Dexter Story announces T'som, his second album for Soundway
The L.A. bandleader and ethnomusicologist returns to Soundway on October 30, following 2015's Wondem.
BY JOLT Staff · Sep 21 2026 · 1 min readDexter Story has announced T'som, his second album for Soundway Records, out October 30. The news landed September 21 in a Bandcamp Daily Big Ups feature, where Story talked through the record and the musical history behind it.
The title comes from Northeast Africa. Story says T'som names the practice of abstention in the Afro-Semitic languages Tigrinya and Amharic. It follows Wondem, his first record for the London label, released in 2015.
Story grew up in South Central L.A. His father was a jazz head, he says, and the bedroom was next to the music room where his father's friends played big band and bebop. Dexter Gordon is his namesake. In the Bay Area he played with John Handy and Pharoah Sanders and studied composition during his years at UC Berkeley before earning a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology.
From those years came a working method. Immersed in the communities he studied, Story says, "Music is not inserted into the community. Music creates the community." An Apple Music page lists the release as Dexter Story's T'som on October 30, 2026.
