Alarm Will Sound - For George Lewis (2021) Hi-Res

Composer and musician Tyshawn Sorey has been described, in a January 2021 feature for the New York Times magazine, as "arresting a figure in contemporary classical and experimental new music as he is in jazz." A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, Sorey has carved out his own territory as an artist and thinker whose range of vision, emotion and visceral power has made him a driving and defining force behind a young Black vanguard in new music.

This pristinely recorded double-disc collaboration with the vaunted chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound documents two unique works — the stately, still For George Lewis (dedicated to the legendary avant garde trombonist and composer) and the thorny, dramatic Autoschediasms (inspired by the real-time improvisational "conductions" of Butch Morris, with a special nod to Anthony Braxton's "language music" system).

Taken together, these performances — part of which were recorded in a video chat during the pandemic — find the composer testing the limits of the ensemble's imagination and concentration, and paint a wide-angle sonic canvas that is by turns taut, trenchant, and profoundly moving.