Tyshawn Sorey

New Jazz is a contemporary subgenre of trap music that emerged from the underground SoundCloud scene. Despite its name, it is distinct from the 'Nu Jazz' of the 1990s. It is characterized by colorful, repetitive synthesizer melodies, often utilizing jazz-influenced 7th and 9th chords, paired with 'wonky' or off-kilter 808 basslines and bouncy, complex trap drum patterns. The sound is often described as psychedelic, playful, and experimental, bridging the gap between the aggression of Rage beats and the melodic sensibilities of Pluggnb.

Conducted improvisation is a live-composition practice in which a conductor shapes collective improvisation in real time using a codified set of gestures, cue cards, and signals. Rather than pre-writing a fixed score, the conductor directs form, texture, dynamics, harmony, and orchestration on the spot, treating the ensemble as an instrument. Emerging from free jazz and experimental music, it bridges improvisers’ spontaneity with the clarity and contour of composed music. Systems such as Butch Morris’s Conduction, John Zorn’s game-piece approach (e.g., Cobra), and Walter Thompson’s Soundpainting offer different yet related languages for controlling entrances/exits, memory, repetition, density, and timbre. The result ranges from chamber-like transparency to big-band intensity, making conducted improvisation a flexible method used by jazz orchestras, experimental classical ensembles, and cross-genre collectives.

Modern Creative is a contemporary jazz umbrella that blends the improvisational daring of avant‑garde and free jazz with post‑bop craft, jazz fusion electricity, and the harmonic/structural ideas of Modern and Contemporary Classical music. In practice it is a semi‑improvisational approach: pre‑composed modules, cue‑based forms, and open sections are interwoven, while grooves and textures can draw from funk, pop, and rock as easily as from swing or rubato abstraction. The result ranges from ethereal, chamber‑like soundscapes to intense, rhythmically intricate ensembles—always prioritizing exploration within a purposeful compositional frame.

Free jazz is a radical branch of jazz that rejects fixed chord progressions, strict meter, and conventional song forms in favor of collective improvisation, textural exploration, and spontaneous interaction. Musicians prioritize timbre, dynamics, and gesture as much as pitch and harmony, often using extended techniques (multiphonics, overblowing, prepared piano) and unconventional sounds. While rooted in the blues and earlier jazz vocabularies, free jazz frees improvisers from pre-set harmonic cycles, allowing lines to unfold over tonal centers, shifting modes, drones, or complete atonality. Rhythm sections may float without a steady pulse, or drive with layered polyrhythms and “energy playing.” The result ranges from contemplative soundscapes to cathartic, high-intensity eruptions. Culturally, the genre intersected with the civil rights era and broader avant-garde movements, emphasizing autonomy, community, and new possibilities for musical expression.

Experimental music is an umbrella term for practices that prioritize exploration, process, and discovery over adherence to established genre norms. It embraces new sound sources, nonstandard tuning systems, indeterminacy and chance operations, graphic and open-form scores, extended techniques, and technology-led sound design (tape, electronics, computers, and live processing). Rather than a single style, it is a methodology and ethos: testing hypotheses about sound, structure, and performance, often blurring boundaries between composition, improvisation, sound art, and performance art. Listeners can expect unfamiliar timbres, unusual forms, and an emphasis on how music is made as much as the resulting sound.

Contemporary classical is the broad field of Western art music created after World War II. It embraces an array of aesthetics—from serialism and indeterminacy to minimalism, spectralism, electroacoustic practices, and post‑tonal lyricism—while retaining a concern for notated composition and timbral innovation. Unlike the unified styles of earlier eras, contemporary classical is pluralistic. Composers freely mix acoustic and electronic sound, expand instrumental techniques, adopt non‑Western tuning and rhythm, and explore new forms, from process-based structures to open and graphic scores. The result is a music that can be rigorously complex or radically simple, technologically experimental or intimately acoustic, yet consistently focused on extending how musical time, timbre, and form can be shaped.