It is helpful to research the artist, using sources like Wikipedia , Music Magazine Reviews (Pitchfork, Rolling stone, NME etc.,) Artist Websites, etc…A synopsis of the life and music of this Issue’s featured artists appears below.

This Week’s Artists

TYSHAWN SOREY

Tyshawn Sorey (born July 8, 1980) is an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, and professor of contemporary music. Sorey grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and attended Newark Arts High School. As a teenager, he participated in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center Jazz for Teens program, through which he was awarded a Star-Ledger Scholarship. In 2004, Sorey completed jazz studies and performance at William Paterson University, where he began as a classical trombone major before transferring to jazz drumming. After a number of years recording and performing as a side-person for artists including Vijay Iyer and Steve Lehman, Sorey’s first album as leader was released on Firehouse 12 Records in 2007. The 2-CD That/Not features various configurations of Sorey, trombonist Ben Gerstein, pianist Cory Smythe, and bassist Thomas Morgan performing an array of works, from “Seven Pieces for Trombone Quartet” to the 43-minute “Permutations for Solo Piano”. Sorey mainly plays drums, but also makes appearances on piano, including on the opening track. Sorey’s second album, Koan, was released in 2009. Featuring Todd Neufeld on electric and acoustic guitar and Thomas Morgan on bass and acoustic guitar. The album was reviewed favourably by All About Jazz and the BBC. In 2009, Sorey enrolled in a master’s program at Wesleyan University to study composition with Anthony Braxton. He completed his M.A. in 2011 and entered the doctoral program at Columbia University. His enrolment at Columbia coincided with the release of his Oblique – I. During the six years of doctoral study that followed, off-campus he recorded three albums with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini. The first of these, Alloy, was released on Pi Recordings in 2014.

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In 2017, Sorey completed his Doctor of Musical Arts in composition at Columbia. After receiving his DMA, Sorey began his appointment as Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. In 2019 he was named Composer in Residence for the Seattle Symphony and Opera Philadelphia, and his duo album with Marilyn Crispell, The Adornment of Time, was released on Pi Recordings. In 2020, Sorey self-released his sextet’s Unfiltered. Later that year he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as Presidential Assistant Professor of Music. Beginning in 2019, Sorey embarked on several musical projects as well as several versions of Autoschediasms. Autoschediasms are large-scale, improvised musical works led by composer-percussionist Tyshawn Sorey, characterized as spontaneous collective improvisation or “something done offhand”. These works, notably performed with Alarm Will Sound, utilize hand signals, a baton, and minimal preparation to explore timbre, texture, and emotional weight in real-time.

The group came to be called by the surreal-sounding name of Tangerine Dream, inspired by mishearing the line “tangerine trees and marmalade skies” from the Beatles’ track “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. Froese was fascinated by technology and skilled in using it to create music. He built custom-made instruments and, wherever he went, collected sounds with tape recorders for use in constructing musical works later. His early work with tape loops and other repeating sounds was a precursor to the emerging technology of the sequencer, which Tangerine Dream quickly adopted upon its arrival. The band’s 1973 album Atem was named as one of British DJ John Peel’s records of the year, and this attention helped Tangerine Dream to sign to the fledgling Virgin Records in the same year. Soon afterward, they released the album Phaedra, an eerie soundscape that became one of Virgin’s first bona fide hits. Phaedra was one of the first commercial albums to feature sequencers and came to define much more than just the band’s own sound. Their mid-1970s work has been profoundly influential in the development of electronic music styles such as new-age and electronic dance music. In the 1980s, the band were early adopters of the new digital technology, which revolutionized the sound of the synthesizer. Their technical competence and extensive experience in their early years with self-made instruments and unusual means of creating sounds meant that they were able to exploit this new technology to make music quite unlike anything heard before. Several of the band’s albums released during the 1990s were nominated for Grammy Awards. Since then, Tangerine Dream with Jerome Froese took a directional change away from the new-age leanings of those albums and toward an electronica style. After Jerome’s departure, founder Edgar Froese steered the band in a direction somewhat reminiscent of material throughout their career. Edgar Froese died suddenly in Vienna on 20 January 2015 from a pulmonary embolism. The group’s remaining members (Quaeschning, Schnauss and Yamane) and Bianca Acquaye (Froese’s widow), pledged to continue working together in an effort to fulfil Froese’s vision for the group

