SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER/FALL, 2017
VOLUME FOUR NUMBER THREE
ESPERANZA SPALDING
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
JAZZMEIA HORN
(August 12-18)
ROY HAYNES
(August 19-25)
MCCOY TYNER
(August 26-September 1)
AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE
(September 2-8)
AARON DIEHL
(September 9-15)
CECILE MCLORIN SALVANT
(September 16-22)
REGGIE WORKMAN
(September 23-29)
ANDREW CYRILLE
(September 30-October 6)
BARRY HARRIS
BARRY HARRIS
(October 7-13)
MARQUIS HILL
(October 14-20)
HERBIE NICHOLS
(October 21-27)
GREG OSBY
Andrew Cyrille
(b. November 10, 1939)
Artist Biography by Chris Kelsey
Andrew Cyrille is perhaps the preeminent free-jazz percussionist of the 1980s and '90s. Few free-jazz drummers play with a tenth of Cyrille's grace and authority. His energy is unflagging, his power absolute, tempered only by an ever-present sense of propriety. Cyrille is at his best in an utterly free context, as on his encounters with the ambidextrous pianist Borah Bergman, where his serrated rhythms and variable textures are given maximum latitude. Cyrille began playing drums in a drum and bugle corps at the age of 11. At 15, he played in a trio with guitarist Eric Gale. For a period in his teens, Cyrille studied chemistry before enrolling in Juilliard School of Music in 1958. In the late '50s and early '60s, he worked with such mainstream jazzers as Mary Lou Williams, Roland Hanna, Roland Kirk, Coleman Hawkins, and Junior Mance. He recorded with Hawkins, as well as tenor saxophonist Bill Barron, for the Savoy label. Cyrille succeeded Sunny Murray as Cecil Taylor's drummer in 1964. He stayed with the pianist until 1975, during which time he played on many of Taylor's classic albums. During that period he played with a good many other top players, including Marion Brown, Grachan Moncur III and Jimmy Giuffre. He also served for a time as artist in residence at Antioch College and recorded a solo percussion album, 1969's What About?, on BYG. Cyrille, Rashied Ali, and Milford Graves collaborated on a series of mid-'70s concerts entitled "Dialogue of the Drums." Beginning in 1975 and lasting into the '80s, Cyrille led his own group, called Maono, which included the tenor saxophonist David S. Ware, trumpeter Ted Daniel, pianist Sonelius Smith, and at various times bassists Lisle Atkinson and Nick DiGeronimo. During this time Cyrille also played with the Group, a band that included the violinist Billy Bang, bassist Sirone, altoist Brown, and trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah. With Graves, Don Moye, and Kenny Clarke, Cyrille recorded the all-percussion album Pieces of Time for Soul Note in 1983. When not leading his own bands, he also worked ubiquitously as a sideman with, among others, John Carter, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Jimmy Lyons. Cyrille continued as a leading player into the late '90s, recording fairly prolifically for Black Saint/Soul Note, FMP, and DIW.
Andrew Cyrille
Andrew Cyrille was born in Brooklyn, NY. As well as studying privately, he attended the Juilliard and Hartnett schools of music. He has performed with Jazz artists ranging from Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet and Mary Lou Williams to Kenny Dorham, Muhal Richard Abrams, Horace Tapscott, John Carter,Mal Waldron and David Murray. In 1964 he formed and association with pianist Cecil Taylor that would last for 11 years. He played drums for many notable dancer-choreogrphers from the mid to late 1960’s.
He was artist-residence and teacher at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio from 1971 to 1973. Cyrille has also taught at the Graham Windham Home for Children in New York. He is currently a faculty member at the New School University (formally The New School for Social Research) in New York City. His sterling work has earned him a number of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer, including a commission to create a new work for the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company in 1990. In 1999, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition.
Starting in 1969, Cyrille began to organize the first of several percussion groups, including Dialogue of the Drums, Pieces of Time, and Weights and Measures. Some of the distinguished artists who played in these groups were Kenny Clark, Milford Graves, Famoudou Don Moye, Michael Carvin and Obo Addy. Starting in 1988 through the present time, he has toured and performed here and abroad with the renown Russian percussionist, Vladimir Tarasov.
In 1975,Cyrille formed a band called Maono (feelings) featuring various instrumental voices determined by his compositions. He is a member of Trio 3 featuring alto saxophonist, Oliver Lake and bassist, Reggie Workman. Also from time to time,he leads another group called Haitian Fascination, playing music inspired by the musical tradition from Haiti. Within the past several years, he has been collaborating and working with musicians such as saxophonist, Archie Shepp, trombonist, Roswell Rudd, trumpeter, Dave Douglas, bassists, Henry Grimes andWilliam Parker, pianists Dave Burrell and Marilyn Crispell, and vibraphonist, Karl Berger. He continues to record and perform with duo, trio, quartet, quintet and big band formations.
AAJ CD Review of Open Ideas
He used very soft rubber-tipped mallets, so you could hear him as predominantly as necessary on recordings, but it was hard to hear him in an acoustic setting. A lot of the other vibes players, like Milt Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo and Terry Gibbs, played with much harder mallet heads. Walt would also cut the stems so they weren’t full-length mallets. That was the sound he wanted to get, and it also helped him with speed; he was one of the fastest vibists I ever heard.
It’s the same as doing a duet with a piano player, a drummer or a trumpet player. Milford Graves did one with David Murray, Real Deal. I did two duo recordings with Jimmy Lyons in the ’80s, Something in Return and Burnt Offering, and then I did another one with Greg Osby, Low Blue Flame. I never recorded anything with Frank Wright, except some stuff I had done in the ’80s at Soundscape, Verna Gillis’ place. I did a duet with Henry Threadgill, and a concert with David Murray in Canada, also with trombonist Craig Harris.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/andrew-cyrille-bringer-of-forms-by-aaj-staff.php?pg=2
Andrew Cyrille: Bringer of Forms
by AAJ STAFF
May 12, 2003
"...I realized that we were doing something that was just a little bit different from what had been going on traditionally, but I always kept in mind that I wanted to make it an evolution of the tradition."
—Andrew Cyrille
This article was submitted on behalf of Hank Shteamer.
Percussionist Andrew Cyrille is as self-assured an artist as one is likely to encounter. "[Art is] all about trying to bring a form to life," he explains, "or give life to a form." Much of Cyrille's best work falls in the category of the former. For years, he has specialized in lending a sense of order to the work of players like Cecil Taylor, whose torrential flow of musical information can seem daunting, if not impenetrable. Listening to Cyrille play, one hears a very grounded force, yet one that constantly vibrates in tune with the life around it.
Cyrille is a creator in his own right as well. Along with his peers, explorers like Sunny Murray, Milford Graves , and Rashied Ali , Cyrille developed a new form of jazz percussion that freed itself from the constraint of meter and paved the way for the advancement of the avant-garde musics of Taylor, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and others. A gifted educator with an awesome knowledge of the jazz tradition and its roots, Cyrille views his school of drummers not as iconoclasts, but as extenders of the language of jazz. His insight has allowed him to document himself and his peers in unique ways and to provide a holistic curriculum for his students.
As an innovator, documentor, and educator, Cyrille has always remained modest, adapting his expertise to the project at hand. This modesty may account for his limited recognition in the mainstream jazz community. Circa 2003, Andrew Cyrille continues to search for unique approaches not only to music-making, but also to making a living.
Cyrille was always a restless experimenter. He describes his early impulses to alter the conventional rhythms of jazz: "When I was with Mary Lou Williams [in the early ‘60s], I used to tell her that I'd like to find another way of playing the ride [cymbal], and she said, 'Well, if you do, you're not going to find anybody to work with.'"
Fortunately, Cyrille was able to find associates whose music accommodated, if not demanded, a freer style. "The person who allowed me to bring that idea, that concept [of ametrical drumming] to fruition was Cecil Taylor," he reveals. "Working with Cecil, that was what we did! If I wanted to play some stuff in meter with him, I could have. I think on occasion I did, but most of the time it was outside meter."
Cyrille was quick to recognize that he was not alone in his desire to rethink the role of the drum set in jazz. Here, he describes his various collaborations with his drummer peers: "I heard Sunny Murray playing free meter with Cecil Taylor, Milford [Graves] playing ametrically with [multi-reedist] Giuseppi Logan, and then of course too, I heard Rashied Ali playing with Coltrane on Interstellar Space. So around that time, I got the idea that I wanted to document us as a generation of drummers, and one of the best ways to do that was to have a drum choir."
"I remember Milford and I had gotten together to play, and then we decided that we wanted to expand the duet; so we got Rashied, and we called it "Dialogue of the Drums". Then in the early '80s, I thought of the idea of trying to - I hate to use the word 'legitimize', but at least show the evolution of our concept of drumming as it related to bebop, and I asked Kenny Clarke to do something with me and Milford and [Art Ensemble of Chicago drummer] Famoudou Don Moye. (This quartet recorded Pieces of Time for Soul Note records in 1983.) So the collaborations started once I realized that we were doing something that was just a little bit different from what had been going on traditionally, but I always kept in mind that I wanted to make it an evolution of the tradition."
In addition to having a remarkably deep understanding of the tradition of jazz drumming, Cyrille understands the various cultural roots that underlie it. He has released numerous records with African themes, such as Nuba (1979, Soul Note) and Ode to the Living Tree (1994, Evidence), the first jazz session ever recorded in Senegal, and he is able to trace a clear line between the rhythms of jazz and traditional African drumming. "I hear a lot of African music, and I hear something similar to the ride cymbal beat, 'dang, dinga-dang, dinga-dang,'" he notes. "Most of the jazz compositions that we know and love are based on that ride beat and all kinds of variations on it.
"You get the ride beat, and then you start playing certain things with the left hand on the snare drums, and you begin syncopating certain things with the bass drum, and the sock cymbal is involved. So, to me, it's almost like a choir of drummers each playing a different instrument and a different rhythm but all coming together in an ensemble. So when you put that kind of feeling and projection together with a lot of European information - in terms of rudiments, sticking, march beats played with a certain feeling - you get what we know as jazz and jazz drumming."
