Tyshawn Sorey wins 2024 Pulitzer Prize in music for ‘Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith)’ (NPR)

Last year, the resolutely nonconformist composer, educator and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music — a rare honor in itself, and a confirmation of the esteem with which his work is held. But that doesn’t mean he had any expectations for this year’s award.

“I’m still sitting here shocked beyond belief,” he told NPR Music on Monday afternoon, about an hour after his composition Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith) was announced as the Pulitzer winner for 2024. “I had no idea that this was even being considered.”

Sorey, 43, is a feverishly prolific creative force who maintains overlapping profiles in the realms of both improvisational music (“jazz,” though he doesn’t use the term) and classical new music. In that sense he carries on a tradition best exemplified by musicians like Wadada Leo Smith, a visionary trumpeter and composer whose album Ten Freedom Summers was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2013. Smith, like Sorey’s academic mentor George Lewis, is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which has always prioritized original music made on its own terms, separate from concerns about genre or commercial appeal.—Nate Chinen

Click here to read complete article from NPR.

Photo by John Rogers.