Ryan Clackner & Tyshawn Sorey

Since their time in the jazz program at New Jersey’s William Paterson University, not far from the fecund scene of New York, former bandmates Tyshawn Sorey and Ryan Clackner have taken very different paths into music careers. After switching from trombone to drums at school, Sorey has steadily emerged as one of the most remarkable players and composers of his generation. His pieces combine the flexibility and exploration of free jazz with the structural considerations of modern composition, an approach that has earned him a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. Clackner, meanwhile, left the draw of New York for Nashville, working hard-living stints in Southern rock and country bands before finally finding a continually morphing hybrid of black metal, jazz ideas, and country melancholia. Now a Knoxville resident, Clackner has built an international reputation as an inventive and enterprising bandleader, releasing strings of absorbing albums on his Moonlight Cypress Archetypes imprint.

Clackner hasn’t completely strayed from jazz; it is audible in the slanted progressions and twisting meters of his metal bands, like Primeval Well and Crestfallen Dusk. His former teacher Jason Moran was even an inspirational lodestar for his chimerical approach. Two decades ago, Clackner was in one of Sorey’s very early bands, Oblique, but they have not played together in the intervening years. At Big Ears 2026, they will meet again onstage for an entirely improvised set, leading one another into the spaces they’ve found since school and, together, setting out for new ones.