Cyrille views knowledge of the jazz tradition as a key to self-discovery. "I'm more about people finding themselves rather than being a clone of mine," he says when asked about his philosophy of teaching. When discussing the techniques of his early mentors, he speaks of a similarly open-ended approach that went beyond conventional lessons: "I used to hear Philly Joe Jones quite a bit. The interesting thing about it was that even though I would have liked to take a continuous series of lessons with him, it never really happened that way. You know, I'd hang out with him, and maybe on the subway, he'd show me something on his leg or something like that. So it was almost like he was the guy that put his arm around my shoulder, and he would talk to me and let me watch him, rather than saying, 'This is a lesson; study it for a week, and then come back.'"
One area of the tradition that Cyrille has helped to expand greatly is the drum solo. He first honed his solo technique by playing for dancers, an experience which Cyrille categorizes as "another outstanding chapter in my life as a drummer insofar as making music with the drum set so that people felt comfortable moving their bodies." His experience in this area was extensive and fruitful. "Every day I played two different classes," he recalls, "and that gave me the strength and imagination to play drum rhythms; and as a consequence, it wasn't that difficult for me to hold an audience playing solos."
Indeed, Cyrille's drum solos are totally captivating, not to mention unique in the world of jazz. On landmark recordings like 1971's What About? (BYG-Actuel) and 1978's The Loop (Ictus), Cyrille demonstrates a concept of percussion that incorporates breath and other subtle uses of the voice as well as uncommon instruments such as the slide whistle and, of all things, a newspaper.
"Sometimes you can get inspiration from anywhere," he explains. "I might think of body and soul and how I could express that in a musical way. So on that What About? album, when I conceived of the piece called "From Whence I Came", it had to do with that concept of body and soul. So the body was the sounds that you hear on the drums and my breath was the soul. I would breathe and play rhythms around the breathing.
"There was one thing I did on The Loop called "The News", where I put a newspaper on the drum set and played on the newspaper. And at the end of the composition to bring into focus what I was trying to say, I rolled up the paper and you hear that noise like when you ball paper together [makes gurgling sound in imitation and laughs]."
Such experiments reveal an eccentric and indefatigably curious musical mind. To Cyrille, though, they are simply a way of processing the information one gleans from everyday life. He elaborates: "Sound, even though we can't see it, is related to all the other senses. And as human beings, for the most part all of us deal with the five senses. So how do you relate in sound what comes through your senses? Writers and poets experience the same kinds of things except they express themselves in that medium. It's all about trying to bring a form to life, or give life to a form, which is art."
By always helping to elucidate the natural form of a given piece rather than imposing his own style, Cyrille has distinguished himself from a long lineage of "star" drummers in jazz whose virtuosic styles have at times threatened to overshadow the music of their ensembles. "I would think of what I felt was appropriate at the time for the music," Cyrille explains, characterizing his approach to playing with Cecil Taylor, "and that would be my contribution. It was always something that would inspire - I hoped - something that would give the music a voice, an extension of sound through the drum set."
Bright Moments With Andrew Cyrille
The master drummer remembers a selection of his most important recordings
by Aidan Levy
11/15/2016
It only takes a minute of conversation to realize that drummer-composer Andrew Cyrille thinks in a web of free associations as broad and imagistic as his eclectic network of collaborators might suggest.
At 76, the Brooklyn-born, Montclair-based avant-garde luminary recently released The Declaration of Musical Independence, his first album for ECM as a leader, and Proximity (Sunnyside), a duo session with tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry, both albums continuing his legacy as a master of rhythmic call-and-response. On the former, Cyrille forms a new quartet of longtime associates: guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Ben Street and electronics pioneer Richard Teitelbaum. The album’s subtle textures and free-floating cymbal work distill a varied career spanning hundreds of dates, from postbop to free improvisation and all the way back to Coleman Hawkins. To Cyrille, it’s all in there.
Proximity emerged from a 2014 duo collaboration with McHenry at the Village Vanguard. It builds on a relatively uncommon orchestration explored most famously by John Coltrane and Rashied Ali on Interstellar Space, but Cyrille is a veteran, having already recorded a handful of duos with Jimmy Lyons, Greg Osby and others. The album’s taut 12 tracks clock in at under 40 minutes, with originals, compositions by Muhal Richard Abrams and Famoudou Don Moye and a jocular adaption of Lead Belly’s “Green Corn.” The final six-second track, which consists entirely of Cyrille saying “To be continued,” signifies not only the possibility of a volume two but also a metaphor for resisting finite conclusions-tradition as a form of ellipsis.
In advance of its release, Cyrille spent an afternoon thinking about some of his most influential recordings and a history of political engagement and omnivorous tastes. “Culture is the sum total of the living experiences passed down from one generation to another,” he told me. As an elder statesman of the avant-garde, Cyrille reflected on his musical inheritance and what he has passed on.
The two-and-a-half-hour conversation that yielded this article included some poignant asides that had to be left out, including memories of John Carter, whom Cyrille called “one of the greatest clarinet players I ever heard”; getting rides home in Sonny Rollins’ Karmann Ghia sports car from the Village Vanguard, where Rollins and Cecil Taylor shared a double-bill in the ’60s; and how Cyrille convinced Kenny Clarke to participate in Pieces of Time, a 1984 percussion-only album with Clarke, Famoudou Don Moye and Milford Graves. “There are so many chapters in the life of this music,” Cyrille explained. And he is a part of so many of them.
Coleman Hawkins
The Hawk Relaxes (Prestige/Moodsville, 1961)
Hawkins, tenor saxophone; Kenny Burrell, guitar; Ronnell Bright, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Cyrille, drums
From Coleman Hawkins I learned to be relaxed and to have a certain amount of confidence in what I was doing. There was not very much conversation that went on between us; we’d just met each other at the recording studio. I was very grateful to be in the right place at the right time when the recording date was offered to me, and it turned out to be a classic for me. I must have been about 21 years old.
At certain periods in life, you’re the baby in the band. It’s almost like being a rookie, because I had never played with Coleman Hawkins before. I had only heard him on the radio, and there was some amount of anxiety, the fact that I was playing for this great man and all of these other illustrious musicians. Ronnell Bright at that time was working with Sarah Vaughan.
I was just hoping that I did everything well enough for them to play with me and not say I wasn’t making it. [If they’d said] they needed another drummer, I would have been crushed. I mean, that happens on occasion. You just have to learn to get up and keep on going, but fortunately that didn’t happen to me on that session.
Walt Dickerson
To My Queen (Prestige/New Jazz, 1962)
Dickerson, vibraphone; Andrew Hill, piano; George Tucker, bass; Cyrille, drums
I met Walt because I used to hang out with Philly Joe Jones. Philly Joe comes from Philadelphia, as does Walt, and when Walt came to New York-he had been living in California-he asked Philly Joe about recommending a drummer, and he recommended me. So I met Walt over the telephone, and This Is Walt Dickerson became one of my first record dates.
On “To My Queen,” which was a suite that he dedicated to his wife, Liz, there was a crescendo that I played with mallets that would take us from one section to the next. To me, Walt was a genius who never got his due as far as the press was concerned, and due to not being heard live by many people.
He used very soft rubber-tipped mallets, so you could hear him as predominantly as necessary on recordings, but it was hard to hear him in an acoustic setting. A lot of the other vibes players, like Milt Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo and Terry Gibbs, played with much harder mallet heads. Walt would also cut the stems so they weren’t full-length mallets. That was the sound he wanted to get, and it also helped him with speed; he was one of the fastest vibists I ever heard.
Cecil Taylor
Unit Structures (Blue Note, 1966)
Taylor, piano, bells; Eddie Gale, trumpet; Jimmy Lyons, alto saxophone; Makanda Ken McIntyre, alto saxophone, oboe, bass clarinet; Henry Grimes, bass; Alan Silva, bass; Cyrille, drums
I met Cecil Taylor when I was 17 or 18 years old, studying up at the Hartnett [Conservatory]. We’d see each other on the street. Cecil had done some things already, because he’s older than I am by a decade, but we’d see each other in places. So I had met Cecil about eight years before Unit Structures came out.
During the 11-year association we had on a continual basis, maybe once or twice I’d say, “What do you want me to play here?” And he’d say, “Play 5 against 3,” or whatever. But it was never anything that he would listen to and say, “No, I don’t like that. Do this, do that. Do something else.” Across the board, he would just say, “Do what drummers do. You know what drummers do.”
He would give the other instrumentalists notes and things for them to play, but he would never give anything to me. So what I had to rely on was the information that I had accumulated over the years, from the time I had begun playing in the marching band in grade school, the bands that I had played with in high school and then in college. I had done all sorts of things, playing for parties, bar mitzvahs, polkas, learning it in Brooklyn where I grew up, playing with so many different musicians and playing in so many different social variations-Illinois Jacquet, Nellie Lutcher, Mary Lou Williams, Babatunde Olatunji from Nigeria.
So when Cecil presented the music, I just had to go into my laboratory, so to speak, or into my library, and say, “Oh, I think this will fit with this. I think that will fit with that.” And that’s how you hear what you hear on Unit Structures. I had a palette of colors, or rhythms, certain things that came from musics that I had been playing and that some of the things that Cecil was doing reminded me of. So I brought that to the table, and as far as he and all of the other musicians were concerned, it worked.
He would say he would “absorb” the music. Absorption means that the liquid goes through the membrane; adsorption means that the liquid remains outside the membrane. The absorption is what was interesting to him, so the music would move through him and then he would deal with it on that level. He would tell us-me and Jimmy Lyons-that it was our music. It wasn’t just his music; it was our music.
Marion Brown
Afternoon of a Georgia Faun
(ECM, 1970)
Brown, alto saxophone, zomari, percussion; Anthony Braxton, alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, clarinet, contrabass clarinet, musette, flute, percussion; Bennie Maupin, tenor saxophone, alto flute, bass clarinet, acorn, bells, wood flute, percussion; Gayle Palmore, vocals, piano, percussion; Chick Corea, piano, bells, gong, percussion; Jack Gregg, bass, percussion; Cyrille, Larry Curtis, William Green, percussion; Billy Malone, African drums; Jeanne Lee, vocals, percussion
The first time I went to Canada was with Marion. Jeanne Lee was on that gig, and we played in Toronto. John Norris and Bill Smith from CODA magazine, which was [based] in Toronto, invited Marion, and Marion asked me if I wanted to go. When we got back, ECM asked Marion to do that recording when ECM was in its naissance, so we made the record Afternoon of a Georgia Faun.
