A quarter century on, Pi marks its anniversary with a two-night multi-artist celebration that highlights some of the label’s longest-standing artistic relationships. The celebration brings into focus the throughline that has defined Pi’s catalog since its inception: rigorous compositional thinking bound to improvisational volatility. Night two features a Matt Mitchell New Quartet and the Tyshawn Sorey Trio.

Matt Mitchell will present new music for a new quartet featuring both longtime and new collaborators. Ches Smith has been an integral part of Mitchell’s music for well over a decade, appearing in duo with Mitchell on Fiction and Oblong Aplomb, as well as on Mitchell’s celebrated opus A Pouting Grimace. Kim Cass likewise has been a close collaborator of Mitchell’s for a decade, appearing on A Pouting Grimace, Phalanx Ambassadors, and the monumental 6 album box set of Snark Horse. This evening will be Peter Evans’s inaugural performance of Matt Mitchell’s music. This premiere will draw on conceptual strands of all the aforementioned recordings.

Matt Mitchell New Quartet
Matt Mitchell piano
Kim Cass acoustic bass
Peter Evans trumpet
Ches Smith percussion

Also at the center of Pi’s ethos is Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, whose work dissolves the false binaries between composition and improvisation, notation and intuition. With ten releases as leader or co-leader on the label, Sorey has garnered universal acclaim for his work. Performing with his trio with pianist Aaron Diehl and bassist Harish Raghavan, the music unfolds with tectonic patience and eruptive clarity, asking listeners to recalibrate their sense of time. Their spontaneous, radical deconstruction of “standards” has set a new bar for the jazz piano trio convention.

Tyshawn Sorey Trio
Tyshawn Sorey drums
Aaron Diehl piano
Harish Raghavan bass

Presented by Pi Recordings in partnership with Roulette.

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.

Founded in 2001, Pi Recordings is a New York-based independent record label dedicated to forward-thinking improvised and composed music. The New York Times has called Pi “Small but significant, with a track record that includes some of the most acclaimed releases in jazz…” and by the Wall Street Journal as “a source of bold influence.” Curated by Seth Rosner and Yulun Wang, the imprint was founded to document the works of the living masters of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, including Henry Threadill, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Muhal Richard Abrams. It has gone on to provide a home to maverick iconoclasts and a generation of artists who are intent on reshaping the vocabulary of jazz and improvised music while staying reverential to its roots, building a catalog defined by risk, rigor, and a refusal to stand still.