Connor Sobieri Could Not Touch the Saxophone for Six Months

Connor Sobieri, a 23-year-old alto saxophonist based in New York, has just released “Lost Ones,” the first track off his debut album First Steps, arriving October 21. The song, he says, is about the feeling of the rug being pulled out from under you. A few months out of NYU, he was writing about the drop from structured college life into everyday uncertainty.

There’s another story underneath it. Sobieri lives with Crohn’s disease. Some of the album’s tracks were written in 2022, after a medical procedure that left him hospitalized and unable to play saxophone for six months — a genuinely dangerous stretch that put the instrument simply out of reach. He composed instead.

First Steps took five years to write, and each track marks a different period: turning points, medical trauma, moments of triumph. Sobieri calls his sound “existential jazz-rock” — Charlie Parker and John Coltrane meeting the rock, R&B and hip-hop that shaped his childhood.

The band spent two years growing the material live, based out of the New York club NuBlu. It was finally recorded in two days at Firehouse 12 in New Haven. What was written on paper turned into something else on stage — by the time it reached the studio, the band’s chemistry had already rewritten it.

Ten percent of the proceeds from a limited 180-gram vinyl pressing go to the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. Sobieri graduated from NYU with a degree in jazz studies last May; he’s already shared stages with Melissa Aldana and Linda May Han Oh.