At that time, a lot of the people that became big stars were young folks in our 20s-Bennie Maupin, Chick Corea, Anthony Braxton. A lot of us had never really played with each other before. Everybody had a responsibility for what they contributed, and we tried to blend so it didn’t come out like the tower of babel.
We went in there with the intention to communicate, understand, and to do what was necessary so the people we were playing with felt good. And that’s what we got. So in that way, it became a classic also.
Andrew Cyrille & Milford Graves
Dialogue of the Drums (IPS, 1974)
Cyrille, Graves: percussion
In the early ’70s, Milford Graves, Rashied Ali and I appeared on a television show on NBC called Positively Black. But prior to that, I knew Milford when both of us were teenagers playing dances in Jamaica, Queens, with a trombone-player buddy of mine named John Gordon, whom I met at Juilliard in [the late ’50s].
The union rules were for musicians to play 40 minutes on and 20 off. But for the dancers, the people had to continue to be entertained, so we’d play 40 minutes, then another band would come on and play. The other band at that time had Milford Graves, who was playing timbales. Maybe we saw each other and waved. Later, I was doing a gig in Harlem with Sam Rivers, and Milford and Don Pullen played before or after us. I don’t think we said anything to each other; they had gone before we came offstage.
Milford was doing something different, and I was moving in the direction of playing arrhythmically, and we had some [shared] feelings about what the Africans had given to the music. Eventually I was at Antioch College with Cecil, and we were invited to do something at Columbia University. Cecil asked me whether I wanted to do a solo or whether I wanted to do something else, so of course I thought about Milford.
Andrew Cyrille & Maono
Metamusicians’ Stomp (Black Saint, 1978)
Cyrille, drums, percussion, foot; Ted Daniel, trumpet, flugelhorn, wood flute, foot; David S. Ware, tenor saxophone, flute, foot; Nick DiGeronimo, bass, foot
Artists relate to things in nature, and sometimes it’s very hard to pinpoint things in a more physically tangible way. How do you play leaves blowing in the wind or on a tree? How do you transfer that to music? Anyway, the stomp was a kind of dance that was going on perhaps in the ’30s and ’40s. But literally, I also thought of the musicians stomping their feet on a metrical beat of the song.
I had heard David Ware with an orchestra that Cecil had put together for a George Wein-produced Newport concert at Carnegie Hall. David was a member of the reed section, and he impressed me. I asked him if he wanted to be a part of this group that I was putting together called Maono, and he said sure. So we got together and went on the road, did a tour in Europe.
Metamusicians’ Stomp came from that collaboration with him, Ted Daniel and Nick DiGeronimo, so that was another memorable occasion. They were dedicated and committed, and they brought what they had to the table.
Butch Morris
Dust to Dust (New World, 1991)
Morris, conductor; J.A. Deane, trombone, electronics; Vickey Bodner, English horn; Marty Ehrlich, clarinet; John Purcell, oboe; Janet Grice, bassoon; Jason Hwang, violin; Jean-Paul Bourelly, guitar; Zeena Parkins, harp; Wayne Horvitz, keyboards, electronics; Myra Melford, piano; Brian Carrott, vibraphone; Cyrille, drums
A lot of the musicians on that recording I had not known before I played with them, like Zeena Parkins, who plays the harp, but I met Butch way before that recording. When I first met Butch, he was playing cornet. I had a gig somewhere, and I decided to do a duet, so I asked Butch. I have a cassette tape somewhere in this house of a duet with me and Butch Morris. There were a lot of musicians at the concert-David Murray, George Lewis, maybe Henry Threadgill. From that concert on, we were musical friends. So when he was putting an orchestra together and recording for New World Records, he asked me. By that time, though, Butch was not playing the cornet as much. When you talk about Butch’s “Conduction,” he had ways of demonstrating a kind of body language for certain things that he wanted with the music, certain expressions, like dynamics, or, for instance, sometimes he wanted emphases on a particular passage. For example, he may have wanted the harpist to play something or the oboist to play a contrapuntal line against the rest of the band. It was very expressive, and of course he would explain to us what certain things meant before we played the music.
It’s almost like when leaders express themselves through a certain instrument. Butch was like an instrumentalist conducting the band, but using his body as the instrument.
Trio 3 & Vijay Iyer
Wiring (Intakt, 2014)
Oliver Lake, alto saxophone; Iyer, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Cyrille, drums
The formation of Trio 3 goes back about 20 years. Reggie Workman had a group back then called Top Shelf, and he would get these opportunities to play at homeless shelters. We also played jails, because there are opportunities for musicians to do that kind of social work for people who are not able to go to clubs or concerts and are in fixed situations.
Eventually we did a recording for Reggie called Synthesis, with Marilyn Crispell, on Leo Records from England. It was Reggie, myself, Oliver Lake and Marilyn. After that, the three of us got together and did a gig or two. We decided to form a co-op group, and it was based on the premise that there would be no leader-the leader was the music.
As a matter of fact, we’re preparing to do another recording next week on Intakt, a Swiss label. It’s the label that Vijay Iyer was on with us. The next recording will be done without another instrumentalist-just the three of us. It’s not that we don’t put our own groups together or have our own organizations, but when we want to go home, we can go back to Trio 3.
Vijay is a brilliant musician. … He wanted to do what it was that we wanted, and he was very respectful of the age difference, and of the fact that I had been out here doing things before he came on the scene. He’d ask me questions about the scene at certain times, and certain people whom I had played with and he probably knew about through reading or listening. We did a few gigs in the city, and he was the featured piano player, and we will use him again when he is available. We [also] played his music, like the “Suite for Trayvon (and Thousands More),” and we worked on it diligently, assiduously.
Andrew Cyrille
& Bill McHenry
Proximity (Sunnyside, 2016)
Cyrille, drums; McHenry, tenor saxophone
At the Vanguard, that was a week when some of the personnel [in McHenry’s quartet] had to do some other stuff, so we just did a duet one night, and the album’s producer, Max Koslow, wanted it to be documented. [Ed. note: The album was recorded subsequently for Koslow’s Brain Schism Productions.
It’s the same as doing a duet with a piano player, a drummer or a trumpet player. Milford Graves did one with David Murray, Real Deal. I did two duo recordings with Jimmy Lyons in the ’80s, Something in Return and Burnt Offering, and then I did another one with Greg Osby, Low Blue Flame. I never recorded anything with Frank Wright, except some stuff I had done in the ’80s at Soundscape, Verna Gillis’ place. I did a duet with Henry Threadgill, and a concert with David Murray in Canada, also with trombonist Craig Harris.
It’s nothing unusual-Sonny Rollins with Philly Joe Jones, Max Roach and Archie Shepp. You just listen and you play the music with whoever your partner is.
Andrew Cyrille
The Declaration of Musical Independence (ECM, 2016)
Cyrille, drums, percussion; Bill Frisell, guitar; Richard Teitelbaum, synthesizer, piano; Ben Street, bass
This is the first album with this quartet, but the textures that I proposed came from the fact I’ve played with all the participants. Frisell and I did a duet at the Stone and performed with Jakob Bro. I’ve done a lot of stuff with Ben Street with David Virelles and the Danish pianist-composer Søren Kjærgaard. Richard Teitelbaum and I go back the longest.
Richard does synthesized music, and I just find myself playing organic, acoustic drums with these electronic sounds. Richard and I came together through Leroy Jenkins, the violinist from Chicago. We did a record years ago for Tomato Records called Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival of America with George Lewis, and we did a recording called Double Clutch in the ’80s. After that, I used to see Richard in West Berlin before the wall came down, and he had gotten a grant to do some work there. Recently, we did one with Elliott Sharp at Roulette, and before that he and I did a duet at Symphony Space. We had also done some things with Braxton.
Anyway, all four of us came together and we did the recording in Brooklyn. I wanted everybody to contribute something with their own minds and pens, and that’s how we got the music.
Faculty
Faculty A-Z
Andrew Cyrille
Email:
- cyrillea@newschool.edu
Profile:
- Attended the Juilliard and Hartnett Schools of Music and worked with renowned jazz artists including Mary Lou Williams, Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet, Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard, Walt Dickerson, and Babatunde Olatunji. From the mid-sixties to the seventies, Mr. Cyrille collaborated with pianist Cecil Taylor; was a member of the choral theater group Voices Inc.; and taught as artistin- residence at Antioch College. Mr. Cyrille organized several percussion groups featuring, at various times, notable drummers such as Kenny Clarke, Milford Graves, Famoudou Don Moye, Rashied Ali, Daniel Ponce, and Michael Carvin. Mr. Cyrille has toured and performed throughout North America, Europe, Africa, and the former USSR. He currently is a member of TRIO3, featuring Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman. He has received three NEA grants for performance and composition, two Meet the Composer/ AT&T- Rockefeller Foundation grants, and an Arts International award to perform with his quintet in Accra, Ghana, and West Africa. In 1999, Mr. Cyrille received a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition.
Current Courses:
"All That's Rhythm!" A Chat With Drummer Andrew Cyrille
March 14, 2012
Washington City Paper
Andrew Cyrille is one of the most prominent drummers in the world of avant-garde jazz—-and one of the first few to establish his own sound in the genre. Studying with Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones, and Babatunde Olatunji as a kid in Brooklyn, Cyrille really made his reputation working with Cecil Taylor for 11 years, from the '60s to the mid '70s. He's also a formidable composer in his own right, and will perform his work tonight at Atlas Performing Arts Centerwith a large ensemble of local musicians (billed as "21st Century Big Band Unlimited"), in arrangements of friend and collaborator Mark Masters. Cyrille spoke yesterday to Arts Desk about his approaches to drumming as well as composing, the importance of dance, and some surprising tidbits of drumming history.
Washington City Paper: So you haven’t met any of the musicians you’re working with here. Do you often work like that?
Andrew Cyrille: On occasion. You know, this is more like a studio situation. I don’t know how many studios they have down here, but when I go to L.A. and do the same project with Mark Masters, he usually hires some people that he knows out there that can play the music the way he wants it.
WCP: To what extent is it your music, and to what extent Mark’s?
AC: They’re all my creations. It’s like Mark was an interior decorator that came into my house and rearranged the rooms! And he did a good job. He brought in instrumentation that I hadn’t thought of, and he did some things that I wouldn’t have thought of with my own stuff. I thought it was great, and working with Mark is great.
