Tyshawn Sorey
ALLOY
Purely by chance, we’ve entered a moment of inspired productivity for drummer-composer-bandleaders grounded more or less in jazz. Tyshawn Sorey fits that category while proving its exception: “Alloy,” his elegant and shadowy new album, due out on Pi Recordings on Tuesday, contains long stretches of through-composed music, nodding to masters as varied as Morton Feldman, Claude Debussy and Muhal Richard Abrams. The album features a trio with the pianist Cory Smythe and the bassist Christopher Tordini, but Mr. Sorey spends much of his time as a silent partner. Stick with the softly ravishing piano piece “A Love Song,” which sprawls to a half-hour, and you’ll hear some light cymbal action, some rustling brushwork and, finally, startlingly, a slow-drag beat. “Movement,” which runs nearly as long, features more trio interplay, but as applied to the mechanics of a somber art song. Mr. Smythe, luxuriously at home in a new-music vein, plays with depth and sensitivity throughout, as does Mr. Tordini. As for Mr. Sorey, his strategies of silence are so effective that it almost feels out of place when, on “Template,” he kicks into a whipsaw drum-and-bass groove.
Bobby Previte
TERMINALS
The downtown scene, as a period and a construct, never dissipated for Bobby Previte, who still crosses genres and disciplines with a perky, transgressive panache. He conceived of “Terminals,” a suite of concertos for So Percussion and five improvisers, after being struck by the similarity between airport terminal maps and stage diagrams of drum equipment. One point of comparison might be “Music for Airports” by Brian Eno, another schematic creation, but there’s too much forward motion to peg this as ambient music, starting with Zeena Parkins’s itchy harp glissandi. The other soloists are Greg Osby on alto saxophone, Nels Cline on electric guitar and effects, John Medeski on organ and Mr. Previte himself on drums. (His track, though, only appears in the album’s digital formats, available on Tuesday through Cantaloupe Music; a double LP is due out on Nov. 18.) True to form, Mr. Previte finds humor in juxtaposition, and works wonders with shifting texture. And as in any bustling concourse, there’s a constant convergence of complex infrastructure and uncharted human movement.
Antonio Sánchez
BIRDMAN
Set aside, for a moment, the Oscar buzz around “Birdman,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new film starring Michael Keaton. Let’s talk about the soundtrack, accurately billed as an “original drum score” by Antonio Sánchez, and recently released on the Milan label. Mr. Sánchez is best known around the world for his routine heroics with the guitarist Pat Metheny; he devised this series of beats and knockabout cadenzas in response to skeletal input from Mr. Iñárritu, who saw in the rhythms a manifestation of his character’s psyche. Stark but never static, these performances call up a few precursors, notably Max Roach’s work for solo drum set. It’s easy to imagine a producer like DJ Quik finding some usable material here, though the recording has already served an unsurpassable function on screen. Speaking of which, among the awards that “Birdman” has already won is one for best score, at the Venice Film Festival.
Clarence Penn
& Penn Station
MONK: THE LOST FILES
Clarence Penn, like Antonio Sánchez, is a jazz drummer of exuberant poise, and on his own albums, he has addressed music both original and canonical. “Monk: The Lost Files” (Origin Records), a Thelonious Monk tribute out this week, clearly belongs to the second category. But Mr. Penn, leading a quartet with the saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, the pianist Donald Vega and the bassist Yasushi Nakamura, takes pains to retrofit Monk’s tunes with new flourishes: stutter-step accents, gospel harmonies, hip-hop swagger. He and his band can also swing with loose authority, and the lone original — “Solato’s Blues,” a version of which appeared on Mr. Penn’s previous album — comes girded with a gruffness and angularity well suited to the muse at hand.
Jim Black
ACTUALITY
Two years ago, with “Somatic,” a promising release on Winter & Winter, Jim Black introduced his acoustic trio with the pianist Elias Stemeseder and the bassist Thomas Morgan. “Actuality,” on the same label, shows a more relaxed band, one surer of itself. Mr. Black is a brilliant drummer who can seem restless even in deep focus, and he has tailored his writing to the trio’s rubbery strengths; “This Is Our Marketing” pairs cyclical harmonic intrigue with a prickly, halting cadence, while “Overhanging” opens as a minor-key indie-rock churner, swerves into unstructured improvisation and ends up as a sort of nocturne. There’s really no way to assess this music without noting its debt to the Bad Plus, which pioneered both the temperament and the tactics at play. Put it this way, then: Mr. Black has taken a strong idea and run his own way with it.
Jason Marsalis
Vibes Quartet
THE 21ST CENTURY TRAD BAND
The shift from drums to vibraphone began quietly for Jason Marsalis, about 15 years ago. By now, it’s complete; “The 21st Century Trad Band” (Basin Street Records) is the second album fully to feature his Vibes Quartet, an agile, swinging unit with the pianist Austin Johnson, the bassist Will Goble and the drummer Dave Potter. The title indicates Mr. Marsalis’s cheeky self-awareness as a New Orleans jazz scion, but it also reflects the genuine in-betweenness of this music, as much on a buoyant funk tune like “Ratio Man” as a clackety saunter like “The Man With Two Left Feet.” There’s a spine of traditionalism here, to be sure, but Mr. Marsalis, leading with flair, keeps its gaze pointed forward.