Ryan Sawyer

Ryan Sawyer is a drummer based in Brooklyn, NY. Drawing on his Texas roots in rock, jazz, conjunto, and zydeco, he uses percussion to create textural conversations, generating complex acoustic layers through both dense and sparse playing.

Born in 1976 in San Antonio, Texas, Ryan started playing drums at 11, learning his craft through an early exposure to not only rock and jazz but also the colloquial conjunto, zydeco, and punk rock musics of his home town. He moved to New York in 1997 to pursue his interest in improvised music. Sawyer keeps returning to texture—the thing that happens when a drum kit becomes a conversation. He is skilled at thwarting expectations, and uses a percussion both aerial and dense, energetic and seething, generating on all the levels of the acoustic spectrum halos and vibrations propagated in multiple wavefronts between the skins and cymbals. He has played alongside Marshall Allen, Boredoms, Thurston Moore, TV On The Radio, Charles Gayle, Nate Wooley, Rhys Chatham among countless others. He also writes and performs for dance and other extra-disciplinary forms, including Anna Sperber's acclaimed ballet Prize, performed in NYC in 2016.