WCP: I know that right now there’s a sort of flourishing movement of drummer-composers; is that something you have much insight into?
AC: Well, with the college situation—-for instance, I’m at New School—-most of the students that come through there take the full gamut of courses that they have, all of the things that are available and the things that are necessary for graduation. So, in my classes, I give them material that I would like for them to play, and then I also encourage them to bring in their own material. So, on occasion, some of the drummers bring in some of the material that they write. So this might be another evolution in some of the younger generation of drummers who might write and perform at the same time.
WCP: That brings up the question of your own education—at Juilliard, before they had a jazz program. Were you learning more of a marching-band type style?
AC: To some degree, yeah, because I was playing rudiments. The rudiments, really, are just beats for soldiers to move in certain directions. Back up, move forward, drop your arms and get the hell out of here! [laughs] It used to be, if you shot the drummer the battle was over! Because then there were no more signals—-there was nobody to give signals. That’s why they had those big field drums, because the drummers would have to play among the gunfire and so on. You had to hear what was going on. Shoot the drummer, shit is over.
WCP: So how would you go from that, which would be pretty precise in terms of technique, to the free-form on which you made your career?
AC: I don’t care what you play; in any kind of music there’s gotta be some sort of precision, and in the avant-garde there’s gotta be a certain amount of precision, otherwise you couldn’t live.
WCP: Well, let me put it another way: What about that sort of training attracted, say, Cecil Taylor to your sound?
AC: Cecil was a student at New England Conservatory. So he of course learned that kind of Western methodology to playing the piano. Now, you take that, and with then again all of the heredity as far as him adoring Duke Ellington, and listening to Billie Holiday, and all of that other stuff that goes into who we are in terms of being American. So, you find out how do you get to that part of the picture to express yourself? Cecil was very into dancing as well.
I met Cecil in 1957. Now, I had been playing around town, and heard each other, and he’d say “I like the way you play—yeah, man, I like all that Philly Joe [Jones] stuff that you do.” So, I remember I was working for the June Taylor School of Dance; I was playing dance classes, which taught me something else again about playing drums and I think more of that should be done where you have live music and live dancers…so that you can see the music. But I remember that I had a private conversation with Cecil, much the same way that I’m talking to you, and he wanted to know what I thought about playing music. And I was very into dance, having also played with Babatunde Olatunji from Nigeria, so I said, “Well, I think about music as far as dancing is concerned.” Click! [snaps his fingers]
WCP: That’s what he wanted to hear?
AC: That’s what he heard! And that was what more or less got us together, in addition to that he had heard me play with many other people, and he asked me if I wanted to be part of his organization.
WCP: Can you tell me about the music we’ll be hearing at the concert?
AC: Well, it is stuff that I’ve written over the years, and most of it has been recorded. I’m not sure what Mark will choose, but on this demo I did with him out in L.A., we did “Given,” and “The Whirlwind,” and “Proximity,” which is a ballad, and then “Shell.” So we did four, and then I did a duet with a trumpet player on a Monk piece. So perhaps Mark will choose some of those pieces, and in addition I have the charts for “5-4-3-2,” for a piece called “Doctor Licks.” It’s a 6/8 piece that I did as a duet with Anthony Braxton.
WCP: Is it more tonal, or freeform?
AC: It’s tonal, because I usually write in a key. And sometimes we stay in tonality, and sometimes we open it up. But with Mark, it will be more metrically strict, and then with more open improvisation.
WCP: How do you work as a composer? Do you work up from the rhythm when you’re writing?
AC: Sometimes. If I come up with a rhythm, sometimes I’ll then work up notes to put to it. But you know, most of the time, the last thing I come up with is what I’m going to play on the drums. I get all the other stuff together, and then I decide, “Okay, this is what I’m going to play on the drums.” Which is interesting, because composers like Ellington, they would think of drum parts first, and then put other stuff on top of that. The rhythm is the strongest part of the production.
WCP: So where do you start?
AC: Anything. I can think of your personality, how I think of you, and then start from that. I can start with the mood, or start with writing some words and from that I can get rhythm, or a melody. And then I can extrapolate, interpolate, find a rhythm; watch the expressions on your face, how your eyes light up and how you smile, and say “All that’s rhythm!”
WCP: I don’t think non-musicians often consider music in those terms.
AC: Well, look! Anything you see around you, the chair even, had to come out of somebody’s mind! This is just a parallel to that.
AC: Sure. I teach not necessarily from an artistic point of view, and here I’m being really practical, but rather I deal with all of my students on the basis of what they need and want. I don’t impose my own musical or artistic principles on them. If someone’s interested in playing shows, I’ll give him the information I have in that regard; if he wants to play march music, I’ll show him how to do that. As we go along and we get a closer relationship, then I’ll tell him why I do what I do and why perhaps he could think about what I do in regard to himself. My main objective as a teacher, however, is to help the student to find himself, to tap his own resources, to feel comfortable with himself. I’m not interested in producing clones.
NPR
Andrew Cyrille, born in Brooklyn on November 10, 1939, studied with Philly Joe Jones in 1958 and then spent the first half of the 1960s studying in New York at Juilliard and the Hartnett School of Music. At the same time, he was performing with jazz artists ranging from Mary Lou Williams, Coleman Hawkins, and Illinois Jacquet to Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard, Walt Dickerson, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, among others. He also played with Nigerian drummer Babtunde Olatunji and worked with dancers. In 1964 he formed what would prove to be an eleven-year association with Cecil Taylor, a gig that brought him new acclaim and established him in the vanguard of jazz drumming.
Starting in 1969, Cyrille played in a number of percussion groups with notable drummers including Kenny Clarke, Milford Graves, Don Moye, Rashied Ali, Daniel Ponce, Michael Carvin, and Vladimir Tarasov. Cyrille formed his group Maono ("feelings") in 1975, with its fluid membership dictated by the forces his compositions called for rather than vice versa. Since leaving Taylor's group, he has also worked with such top-flight peers as David Murray, Muhal Richard Abrams, Mal Waldron, Horace Tapscott, James Newton, and Oliver Lake, was the drummer on Billy Bang's A Tribute to Stuff Smith (Soul Note 121216), notable for being the last studio session of Sun Ra.
An artist-in-residence and teacher at Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio) from 1971 to 1973, Cyrille has also taught at the Graham Windham Home for Children in New York and is currently a faculty member at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His sterling work has earned him a number of grants and awards, mostly notably from Meet the Composer. Additionally, he has an educational video available from Alchemy Pictures.
Source: blacksaint.com
THE MUSIC OF ANDREW CYRILLE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH ANDREW CYRILLE:
From the album ‘Special People’ (1980 /Soul Note):
Jazz Presents Andrew Cyrille @ The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music:
Duo Palindrome
Andrew Cyrille & Anthony Braxton--2002:
Music in Us--From: The Navigator--1982:
https://vimeo.com/11322195
https://www.moderndrummer.com/article/december-1981-january-1982-andrew-cyrille-aesthetic-endeavor/
Andrew Cyrille: An Aesthetic Endeavor
by Harold Howland
Modern Drummer Magazine
January 1982
by Harold Howland
HH: What motivated you to study music?
AC: We always had some kind of instrument in the house. My sister got piano and violin lessons, and I remember banging on the piano. My mother belonged to this club which needed a piano, so later she gave the piano away. I was never given any lessons, but I guess that some of the seeds of hearing tones were placed. As most kids do. I fantasized about playing trumpet, drums, saxophone, or what have you. But I didn’t give any serious thought to it.
When I was about eleven, a gentleman named Pop Jansen came to my grade school in Brooklyn, St. Peter Claver. He wanted to revive a drum-and-bugle corps that had been dormant for a few years, and he sent a memo around to all the upper-level classes—sixth, seventh, and eighth grades—asking for kids who wanted to participate. At first I didn’t want to join the corps. It was very strange; I had some kind of reaction against marching up and down the street. I don’t know why, because I had seen a number of parades by that time. Anyway, my friends all joined, and as a result, because I wanted to be with them and because they asked me. I too joined. So it was coincidental that it was found that I had natural hands and an ability or talent to absorb these rhythms and play them. I was dubbed a natural, and in some ways I became the best one out of all the other kids. That’s how it began. Actually, once I began playing, it seemed as though I’d found my voice, in a very roundabout, accidental way.
HH: Do you think that you might have had that same realization on another instrument in another musical situation?
AC: Could have been, sure. I don’t see why not. I don’t know where the predisposition for the absorption of music came from. Again, there were musical instruments around, and my mother used to sing nursery rhymes to me all the time. But how I got into the drums themselves was coincidental.
HH: Did you play the whole drum section?
AC: I would play snare drum primarily, but sometimes I would play tenor drum or bass drum.
HH: Did you enter competitions at that stage, or was it mostly parades?
AC: It started off with parades. Pop Jansen had come from Huntington, Long Island, and he got tired of coming into Brooklyn and managing the corps there, so he asked some of the kids who he felt were the better musicians to come out and join this Catholic War Veterans Post Corps in Huntington. There we began engaging in competitions. I began seeing drum corps in that area like the Hawthorne Caballeros, the Patchogue Black Knights (or something like that; I can’t remember all the names), the Raiders, and others.
Even today, when I see a drum-and-bugle corps that has that precise execution, everybody playing these things in unison, it just sends a thrill through my body that is unexplainable. I can watch those corps all day long; it’s just fantastic to me. I love to hear them play those rudiments, how crisply and clearly they play them, and the kinds of combinations that they get.
HH: Did you have an actual percussion instructor concurrently, or did you learn from the corps masters?
AC: When we started, most of the guys who came down to teach the kids were much older and had been members of the corps that had existed a few years prior to that. They used to take turns showing us the rudiments, how to hold the sticks, and so forth. As happens today in my own teaching, they wanted to give us guidance. I came out of a ghetto neighborhood, and obviously in that situation there is always a kind of concern about most of the young people that they don’t go astray. You want to give the kids something of value that perhaps they can hold onto, and in that way they may learn some kind of responsibility.
