Tectonics 2023 Artist Profile
Cory Smythe
Pianist Cory Smythe has worked closely with pioneering artists in new, improvisatory, and classical music, including multi-instrumentalist-composer Tyshawn Sorey, violinist Hilary Hahn, and trans-disciplinary composers from Anthony Braxton to Zosha Di Castri. His own music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader). Smythe has been featured at the Newport Jazz, Wiener Festwochen, and Mostly Mozart festivals. He has received commissions from Milwaukee’s Present Music, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which he is a longtime member. Smythe received a Grammy award for his work with Ms. Hahn and a 2022 Herb Alpert Award in music.
'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes'
In this set of improvisations on “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” — or some semblance of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”: its swirling, spiraling vocality, its portrayal of deceit and disappearance, its fluidic memorial to acrid, heartbreaking loss -- I'm attempting to add to (and undermine) the piano’s resources of sound with extensions of concealed computerized origin. The piano here, like the love affair lamented in the Kern/Harbach standard, isn't quite what it seems.
