Tyshawn Sorey is born July 8, 1980, in Newark, New Jersey, and grows up there, attending Newark Arts High School. As a teenager he takes part in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center's Jazz for Teens program and is awarded a Star-Ledger Scholarship. He enrolls at William Paterson University as a classical trombone major, transfers to jazz drumming, and completes a B.Music in jazz studies and performance in 2004.

Sorey spends the mid-2000s establishing himself as a first-call New York drummer. He plays on pianist Vijay Iyer's Blood Sutra (2003, Artists House) and becomes a member of saxophonist Steve Lehman's working groups, recording Demian as Posthuman (2005), On Meaning (2007), and Travail, Transformation, and Flow (2009), all for Pi Recordings. He also co-forms Fieldwork, a collectively run trio with Iyer and Lehman, documented on Door (2008, Pi Recordings), for which Sorey contributes several compositions alongside his drumming. His own recording career as a leader opens with That/Not (2007, Firehouse 12 Records), a two-disc set recorded in New Haven with trombonist Ben Gerstein, pianist Cory Smythe, and bassist Thomas Morgan, ranging from a piece for trombone quartet to a 43-minute solo piano work; a digital reissue later adds five further pieces from the same sessions. Koan follows in 2009 on 482 Music, a trio recording with guitarist Todd Neufeld and Thomas Morgan that is reviewed favorably by All About Jazz and the BBC and named to NPR's top ten jazz records of the year.

In 2009 Sorey enters a master's program at Wesleyan University to study composition with Anthony Braxton, completing the degree in 2011 and that same year playing percussion on Braxton's large-scale opera recording Trillium E. During this period he also co-leads Paradoxical Frog, a collaborative trio with pianist Kris Davis and saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, releasing Paradoxical Frog (2010) and Union (2012) on Clean Feed, and records three albums as an equal member of a trio with bassist/violinist Henry Grimes and saxophonist Roberto Pettinato, joined on two of the three by pianist Dave Burrell: My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains (2011), Purity (2012), and Same Egg (2013). He enters Columbia University's doctoral program in composition in the fall of 2011, the same season his leader date Oblique - I (Pi Recordings) is released, featuring Todd Neufeld, bassist Christopher Tordini, and pianist John Escreet. Across his six years of doctoral study he works closely with composers George E. Lewis and Fred Lerdahl, and begins a trio with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Christopher Tordini that produces Alloy (2014, Pi Recordings), recorded at Firehouse 12 in New Haven.

That trio expands to include violinist Fung Chern Hwei, violist Kyle Armbrust, and cellist Rubin Kodheli for The Inner Spectrum of Variables (2016, Pi Recordings), which the Chicago Reader calls "one of the year's most arresting and ambitious recordings," The Nation names to its ten best albums of 2016, and which Nextbop later ranks the best jazz album of the decade. Sorey returns to the trio format for Verisimilitude (2017, Pi Recordings), which places third in both the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll and The New York Times' best jazz albums list for the year. He completes his Doctor of Musical Arts at Columbia in 2017; his dissertation centers on his song cycle Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine, devoted to Josephine Baker, which he performs in 2019 on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with soprano Julia Bullock and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble. He is named a MacArthur Fellow in the fall of 2017 and takes a post as Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan, where he founds the university's Ensemble for New Music.

In 2018 Sorey premieres Cycles of My Being, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Carnegie Hall for tenor Lawrence Brownlee with poetry by Terrance Hayes, addressing what it means to be a Black man in America; it is made into a film with Opera Philadelphia in 2020. The same year he releases Pillars (Firehouse 12 Records), a three-disc large-ensemble work on which he plays drums, percussion, trombone, and the Tibetan dungchen horn and conducts a group including bassists Mark Helias, Zach Rowden, and Carl Testa, guitarist Joe Morris, guitarist Todd Neufeld, trombonist Ben Gerstein, and trumpeter Stephen Haynes. In 2019 he is named Composer in Residence for the Seattle Symphony and Opera Philadelphia and releases The Adornment of Time (Pi Recordings), a duo recording made live with pianist Marilyn Crispell. In March 2020 he self-releases the sextet album Unfiltered, featuring saxophonists Nathan Reising and Morgan Guerin, pianist Lex Korten, vibraphonist Sasha Berliner, and bassist Nick Dunston, and that fall joins the University of Pennsylvania faculty as Presidential Assistant Professor of Music. A New York Times critic later calls him 2020's "composer of the year" for a wave of pandemic-era premieres cast in unconventional concerto form. Through these years Sorey also works regularly with the new-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, including the commissioned sinfonietta piece For George Lewis (premiered 2019 at Washington University in St. Louis) and several "autoschediasms," spontaneous group compositions he leads in real time, released together as an album in 2021.

Sorey's recent work moves fluidly between his jazz and concert-music careers. He joins pianist Vijay Iyer's trio, with bassist Linda May Han Oh, for Uneasy (2021, ECM) and Compassion (2024, ECM), having already recorded with Iyer's sextet on Far From Over (2017, ECM). In 2022 he premieres Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), commissioned for the 50th anniversary of Houston's Rothko Chapel and later performed at the Park Avenue Armory in New York; the recording is issued in 2026 on Dacamera Editions. The same year he launches a piano trio with Aaron Diehl and bassist Matt Brewer, documented on the self-released Mesmerism (2022) and expanded to a quartet with alto saxophonist Greg Osby on The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism (2022, Pi Recordings); the trio continues on Continuing (2023, Pi Recordings) and, with bassist Harish Raghavan succeeding Brewer, The Susceptible Now (2024, Pi Recordings). He also begins a duo with percussionist Adam Rudolph, releasing the improvised Archaisms I (2023) and, expanded with three additional percussionists, Archaisms II (2024). Sorey receives the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his composition Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith). His 2026 releases include Members... Don't! (Pi Recordings), a quintet recording centered on a reworking of drummer Max Roach's 1968 civil-rights-era piece "Members, Don't Git Weary," and Red Sulphur, a duo recorded live at London's Cafe Oto with British pianist Pat Thomas. He continues to perform and record prolifically while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sorey resists categorizing his own music by genre, arguing in interviews and in his doctoral thesis that improvisation and composition are not mutually exclusive practices. He describes his own aesthetic less in terms of fusing traditions than of moving between them: rather than blending jazz, free improvisation, and notated concert music into a single hybrid style, he treats each as a distinct model he can occupy and leave at will, often within the same piece. That mobility runs from the AACM-descended lineage of his teacher Anthony Braxton and collaborators Muhal Richard Abrams and George E. Lewis, through an expansive, Elvin Jones-indebted approach to the drum kit that can stretch a single pulse across enormous spans of time, to the hushed, Morton Feldman-like slowness of large-ensemble works like Monochromatic Light (Afterlife). He is also a genuine multi-instrumentalist rather than a drummer who occasionally doubles, playing trombone (his original instrument) and piano within his own compositions on records including That/Not and Pillars. Critics and prize committees have recognized both halves of his career on their own terms rather than as a novelty: The New Yorker placed him on its "Notable Performances and Recordings" list four consecutive years (2017 through 2020), The New York Times called him 2020's "composer of the year," and he holds the rare distinction of being simultaneously one of contemporary jazz's most in-demand drummers, through long tenures with Vijay Iyer and Steve Lehman, and a first-rank concert composer, honored with a MacArthur Fellowship (2017) and the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Music.