Now, in that particular community at that time, once something musical began to happen, other people would learn about it. As a result, jazz musicians began coming to the auditorium when we were rehearsing. They would teach us some rudiments, but at the same time they would begin talking to us about this other music, a different kind of drumming. Fortunately, I was a gifted student, and they would say, “Man. you should come on up to my house, and I’ll show you some more.” A young fellow named Bernard Wilkinson and I would go over and take lessons from Willie Jones and from Lennie McBrowne, and they began playing records by Max [Roach] and the others. It came to pass that Bernard’s sister married Max, and as a result I met Max and began hearing the jazz element more and more.
As I was playing and hearing about the jazz contingency, I was continuing in the corps, and I belonged to a Police Athletic League Corps, the Wynn Center Corps in Brooklyn. Then in high school, along with these corps, I was in the school band. As a matter of fact, the guitarist Eric Gale was in my high school band, a year ahead of me. He and I formed a group with a couple of kids from the school band and began playing dances and so forth outside of the school activities.
In Brooklyn there was a piano player. Leslie Barthwaite, and it was with Leslie that we began really exploring the jazz forms and I began playing tunes like “Billie’s Bounce,” “Lullaby of Birdland,” “Opus de Funk.” and so forth. We began trying to learn the language of jazz; how to improvise. We were playing for community affairs, and in a sense we became young celebrities in the neighborhood. We were only fifteen or sixteen years old, and it was always thought that people who liked jazz were very intellectual and could do something which was really quite different from the regular kind of music. The other kids would always single us out. Even though many of them did not quite understand jazz (just as today’s regular population), it was always something that was prized or looked upon with favor. Then there were certain people who were really into the music, and they could appreciate everything that we did. With that particular unit of musicians, we began meeting some of the older musicians who wanted us to work with them on certain jobs, and that’s how it began to grow.
HH: When did you begin studying with Philly Joe?
AC: I met Philly Joe Jones when I was about sixteen or seventeen years old. Again, all these things were happening at about the same time. Once I became interested in the drum, I had a choice to make as to how I was going to live my life, and I used to fantasize about how I was to make a living if I had to be a musician. I knew that I had to learn the discipline, and the best way to do that was to be involved with the people who were doing it. I met Joe after I met Max. And it was really Joe who took me under his wing and would talk to me about drumming and about music. I had only one or two actual lessons where we would pick up drumsticks and play: most of the time it would be just conversation. Joe would let me go to a lot of those recording sessions he was on. And sometimes on jobs he would let me sit in with the older musicians—that was an experience!
HH: He does give the impression of a protective father figure, a teacher of life.
AC: That’s the kind of guy he is, and I used to hang out with him often. I was at his house in Brooklyn a number of times during the week, and we would go into Manhattan.
Max was another kind of figure. I would see Max and we would talk and I used to watch him practice, but Max never gave me any direct lessons. Every now and then something would spill over, but Joe was the one who focused in on me and made suggestions. I’m not saying that Max was unfavorable towards me: it just never happened that way. Max did let me sit in on his gigs a couple of times. As a matter of fact, much later Elvin let me sit in with Coltrane. Things like that don’t happen very often.
Once Joe asked me to be his protégé. Even at that time I had a sense of identity and individuality, though, and I said, “Well, no, man, I don’t want to be a protégé.” But I love Joe a lot, and quite naturally, there are probably things that I do that reflect some of the things that he does.
HH: How long did you continue playing in corps?
AC: Until I was about sixteen or seventeen.
In my last year of high school I quit the school band and really started playing professional gigs with people like Duke Jordan and Cecil Payne.
I was pretty lucky that way. I don’t know whether it was because I had the singleness of purpose, whereby I wanted to learn this music and would find myself in these good musical environments, or whether it was just by some stroke of luck that I was there. I guess that sometimes our actions influence our luck.
HH: It seems that if one puts enough energy into something eventually he will be in the right place at the right time.
AC: Right, sure.
HH: What drew you to study European classical music at Juilliard?
AC: I was at St. John’s University before I went to Juilliard. I remember that one night there was a university talent night. I decided that since I didn’t have a band I would do a drum solo, and I went up and played for about forty-five minutes. I think that was the first time I ever did a drum solo. After it was over, people began saying to me, “What are you doing here? You should go on and develop a career in music!”
HH: St. John’s didn’t have much of a music department?
AC: No, I was a chemistry major. I had to think about how I was going to make a living, and at seventeen or eighteen I didn’t think that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with a music career. It was a possibility, but I had assumed that I wanted to learn chemistry and make that a profession. What I found when I was in college was that I began working nights with some of these names, and it became a conflict for me to do my scholastic work and at the same time do the work that was necessary for me to play this music on a very high level. I’m one of these people who, if I’m going to do something, I would like to do it well rather than be an also-ran. So if I had to be a chemist I would have really wanted to be a doctor of philosophy and to be on a high level of performance there. I said to myself, “Well. I could take both of these disciplines into infinity, and I have to decide really which one I want to do.” I liked chemistry a lot, but I loved music. That’s really what the difference was so I decided to give music a shot.
I took the audition for Juilliard and I passed and was accepted. Then I spoke to the dean at St. John’s and said. “Well, look. I was accepted at Juilliard.” and he said. “A lot of people are not accepted there, and it’s an excellent music school, so what you can do is go there and try it. And if you don’t like it. You’ll always he welcome hack here.” So I went to Juilliard and I never looked back.
To answer your question more directly courses, we would bring jazz records into the listening library. There would he a group of us around this table with the earphones on, and every now and then something would happen musically on the record and all of us would crack up and make some noise, and the librarian would come over and say. “Shsh!” Afterward, of course, I’d have to do these other things for my assignment, and I’d be listening to records by Mendelssohn and Elgar and so forth, and sometimes I’d be so tired that I’d fall asleep during the middle of the record. When I’d wake as to why I chose a place like Juilliard. it was because I wanted to learn more about jazz. To my disappointment, that was not really in the curriculum.
HH: That’s why I asked. It would seem that one would go there to study every kind of serious Western music except jazz.
AC: Right. At that time it was really about European classical music and its derivatives. I went, and I learned, of course, but I was disappointed, because I really wanted to learn about Monk and Bud Powell and Bird and Max and all those people, and it just wasn’t there.
I remember that some of my classmates were Gary Bartz, Grachan Moncur, John Gordon, and Benny Jacobsel, and when we would have to go listen to the classical records for our ear-training up the record was over, so I’d have to start listening all over again! In class the teacher would just put the arm down anywhere on the record and ask you who the composer was and what movement it was.
Anyway, that was my experience at Juilliard. I was disillusioned to some degree, and I wanted to learn really how to play the music. While I was there I did meet some musicians like Bobby Thomas, who was a percussion major, and bassist Morris Edwards, who gave me the opportunity to play with such people as Nellie Lutcher, Illinois Jacquet, and Mary Lou Williams. At the same time I began really getting experience with some of the masters, and then I knew that I had to leave Juilliard. It was always a feeling among musicians that if you stayed there long enough, eventually you would lose your feeling for jazz; that they would somehow alter its techniques and you wouldn’t be able to swing anymore. Whether that was true or not, I had that impression in my head.
HH: How long were you at Juilliard?
AC: A little over a year.
HH: Had you not looked into other schools where jazz might have been in the curriculum?
AC: No, I didn’t know of anyplace. I guess. The students at Juilliard always used to compare themselves with the students at the Manhattan School of Music— those were the two major schools of music in New York—and they would say that Manhattan was a better school for people who wanted to play jazz. But they would say. on the other hand, and I don’t know why. that the kids who went to Manhattan were programmed to be teachers rather than performers, and that at Juilliard it was the other way around— but they were performers in the classical tradition.
I remember that my teacher at Juilliard, Morris Goldenberg, would always say to me (in a sense he had protégé attitudes also) that when you went to work with some symphony orchestra in Denver or Idaho or wherever, they’d know as soon as you picked up a mallet or a set of timpani or snare drum sticks that you’d studied with Morris Goldenberg. Even though I didn’t say to him that I didn’t want that to happen to me. I had an aversion to it. His main idea was to program me for the symphony or for staff work in studios.
I didn’t look around for another school because I assumed that most of them would be generally the same. Then again, other good schools like Eastman and Curtis were outside of New York.
A lot of the professional jazz musicians with whom I began working had negative things to say about learning in the academic system, and they would say, “Well, man, the best thing for you to do is just to get out here and play and learn from people like us who have been doing this.”
I knew, though, that I needed to further my studies, so as time went along I found another school, a private school on Forty-second Street which is now defunct, called Hartnett. It was there that I began studying harmony and theory that was geared more to jazz, and I began playing with a big-band there. George Robinson was one of the theory teachers, and after the school closed down. I continued studying with him privately, which is how I got the foundation for my ability to compose.
I thought that I needed some more training in reading drum music, so I went looking again for Morris Goldenberg. Morris was teaching privately as well as at Juilliard, and I didn’t want to re-enroll in the Juilliard course. I found him at his studio and told him what I wanted. He was concentrating really on mallet work, so he said, “Well, look, there’s a guy who has studied with me for a number of years who is very good,” and the gentleman to whom he introduced me was Tony Columbia. I remember that when I was at Juilliard, Tony was a few years ahead of me and I’d met him.
Tony was the one who began applying what we would learn in those drum theory books to the trap set. I don’t know whether it still goes on, but there’s another division in the music schools; when you’re in the percussion department, you learn how to play snare drum, but you don’t learn how to play snare drum in relation to the trap set or in relation to popular music; you learn it according to classical music. There’s a whole other way of interpreting those notes for the drum set, in relation to the music that we know to be American. Tony Columbia was focused in on that application, making it sound legitimate in relation to the set. I studied with him for about a year, and he opened up a certain thought pattern to me.
HH: How do you think American music education relates to what Cecil Taylor calls black methodology?
AC: Well, I think that all of it is in us, that most definitely we have European influences; we’re part that as well as we are part African culturally. In this country, black methodology has been, to an extent, a synthesis of what has been available to us. For instance, black people took the saxophone, the trumpet, or the snare drum as it was in their communities and did with it what had been handed down to them enculturally and developed the music that we know, called Afro-American music or black classical music or jazz, with the European influence. In Juilliard you learn about chords and about reading and so forth, but you can take those very same things and swing them, and give them another kind of feeling, another kind of inflection. Those things can be used or reapplied in a way that is more suitable to your artistic direction, more meaningful in your environment. I feel that if I had to go back now to a school like Juilliard and study further it would be more relevant because I know what I want to do and have established myself. There’s nothing wrong with getting more information about musical devices, the point being that I could shape them to function for my needs.
