Tyshawn Sorey and Pat Thomas
St Luke’s Church, Old Street, London
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Tyshawn Sorey
Members…don’t!
(Pi Recordings)
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THE origins of jazz in New Orleans fused both sacred and secular music in a struggle for justice against Jim Crow racism. So, being well-used to savouring the open, often boozy stand-up ambiance of most London jazz venues, it was a change for me to sit in the nave of a resonating City church to hear the improvising genius of two musicians from each side of the Atlantic.

Playing in St Luke’s Church, Old Street (now a rehearsal space for the London Symphony Orchestra) were the drummer, multi-instrumental opera composer and music professor from Newark, New Jersey, Tyshawn Sorey, and the free pianist from Oxford with his roots in Antigua, Pat Thomas. It was an unusual and compelling tryst: an American polymath and British Muslim improvising together in an 18th-century Hawksmoor church, with its sublime whitestone spire.

Thomas’s opening volleys of notes sounded like church chimes, with Sorey’s clashing of cymbals the bells of justice as the acoustic echoes bounced off the walls of redbrick and stone. The sustained power of the duo’s rhythmic upsurge was unified and profound. Tyshawn’s mallets struck out like the pounding heartbeat of the London earth somewhere beneath these church floors, and he made his snares whine for freedom as his drumsticks coursed and scratched around their rims.

Pat’s lightning black hands and pummelling fingers ran up and down his keys and his lonesome chimes rang out like the cries of the wretched of the earth, for Fanon was there with them, another Caribbean trio-mate urging their message on: One music! One struggle! One people!

As I walked out, below the tall trees in the churchyard and looked up at the mighty spire, I could only marvel at the syncretic power of the music I had just heard — in the transported words of a Christian poetic genius — and its urge to make every single venue an everywhere.

Get hold of Tyshawn’s new sextet album on Pi Recordings, evocatively titled Members… Don’t!. It’s a re-working, in the now times of Trump, Musk and Ice, Farage and Yaxley-Lennon, of Max Roach’s 1968 album, Members Don’t Get Weary, the great drummer’s fanfare to galvanise resistance and mobilise fresh organisation and action following the murder of Martin Luther King and the attacks on the Poor People’s Campaign and the Civil Rights Movement… On both sides of the Atlantic, it is music as a 2026 call to action.