Drummer, composer, and arranger Tyshawn Sorey has put together a top-shelf quintet for a blistering, intense, live double-LP reimagining of Max Roach’s landmark Members, Don’t Git Weary (Atlantic, 1968), entitled Members…Don’t! (Pi, 2026). Recorded at the end of a four-night engagement at New York’s Jazz Gallery, the group comprises of Adam O’Farrill on trumpet/electronics, Mark Shim on tenor saxophone, Lex Korten on piano, and Tyrone Allen on bass alongside the leader. Vocalist Fay Victor joins for the closing title track.
Full appreciation of the album is assisted by first understanding the original within its historical and social context. Recorded the same year as assassinations – of Robert R. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., – and fires in Watts, Detroit, and other cities – Roach’s album emerged in a time of unparalleled social unrest. Against this backdrop, music was also in a season of change. Motown ruled the radio waves. Miles was turning his eye towards the electric, releasing his last fully acoustic album (Nefertiti (Columbia, 1968). Though John Coltrane had passed less than a year earlier, the avant-garde was in full bloom. That summer, three standout albums were recorded within the span of a week – Members, Gary Bartz’s iconic Another Earth (Milestone, 1969), and Charles Tolliver’s Paper Man (Black Lion, 1971). Both Bartz and Tolliver were also on Members, joined by pianist Stanley Cowell, bassist Jymie Merritt, and vocalist Andy Bey. Roach, a major figure in Civil Rights long ago established himself as a premier drummer of the bebop era. His work with people like Bird naturally flowed into some of his early 60s Black Power emphasizing albums like his better known We Insist! (Candid, 1961) and Speak, Brother, Speak! (Fantasy, 1962). But by Members, Don’t Git Weary, he developed well beyond bop and post-bop language and towards his own experimentations with funk, electric instrumentation, and adopting the modal vamps of Trane and McCoy Tyner.
Sorey’s Members… Don’t! facially builds off of this album as it draws direct lines to today’s cultural and political realities. Anyone familiar with Sorey’s work, however, should know better than to expect a rehash of what came before. Instead, he changes the original album’s sequencing and extends all tracks, with “Equipoise” even split into two parts. But in another sense, Sorey also emphasizes natural acoustics more than Roach’s work. While O’Farrill’s effects-enhanced trumpet, the ensemble as a whole mostly eschews electronics. Where Cowell mostly expressed himself on the electric piano and Merritt on electric bass, Korten plays acoustic piano and Allen an unmodified upright.
Sorey’s arrangement of Cowell’s “Abtrutions” runs for thirteen minutes, opening in modal form with Korten’s chords and O’Farrill and Shim’s horns. The rhythms are emphatic, angry, defiant. A reasonable response to the social forces surrounding them. The piece, like most of the album, adopts a very hard edge, occasionally discordant. Yet, careful listening reveals quotes of Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance,” that are more prominent than in the original. There are also elongated melancholic sections, as authored mostly by O’Farrill’s trumpet. “Effi,” another Cowell piece, runs for a relentlessly intense eighteen minutes as a whirling, circular version of a waltz with horns dancing around the pentatonic scale. Korten launches the first rambling, breathtaking solo, backed by Allen and Sorey’s immense work on the drum kit. O’Farrill steps up, breathing fire, as he further invigorates the quintet. A brief pause cues up Shim, who fiercely trades lines with O’Farrill before launching into a low-register fury. The finale is an aptly gloriously volcanic eruption, though an audible audience would have brought it even more gravitas.
“Absolutions,” originally written by Merritt, a mainstay in the bands of Art Blakey and Roach, serves as a feature for Korten and Shim. While Roach’s original version bore similarities to Miles’ Second Great Quintet’s work on Miles in the Sky (Columbia, 1968) and Filles de Kilimanjaro (Columbia, 1968), recorded the same year, Sorey’s arrangement is mostly a flat-out, heated blowing session. “Equipoise,” arguably Cowell’s best-known composition, is full of modal figures and a lyricism that stands apart from these other pieces. Yet, Sorey’s ensemble navigates their complex chord structure with abandon, as Korten supports with a percussive intensity. Around the three-minute mark, the piece enters calmer waters, centered around quasi-minimalist repetitive, dense piano chords. “Part 2″ is over twice as long, with horns holding sway whether in unison, contrapuntal, or solo. Here, the intensity undulates, making way for Allen’s declarative bass solo, and a lighter, though increasingly intense turn from Korten that is sandwiched between the heady, spicy harmonics of the horns. Brilliant!
Bartz’s “Libra,” finds Shim in beast mode, leaving no quarter to which O’Farrill follows accordingly. “Members, Don’t Git Weary,” credited to Roach, incorporates an older spiritual. The opening on both roach’s and Sorey’s versions evoke the spiritual yearning one finds in the work of Coltrane. Fay Victor enters quietly but builds emotionally, as if leading a church congregation in a rousing prayer with her glass-shattering vocals, to which the horns respond in kind, breaking into a deceptively seemingly barely controlled, roof-raising chaos.
Members… Don’t! is a vital call for perseverance in the fight for justice. It will thrill you with full-on bliss for ninety minutes. It may take days to fully recover from the album’s monumental performance.
‘Members… Don’t!’ is out now on Pi Recordings. It can be purchased on Bandcamp.