Over the next few years, personal issues began to take their toll on the group. The band’s next album, “Nuthin’ Fancy,” was recorded in a rushed 17 days to accommodate an aggressive touring schedule. Disagreements and pressure led to fissures among the group and prompted additional lineup changes. One of those new additions was Steve Gaines, whose multiple talents were on full display in the band’s fifth album, “Street Survivors.” In addition to multiple songwriting credits and rousing guitar riffs, Gaines also served as co-vocalist – the only time to that point anyone other than Ronnie Van Zant had sung lead vocals for the group. The album was an instant success, going gold in just 10 days. (It would eventually go double platinum.) It marked the last Skynyrd album featuring original members Ronnie Van Zant and Allen Collins. It was also Steve Gaines’ only Skynyrd studio recording. On October 20, 1977, just three days after the release of “Street Survivors,” the band was flying from a show in Greenville, South Carolina, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when their chartered plane ran out of fuel. The plane crashed in the woods five miles outside of Gillsburg, Mississippi, killing band members Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines, as well as backup singer Cassie Gaines (Steve’s sister) and road manager Dean Kilpatrick. Both pilots also lost their lives. The other band members suffered serious injuries but survived. Skynyrd disbanded following the crash. It would be ten years before they reunited. Before long, a second generation Lynyrd Skynyrd was adding new members and recording new music. The band’s legacy as pillars of Southern rock has only grown over time.

MICHAEL TIPPETT

Shortly after Michael’s birth, the family moved to Wetherden in Suffolk. Michael’s education began in 1909 with a nursery governess and various private tutors who followed a curriculum that included piano lessons—his first formal contact with music. In September 1914 Michael became a boarder at Brookfield Preparatory School in Swanage, Dorset. In 1918 he won a scholarship to Fettes College, a boarding school in Edinburgh, where he studied the piano, sang in the choir, and began to learn to play the pipe organ. When Michael revealed to his parents in 1920 that he had formed a homosexual relationship with another boy, they removed him to Stamford School in Lincolnshire, where a decade previously Malcolm Sargent had been a pupil. Around this time his father, Henry Tippett decided to live in France, and the house in Wetherden was sold. The 15-year-old Michael and his brother Peter remained at school in England, travelling to France for their holiday.It was an innate sense that he should respond creatively to global events, rather than any natural talent, that led to his studying at the Royal College of Music. His twenties and thirties were given over to compositions, now withdrawn, that he later decided were weakened by lack of originality and a devotion to left-wing politics. Aghast at the Great Depression and the threat of fascism, Tippett initially dedicated much of his time to political endeavours, not least major musical projects formed to boost the morale of unemployed miners in the north of England. He quickly rejected the Stalinist interpretation of Marxism. A break-down of a major love affair and a subsequent period of Jungian therapy coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War, leading Tippett to reject violence of any persuasion in favour of an ardent and absolute pacifism. He registered as a conscientious objector, and his refusal to comply with the terms of his exemption from military service led to his serving two months in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. By the end of the war, he had produced a clutch of powerful works, characterized by imaginative counterpoint and an eclectic list of influences from Beethoven to blues: two string quartets, a symphony, the Concerto for Double String Orchestra, and A Child of Our Time, an oratorio woven around the events of Kristallnacht.

In 1951 Tippett resigned as Director of Music at Morley College, an adult education college in South London, where he had created a music department of historic significance, the choir and orchestra championing and even broadcasting then-neglected figures from the Renaissance and Baroque. The post-war years saw Tippett dedicated to the lushly-orchestrated lyricism of his first mature opera, The Midsummer Marriage, and its satellite works, chief among them his piano concerto, and the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli. Critical reception was either politely perplexed or openly hostile, an attitude only exacerbated by the breakdown of his second symphony at its first performance, in 1958. Undeterred, Tippett reinvented himself musically with his second opera, King Priam (a re-telling of Homer’s Iliad), splintering the orchestra into a jagged mosaic of juxtaposed motifs, alternately harsh and lyrical. Praise of King Priam and the works it gave rise to – The Vision of Saint Augustine and a concerto for orchestra – coincided with a reappraisal of earlier pieces to cement Tippett’s reputation as one of the country’s leading composers. He was knighted in 1966. Operas three and four – The Knot Garden and The Ice Break – were rapturously reviewed, younger audiences thrilling to the septuagenarian. Tippett’s grappling with twentieth-century life in a soundworld that now fizzed with jazz and blues, the orchestra augmented with electric guitars and a drum kit. His commissions became international and lucrative; happy to appear on television chat shows wearing brilliant and eccentric outfits, he was something of a celebrity. In 1979 he was made a Companion of Honour, and four year later was appointed a Member of the Order of Merit. He enjoyed a mainly vigorous old age, reintroducing to his music a lyricism some thought had gone for good: the Triple Concerto; a large-scale setting of Yeats’s “Byzantium”; and a further two symphonies, one culminating with a set of blues songs in dialogue with Beethoven’s Ninth, the other incorporating the pre-recorded sound of human breath. For his ninetieth-birthday celebrations, working with an amanuensis as a result of macular degeneration, he produced a final blaze of instrumental colour in The Rose Lake, a ‘song without words for orchestra’. By his and the century’s seventies he had settled into a lasting relationship with the music writer Meirion Bowen, though continued to live alone in the Wiltshire countryside. He died aged ninety-three, in January 1998; his obituaries proclaimed a composer to rank alongside Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Britten.