime violinist. But both of their backgrounds extend far beyond the rarified world of contemporary classical music. Curtis has played drums in rock bands, written tunes on mandolin, studied Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros, and much more.
Sorey first made his name as an infinitely versatile jazz drummer with Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, John Zorn, and Roscoe Mitchell. Over the past decade, his has proven himself equally adept as a pianist and composer. He was named a MacArthur Fellow and recently followed Anthony Braxton as Professor of Composition and Creative Music at Wesleyan University.
After a performance in Boston in 2018, Curtis and Sorey drove to Ezratty’s house in Manhattan for two days of recording. During the drive, they had a long conversation about their childhoods and discovered that they had similar experiences growing up with absent or negligent parents, feeling closer to their grandparents, and using music as a refuge. They didn’t talk about what they were going to play, opting to let it grow naturally out of that particular moment.
At Ezratty’s house, Sorey took over the living room with his large percussion rig—drum kit, cymbals, gongs, cow bells, and all manner of other instruments—and the two started playing.
“Sometimes, we’d get an idea in the first few minutes,” Curtis recalls, “and we’d be like, ‘Ohhh, this feels really good now, let’s start again.’” Elsewhere, they would just go, letting their dialog propel things forward, with Sorey switching between percussion and piano.
The eight untitled tracks on Invisible Ritual show off the vast sonic array these performers have at their fingertips. In track four, Curtis toggles between a forgotten Led Zeppelin lick and an arpeggiated riff from some nameless Romantic violin concerto, all of which evolves into bursts of fiddling. Sorey’s drumming is supremely flexible, grabbing shards of Curtis’s rhythm and extrapolating everything from clattering free-jazz textures and fractured hard-rock beats to flashes of funky breakbeats.
“He can do stuff so intricately that I felt really confident and free,” Curtis says.
When Sorey switches to piano, an entirely different mood emerges. Track three is built around dense, dissonant Morton Feldman-esque piano chords, each of which seems to contain its own universe. And on track six, Curtis becomes a torch singer, exploring some ineffable sadness over rich-hued piano accompaniment. When they finished recording that track, the two agreed that they had just “played the story” from that car-ride conversation.
Listening to these performances, it’s sometimes hard to believe they are fully improvised. They all have a sense of structure, as if Curtis and Sorey have unconsciously agreed where they’re trying to go.
For Curtis, that shape comes in part from her time creating improvised healing ceremonies with Peruvian musician and Curandero de Sonido (sound healer) Tito La Rosa in the early 2010s. Curtis would assist La Rosa through these ceremonies, using sound to interact with the energies of the participants to create some kind of healing.
“Everything has to feel good,” she recalls, “and it has to feel like an emotional journey. You’ve gotta have this invocation, you’ve gotta have an acknowledgement, then you’ve gotta have the exploration and the conflict and the climax, and then the peace, the peacefulness, and the embers are burning out. So the shape of a song became something that I was viscerally experiencing.”
While none of the pieces on this album quite have that arc, the sense of ritual remains, a reflection of all those things that remain hidden behind an improvisation—the shared conversations, life experiences, histories, patterns of thought, and musical intuitions that can be revealed only through performance.
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