HH: Which of the three main influences—African, European, American—do you think plays the largest part in the development of jazz?
AC: Well, I would have to think that it would be the African because of the way the music eventually came out. It’s improvised; you have all of these cross rhythms; you have all of the antiphonal, call-and-response factors; you have the vocal inflection into the instrument to make it reminiscent of the human voice, so that it relates to the talking drum (a lot of people may not be aware of that). All of the ingredients that go into the making of African music go also into the making of jazz, but with the European means of instrumentation, chord structure, and so forth. We drummers use the rudiments— paradiddles, ratamacues, and so forth— in so many different ways within the sticking patterns. The idea is to make it sound or feel more natural to yourself, and because of the encultural influences in how the music survives, I think that in its intrinsic methodology here in the U.S., jazz is more related to Africa than to Europe.
HH: Do you consider yourself strictly a jazz musician, and does the term “jazz” mean the same thing now that it has in the past?
AC: As long as I have heard the word “jazz” it has meant essentially an improvised music, composed, organized, varied, and performed spontaneously. The people who began laying down musical ideas to me were black, and the idea was always to be able to swing. When we talk about swing as it always has been, we usually think of some kind of four-four metrical pattern (now you might play a three or maybe even a seven), hinging on the proverbial dotted eighth note and the sixteenth. To some degree this has been a point of debate even within the creative community of people who play, say, bebop, and people who have gone on from there and tried to do something else. Whether you want to call the music jazz, I think, depends on the feeling that you get when you play. The idea was never to make the music feel stiff or rigid or totally cerebral. Even when I myself, and I have to speak for myself, do something that may be considered abstract, I always try to inject it with a feeling of swing, or at least to impart some kind of feeling of levitation; that is, people get some kind of an emotional and organic stimulation as well as an intellectual stimulation. In that light, I would say that the word “jazz” could still be used but you have some people who would dispute that simply because now the rules and concepts of making the music have broadened. I may not play a four-four metrical pattern; it may be ametrical. It might be as I’m talking now, which very often is how I think about what I do, as a conversation; I don’t talk in four-four or six-eight or nine-eight or whatever. If people get something from the way I deliver what I say, then to me that has an organic, emotional appeal; then if they can move their bodies as well, then it imparts also a kind of levitation.
The problem now is that when you think about the word “jazz” and listen to the commercial radio stations, what you hear is almost rock. And then the definitions have widened, so you will find some jazz musicians, a lot of the guys from Chicago, for instance, who will say that they’re not really jazz musicians; they’re “creative” musicians. It’s funny; as the appellation continues to be applied to so many different kinds of music within what we know to have come from, say, ragtime to dixieland to swing to bop, the musicians still accept it; but there hasn’t developed one singular term that everyone can feel comfortable with. Sometimes I feel more comfortable with the term “creative music,” but you have creative musicians who get their impetus from the European classical tradition, which is not necessarily involved with the African tradition as well. So when people ask me what kind of music I play I usually come out and say, “Jazz,” because that almost automatically stereotypes or directs them in a certain area and there are no more questions. If you say, “Creative music,” they might say, “Well, what kind?”
HH: Tell me about Voices Incorporated.
AC: Voices Incorporated came about through drummer Andrei Strobert, who had been working in their show. He asked me to sub for him with this show, then he left, and I took over the chair. At that time it wasn’t Voices Incorporated; it was called The Believers. This was during the sixties, and they were trying to raise the level of black consciousness through musical theater. I had met this other African drummer, Ladji Camara, who had come here with the African Ballet of Guinea. He had worked also with Olatunji, and he and I happened to be the drummers who started off and ended this show. The show would start in Africa to show the development and gradual evolution of black people as happened later here in America. The Underground Railroad, slavery songs, songs about freedom, gospel songs—the whole scenario was based around music. After The Believers closed, Voices Incorporated was a group of the same people who continued doing these kinds of shows around the country. It was another great experience for me because there I had the opportunity to be a drummer playing trap set with trained voices. Most of the people who sang in that show were trained operatically, but they would sing black spirituals. There’s a connection, as I was saving before about encultural influence; you have spirituals which are a development of New England hymnody and African rhythmical inflections. The people go to schools like Juilliard and get operatic training, but when they begin to sing spirituals it comes out another way; you have the bent notes, the dropping of the voices at the end of words, shouts, field hollers, and so forth. It was a great thing that they could relate to and hear my drumming so easily.
HH: Were you the only instrumentalist?
AC: Usually there would be a piano, but sometimes it would be just the voices and me. It was very strict harmony, the chords being stacked as we know them to be, in thirds, sometimes with the higher functions.
In between I was making jazz gigs, but Voices Incorporated was a way for me to make some money and at the same time be in something which I thought was artistically viable and in keeping with my other goal, which is what I’m doing now.
HH: Surely that experience helped to prepare you for the completely natural ensemble you have with Jeanne Lee and Jimmy Lyons. In most situations, if you told someone that your band consisted of voice, saxophone, and drums, he’d say, “Well, there’s something missing.”
AC: Right, yeah. Here we are, talking about education. A lot of my education has been empirical. Conservatories are just that; they conserve what people learn over the years through experience. So even though I haven’t gone completely through a conservatory in the academic sense, I’ve gone to a conservatory of life, and I probably couldn’t learn how to do these things in a school. I am out here living a life heavily influenced by politics, economics, sociology, and so on. Playing art that is relevant to the times—which is invaluable experience. I’ve had the ability and the good fortune to be involved with people who allow me to do my work.
HH: Do you think that the current state of jazz education in America is healthy?
AC: Well, I haven’t been involved in a real academic setting since I was out at Antioch with Jimmy and Cecil back in the seventies, so I can’t say that I think it’s really better or worse. But from what I hear, there are more programs going on around the country. I understand now you are able to get degrees in “jazz.” so I would say that perhaps on a comprehensive basis, with the establishment becoming more involved with the music, maybe it is getting better. I would say too that the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in 1979 [which featured Andrew as a performer-clinician], incorporating styles from the other disciplines of drumming, addressed itself to a larger area of education. There are people who are trying. Then again, this country has so many universities and schools that probably, if you really looked at the percentage of jazz education, it would be less than a drop in the bucket.
HH: Your most famous gig as a sideman was with Cecil Taylor. Tell me about that.
AC: I met Cecil back in 1958, up at Hartnett. I met him through trumpeter Ted Curson, who had a rehearsal with him and asked me to come along and meet this guy who plays piano in a very unusual way. When I got there, Cecil asked me if I wanted to play, and I played with him on that occasion. We hung out and became musical acquaintances and, as time went on, observed each other on the scene. Cecil would practice and hold rehearsals at Hartnett, and finally in 1964, when Sunny Murray left Cecil’s band. I was there. Cecil knew about the work that I had been doing with people like Walt Dickerson. Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and Bill Barron. I had made records with them as well as with Coleman Hawkins. Cecil would see me and we always had a good rapport. So Cecil asked me to be part of his organization, and I said. “Sure!” That was ’64, and the relationship lasted until ’75.
HH: How would you describe your personal relationship with Cecil?
AC: It was one of great rapport. We understood each other as black individuals in an American social system that sometimes has been very unfair and unjust to individuals like ourselves.
Often when I’d be around him I would have this feeling of peace and tranquility. He was someone I didn’t have to struggle with, explain or demonstrate to, or be always on guard against as to what I was, what I felt, and why I was playing the drums the way I did.
It was a total relationship in that I worked with him on almost all of his gigs. But very often we would maybe only work two or three times a year; I’d be doing other things. During this time I was working with Voices Incorporated and so forth. I was also working with dance classes, which was another invaluable experience.
HH: That seems to be one of those New York phenomena, that a drummer has the accompaniment of dance programs as an opportunity which is not nearly so available in other cities.
AC: Which is unfortunate, really unfortunate. Just as you can relate the voice to any other instrument, dance is another manifestation of music, almost a twin to rhythm. People don’t dance unless they dance to rhythm. Why can’t there be more drummers and dancers who get together? It’s another whole area of exploration in the arts, the visual contact as well as the auditory. Some of it’s fantastic because when you find a dancer who can hear and utilize his or her body the way that an instrumentalist can, it’s almost like watching the musical development itself. You can exert the same kind of creativity with a dancer that you do with other instruments, but you have to think a little differently. Dancers organize their movements a little differently from the way we organize sound, so you have to find a way to play the music so that it relates to their artistic science of form and count. Of course, in other cultures, such as India and Africa, dance and drumming go almost hand in hand. Here, in some ways, it’s been more widely separated, probably because of the European heritage of the drum in relation to the other instruments of the symphony orchestra.
HH: To what do you attribute, and how would you describe, the widely acclaimed musical rapport which you shared with Cecil?
AC: From my own point of view, I would have to say that my role as a drummer in the organization sometimes was, as it was even before I worked with Cecil and as it continues to be, interpretive.
I was always told that the role of the drums was one of accompaniment in relation to the soloist. With Cecil, however, that particular concept changed a bit. Sometimes, yes, I would be accompanying, but other times I would be soloing simultaneously with whomever it was who was actually the featured soloist, listening to what was happening all around me. You would hear, therefore, this density of rhythm and sound coming from the Unit. You might ask, “How did the audience know when a particular person was soloing if everyone else was soloing?” Well, the person who was soloing would simply raise the level of consciousness and go one notch higher in terms of projection. In other words, he would project his ideas more strongly, setting dynamically the direction and shape that the improvisation would take. That’s how we solved that problem among ourselves. When we were playing and it was time for somebody to solo, there was no doubt about it because he was the individual who would take over.
I would think of forming contrasting shapes, sounds, and rhythms by employing various timbres from the trap drum set. I would think of antiphonal phrasings. It was a push-pull concept that would suggest and absorb the ideas being presented. Ninety-nine percent of the time Cecil would not tell me what to play; that was left wholly up to my own interpretation. This was an excellent situation because it gave me an opportunity to form my own sound within the language. It also presented a challenge in that I had to measure up to whatever else was happening, playing something that was interesting to the others as well as to myself. We had a feeling of continuity, rapport, and support.
