Tyshawn Sorey Rebuilds a Max Roach Landmark on Its Own Unsettled Terms

Tyshawn Sorey’s new recording doesn’t revere history so much as it argues with it. Members … Don’t!, captured over four nights at The Jazz Gallery in New York, takes Max Roach’s 1968 album Members, Don’t Git Weary and pulls it into a jagged 21st-century present. At over 90 minutes, the performance is as demanding as it is immersive.

Roach’s original was a post-bop suite threaded with politics—a direct response to the assassinations and Black liberation struggles of its era. Sorey, leading a quintet of razor-sharp improvisers, doesn’t simply update the compositions by Stanley Cowell, Gary Bartz, and Jymie Merritt. He dismantles them. Melodies surface only in fragments, peeking around long stretches of collective improvisation where form is in constant flux.

The band is exceptional: Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, Mark Shim on tenor saxophone, pianist Lex Korten, and bassist Tyrone Allen II join Sorey’s drums. Their playing is restless, often stripping away the swinging pulse and soul-jazz comforts Roach employed. Where the original “Abstrusions” hit with horn drama and a bluesy groove, Sorey’s version leaves you disoriented, searching for footing. The tension is the point.

Vocalist Fay Victor appears only at the close, on the title track, and her presence shifts the gravity. She delivers the spiritual-rooted lyric as a statement, not a balm. The music stays unsettling, a mirror to current politics rather than a refuge from them. Sorey’s reinvention doesn’t ask to be liked. It asks to be felt, precisely as friction.