Sometimes I would project certain feelings and pulses by using parts of the drum set in a particular way. For example, using the ride cymbal primarily, with alternate-hand accents around the set to give a feeling of floating, levitation; or rapid, high-tension rhythms with incredible energy to generate force. At other times the opposite was the case, and I would suggest space, brevity, and peace, giving the feeling of being soothed. Whether the tempos that I played were exceptionally fast or very slow or in between, we struggled for sonic beauty with clarity of thought.
HH: How did your role as a percussionist relate to Cecil’s as a player of what might be considered a stringed percussion instrument?
AC: I would think of him and Jimmy and whomever else was in the Unit as part of an African drum choir, where each individual found a place for himself that was natural, unobtrusive, and adaptive to what was happening. There’s always space, and you can always find your place.
HH: You and Jimmy were together throughout that association, correct?
AC: Right. I met Jimmy when he was with Cecil, at Hartnett. Actually, I met Albert Ayler the same day.
In terms of relationships, let me say this without any reservation: I hold Jimmy Lyons, who has worked with me as well as with Cecil for over eleven years, in the same high regard in which I hold Cecil. Jimmy hasn’t received the kind of recognition that he deserves. He is a great, great musician and a true friend. We’ve had fantastic times together, and I’m sure they will continue.
I stopped working with Cecil consistently in ’75. I’ve done two jobs with him since then, one in ’78, a Newport gig, and in ’79, a week at Fat Tuesday’s in New York City.
I feel that things in life are circular, and maybe from time to time Cecil and I will get together, but it’s nothing whereby he can feel that he can depend on me on an “on-call” basis. If he wants to use me and I can make it, then I will, but it’s not as though if I have something that may conflict I won’t choose to do the other thing. I have other priorities now.
HH: What is the background of the Dialogue of the Drums?
AC: That’s another one of those situations in life whereby you meet people, find out that there’s certain rapport, and say, “Well, let’s get together and plan to do something,” and in time it happens. I met Milford Graves about 1959 or 1960.I was playing a dance in St. Alban’s Queens opposite another band, and Milford was the drummer in the other band. I remember that when I walked in they were playing, and he was on timbales. We probably just said hello to each other. But as time goes on, because you are of a particular frame of mind, you begin meeting people who are thinking more or less in the same direction.
I always had felt that I wanted to do a solo percussion record because I had heard those kinds of things in the past. I had heard Max’s “Conversation on Drums” when I was about twelve years old. Then later I had gotten records of Art Blakey doing pieces like the “Message from Kenya” duo with Sabu Martinez on conga, and “Nothing but the Soul,” which was a track on one of those old Blue Note records where Art plays magnificently. Those things turned me on. Then I started hearing Indian drummers, which is another whole ten-thousand- year tradition. And I used to see these Gretsch Battle Royal nights at Birdland with guys like Elvin Jones, Mel Lewis, Charli Persip, Art Taylor, sometimes Philly Joe Jones, sometimes Max, sometimes Art Blakey. They’d get three or four of them together with some horns, and they’d usually start off with a tune like “Cherokee.” Everyone would play, eventually they would trade fours or eights or choruses, and then the horns would let the drummers have it. I saw all that; that was the generation that preceded me.
Later, as I began getting these other concepts about how to organize rhythm and how to make music from the drum, I said to myself, “Well, since I have this stuff, I might as well think about a way of documenting it in this time zone.” I knew about Milford and approached him about doing some duos. The first time we played was for some people from a mental institution, and they loved it! Milford and I had a good rapport. I knew that he was trying to expand the consciousness of the drum set, so it was only a natural union. Around the same time I knew also that Rashied Ali, who had been working with Coltrane, was going in the same direction. This is how we got to the Dialogue of the Drums.
HH: How do you as a drum ensemble organize a totality of ideas and maintain musical interest?
AC: Let me answer the last part first. You create musical interest through the organization of your performance and whatever abilities you have to communicate that to an audience. To answer the first part, we have compositions.
HH: Predetermined throughout?
AC: Sometimes, yes, very often. For instance, I would contribute a composition that I would think about just as I do for the other instruments, and I would explain its organization. Milford and Rashied would present their ideas and compositions as well. And let me say this: because of the way that this music is learned—this methodology of being able to improvise— we can just improvise flat out and still make music because we know what and what not to expect, what and what not to do.
HH: The Dialogue is an ongoing relationship?
AC: Oh yeah.
Interestingly enough, Milford and I haven’t really played together since 1974, but we have a business together, IPS Records and the Institute of Percussive Studies, Inc., so we’ve been in contact with each other, sometimes daily, over the past six years.
It’s funny. In order to survive as musicians in this society we have to do many things, and one of the things we had to do was to get a business together—which was a result of the music itself. First there was the music, and then in order to continue the music, we had to have the business. In time, of course, the music will always prevail.
HH: It’s important that today’s artist has at his disposal these means of survival— numerous funding agencies, ownership of private studios, record companies, clubs, and so forth—so that he can function more completely in his art rather than having to experience frustration and despair in some unrelated field.
AC: At least this organization of musicians is being given the opportunity, through organizations like the National Endowment, to get little bits of money to create areas whereby we can perform and not have to depend always on the commercial establishment. Of course our returns for what we do are still very small, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.
This was not made available to jazz musicians ten or twenty years ago, which is probably why you had more self-destruction then. Now we are able to use our creative abilities in a more constructive way.
HH: Several years ago NBC produced a videotape of the Dialogue. What was its outcome?
AC: That was with Milford, Rashied, and myself, on a program called Positively Black, and it’s probably in the archives at NBC. Again, with my desire to document the Dialogue and not have it lost to history, I approached one of the producers— this must have been between 1970 and ’72—with the idea of showing this unusual way of playing drums on this program, and he gave us a shot. It was only about five or seven minutes. Maybe in time, as we get older and the music becomes more important on the documentary or academic level, NBC will release that film again.
HH: Also in the media department, you once hosted a radio program on world music. Tell me about that.
AC: It wasn’t really a world music program, but I made it into one. It was on Jazz Alternatives at WKCR-FM in New York, coming out of Columbia University— a student-run station.
HH: Did they approach you as a guest artist?
AC: No, I approached them. This was around 1973 or ’74.
Another one of the fortunate chapters of my life was when I went out to Antioch College. Finally I was able to focus my efforts and energies, which had been scattered so much by my having to freelance in order to make a living. At the college I was able to read, buy records, lecture, and teach; I was able to consolidate a lot of information. Consequently, when I went back to New York I said, “Well, I might as well share some of what I learned.” I approached WKCR and asked them to let me do this program on the various areas of drumming around the world. The program was music that had percussion in it as an indigenous, integral element. I played music from Tunisia, Ethiopia, the Australian bushmen, skiffle bands (a guy playing pots and pans), Zutty Singleton from New Orleans, Charli Persip, Ed Blackwell, Oliver Jackson—I’d try to pick somebody who wasn’t heard a lot in terms of solo work—and then I’d pick one of the avant-garde people, like Sunny Murray, Milford; I had a cross-fertilization program. It was very successful.
I did about five or six of those programs, and fortunately KCR documents everything that goes down. As a matter of fact, I think that any KPFA station can get one of those programs from KCR and broadcast it.
HH: Let’s discuss the drums specifically. Cecil has described various registers of the piano according to their cosmic implications. Do you have any similar metaphysical concept regarding the drum set?
AC: I can very well understand that you can live in certain areas of the percussion ensemble of accouterments and find a home there in terms of what you’re trying to project; playing only on the cymbals, only on the snare drum, on the large tom-tom, on the bass drum; using different effects in order to get different sounds from the heads, devices other than drumsticks in order to produce sound. In that way, yeah, I think of sound, of colors, of rhythm. There are many different ways of approaching a drum set.
HH: You’re a master of what John Cage might call a prepared drum set, playing the instrument while various cloths, chains, or others objects are resting on the surfaces. You frequently will play at a certain “station” of the set without having your feet planted on the pedals for long periods of time. It was refreshing that during most of the first set last night you hardly touched the cymbals— not what one expects from the “modern jazz” drummer.
AC: Right! “Jazz,” what is it? People have to be open in terms of what the music can offer.
HH: The small “jazz” drum sizes, born of practicality, gave rise to a whole different concept of tone color. Today’s jazz listener accepts the higher-pitched, ringing 18″ bass drum, but few drummers acknowledge the instrument, and some who use it do so because they think it looks hip.
AC: It’s a funny thing. It is said that to play with a big orchestra you need a 24″ bass drum. People will dispute this probably, but I don’t find that to be true at all. I play the same 18″ x 14″ bass drum with a large orchestra such as Carla Bley’s or the Jazz Composers Orchestra, which is twenty-four or twenty-five pieces, that I use with a small group, and I get the necessary sound projection. Nobody ever said, “Hey, man, play louder” (I don’t use any mufflers in my drums, and maybe that’s why). I can’t understand the discrepancy or controversy regarding a bigger drum’s being necessary for a large orchestra.
HH: Tuning, grip, stroke, touch, head selection—such things contribute heavily toward one’s tone quality and projection. What are your thoughts on these matters?
AC: Actually, to be honest with you, I like the skin heads more than any other kind; I seem to get more of an organic feedback from them. When I play the drum set, I don’t want the drums to make me work; I want to get some kind of rapport with them, a good feeling from the heads when I hit them. I don’t use any mufflers because I don’t like the flat sound. That sound comes from the studio engineering of records, even though a lot of people don’t know that; it’s an imposition made by engineers so that the sound won’t leak.
I like to tune my drums in an intervalic relationship, fourths, fifths, sixths, octaves; for some reason I respond to that. I like a rich, ringing sound. If I need to muffle the ring, I will muffle it with my hand or some other means. I take all my mechanical mufflers out.
HH: Do you start with a specific set of intervals?
AC: From the large tom-tom to the two closest small toms I might have a fourth and a sixth, which would be two whole steps between the two small toms; and then from the large tom to the one at the top I might have an octave; then the bass drum may be a fifth or a fourth below.
HH: Do you always start in the same place?
AC: I usually start with the large tomtom because it seems to respond first, and then I tune the other drums according to it. But it’s not whether it’s a G-flat or an A-flat or an F or a C or whatever.
Since I do endorse Ludwig and they sent the drums with the plastic heads, I’ve continued using the plastic heads. I’ve found advantages in the plastic heads in that normally they don’t warp or break on you, and they’re not adverse to weather.
HH: Do you always use double bass drums these days?
AC: Well, let me say this: when I do solo work, I use two bass drums. I’ve done a couple of solo percussion tapes that at some time I may be able to have out on a record. I use double bass drums on the Nuba record with Jeanne Lee and Jimmy Lyons.
There’s a track on the Loop solo record where I use newspaper as a percussion device.
HH: What’s the application?
AC: It’s an idea I got from thinking about the news, about news reports as they would come over the media, and at the same time, about different regions of the country and the different kinds of music and rhythms that come out of them. “News” is an acronym for “North East West South.” I rattle the newspaper, and I use it on the snare drum, and I play on it. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to work on it, but I approximated it as best I could. I called it “The News,” and it seems that everybody who hears it likes it because it’s a unique idea. And this recording is excellent. It comes across the speakers just as though somebody is rattling newspapers right here.
I’d play a rhythm going from one page to the next, and I’d crush up this newspaper. I’d have these different sections and segues, so you wouldn’t have any space, but you’d have interludes of newspaper between each rhythmical section.
HH: Manifestations such as this demonstrate how, in some ways, the evolution of jazz has compressed independently into a few decades, developments which occurred in European classical music over as many centuries.
AC: Perhaps so, but with feeling.
Of course, with the Dialogue and with other percussion performances I use all kinds of percussion instruments such as timpani, tubular chimes, crotales, African thumb pianos, and so forth.
I just did a duo percussion festival concert in London with a South African drummer, Louis Moholo, who worked with a now-defunct group of black and white
South African musicians called the Brotherhood of Breath. (He’s now with a group called the Blue Notes). It’s quite interesting, knowing South Africa and its evolution over the past century or so, that here are their drummers, playing the trap set. And they play it with more or less the same kind of conception that we do, maybe because of the same type of colonial influences, but with kind of a South African inflection. I know that Africans from other parts of the continent play trap set too, but they play it more in their own traditional way; it’s more conservative. I don’t think there’s any other nation of people in Africa that would approach the trap set the way Moholo did.
HH: The name of your group Maono is a Swahili word meaning “feelings,” correct?
AC: Yes.
HH: In the same ways that we mean it?
AC: Yes, in my own head, anyway. I always liked the word “feelings”—obviously, I use the word a lot—and, although I could have named the group Feelings, I wanted a name that was different and, in a sense, exotic. So I looked up in the Swahili dictionary the word for “feelings,” and it said “maono.” I may change the name because a lot of people can’t pronounce the word or don’t know what it means, but maybe I won’t.
HH: What do you think about when you’re preparing to play?
AC: I think about organization. I’m one for organization. But within that, you can go crazy if you like; pull out all the stops, let it all hang out. I’m there to make an event, a happening. Within that organization, if it’s not an event, I feel as though I haven’t arrived.
HH: Are there specific things that you do or avoid doing on the day of a concert which contribute to or interfere with your performance?
AC: No. I feel, as I’m sitting here, that if I had to play, and if all the elements were together (the convergence of all the things in the universe that make an event happen), I could do it right now. That’s the kind of feeling that I like to carry with me perpetually. On the day of a performance I’m usually so busy putting all the equipment together that I don’t have much time to sit down and meditate. Of course if I’m early enough I can think about what I’m going to play and how I’m going to arrange it, and I ‘ l l warm up and so forth. Sometimes I do like to be alone at that particular time. If there are other performances going on, I don’t like to listen to them until after I’ve played, so that I can get a focus. I guess it’s almost like a boxer in the training room before he comes out to get into the ring. It’s nothing that goes on for days, though.
The only thing that does go on for days is my preparation for a solo percussion performance. Maybe a month or a few weeks before, if I have the time, I’ll get vague ideas, and then the closer it gets— and I don’t know whether this is something that happens just with me—almost automatically I’ll get the form.
HH: Do you practice on the instruments that you will be playing, or is that left more or less to chance?
AC: Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t, but I can apply the forms in my mind to any instruments. The structures can be the same, but the sounds will come out differently.
HH: Tell me about your current activities with Jeanne and Jimmy, with Maono, with IPS, and with anything else you would like to discuss—the present world of Andrew Cyrille.
AC: Well, all of these endeavors are pieces of me addressing how I have to survive in this society. If I can’t do one thing, at least there’s something else happening so that I don’t get put out of my house.
As we were saying before, necessity is the mother of invention. Sometimes I don’t like that pressure; I wish I could invent under more agreeable circumstances. I have interest in all of these things, but a lot of them come out of the fact that I necessarily have to do something which people may want to buy. Fortunately, I’ve never had to do anything outside of music in order to make a living. We’re involved in a noble artistic endeavor, and I can always point to the aesthetic and say, “This is something of value.” The Institute, my private teaching, the band Maono, Jeanne and Jimmy— all of these things happen from one time to another because I can’t do one thing all the time. It’s almost like freelancing, but with different types of activities that I have inaugurated wholly or in part, that I want to do.
HH: What is the relationship between IPS Records and the Institute of Percussive Studies?
AC: IPS is a business partnership registered in the county clerk’s office in New York, and it’s a profit-making record company. We thought of the appellation Institute of Percussive Studies when we got IPS Records together. As time went on, we decided we wanted also a tax exempt, nonprofit corporation to do some other kind of work, so the teaching practice called Institute of Percussive Studies became that. They’re two different, legally separate entities or functions. IPS Records, which began in ’74, is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I’ve never been offered a record contract in America, by anybody. I’ve done only one record—it’s not even a whole record, just a track—for an American company, in the Douglas Wildflowers series. They have about six albums out with new music people, and on one of them is my composition called “Short Short.” I decided that if I was going to have some of my works documented on records, I was going to have to do it myself.
I was going into a Unit Core record label with Cecil, but for some reason that didn’t happen. Milford had the SRP record company as a business partnership with Don Pullen, but that company became dormant after their Nommo record. I approached Milford with the idea of a company with me in order to do the Dialogue of the Drums record. He was the one who came up with the name Institute of Percussive Studies, the acronym being IPS.
IPS has put me on the recording map around the world, and as a result, the Italian companies Black Saint and Ictus asked me to record with them as well. They knew that I could make some kind of money for them, if not thousands upon thousands of dollars.
HH: How would you compare Maono with the trio with Jeanne and Jimmy?
AC: With Maono, and of course the personnel there may change, although it hasn’t for the past three or four years, I can write with conventional notation and dictate instrumentally what I want. With Jeanne and Jimmy, because of the kinds of musicians those two are, a lot of the work we do at this point is conceptual, even though we rehearse and we know what we’re going to do (a lot of it is predetermined). But it’s not of the same stylistic nature as Maono, which plays charts. Then again, Jeanne and Jimmy have other commitments. Jimmy has his own band and plays with Cecil, and Jeanne sings with Gunter Hampel. So that cannot be a permanent group unless we begin really making a lot of money on an ongoing basis. Maono is more something that I can direct and control regarding the music that I have been writing over the years. In that group, too, the individuals have ideas of forming their own bands (Ted has his own organization, as does David), but I can replace those people.
It’s hard, running a business. You have to sit down every year and deal with these tax situations, and you have to send out statements. I just don’t have time to do all of that. Not that things are over my head now, but with all of these different avenues that I have to drive down, it’s just about saturated. I wish I could practice drums every day for six, seven, eight hours and/or write music for six, seven, eight hours. I can’t have too many irons in the fire. Fortunately, I have a little bit of help, and I have my head in order to devote enough time to each activity to keep all of them viable.
HH: What other projects lie in your foreseeable future?
AC: I would like to write a book on drum methodology one day. Henry Adler has been after me for a couple of years now, but I just haven’t sat down to it. I have enough material and information from my private teaching and from my experience over the years to write a couple of books, as a matter of fact.
HH: Do you use standard published materials in your teaching?
Mosaic Records Daily Jazz Gazette
How Cecil Taylor Met Andrew Cyrille
Cecil Taylor’s collaboration with drummer Andrew Cyrille by now approaches legend in the world of free improvisational music. This account, written for the Revivalist by Libby Peterson, traces not only how Andrew Cyrille came to meet and work with Cecil Taylor, but also how the rising turbulence of the times spurred musical development for both individuals that drew the two together.
--Nick Moy
Photo of Andrew Cyrille: Seth Rogovoy
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Posted by Eric Sandler
Andrew Cyrille & Cecil Taylor Break Free of Structure
Back when bebop, big band, and swing reverberated through nearly every radio, parlor, bar, and dancing venue, some of the greats we know today as the pioneering avant-garde and free jazz musicians were gathering in studios and on street corners deconstructing the parameters and progressions that conventional jazz established to create a completely new genre of music. Some people liked this new genre; others didn’t. But either way, these new genres changed the way we thought of music construction.
Photo by Seth Rogovoy
One of the pioneering free jazz founders is pianist Cecil Taylor, though he wouldn’t necessarily identify that way; he was most inspired by playing with other musicians, including his longtime collaborator and drummer Andrew Cyrille.
In the 1950s, the 11-year-old Cyrille began playing the drums on a whim, volunteering to join a drum bugle corps in Brooklyn. Cyrille and the corps played at dances and parties around town, in the heyday of bebop music, which seemed to consume everyone. He studied classic jazz musicians such as tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, and pianist George Shearing, and swing and big band musicians like drummer Gene Krupa and tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. Cecil Taylor also came out of the bebop scene. Classically trained, he played stuff by Billy Strayhorn, whose classic linear style of jazz inspired the likes of Duke Ellington.
One afternoon in Brooklyn, Cyrille was playing with pianist Leslie Braithwaite when trumpeter Ted Curson approached him. Curson invited the 18-year-old along to a rehearsal he was having in Manhattan later that day with Cecil Taylor, who had begun to experiment with free jazz. After quick introductions, Taylor invited the young drummer to join their rehearsal on the spot. He didn’t tell Cyrille what to play or how to play — they just played. Taylor and Cyrille did that for ten years, learning along the way to hear each other and feed off of the collective creative energy. Listening and playing and listening while playing familiarized Cyrille with how Taylor worked the piano.
Some people consider avant-garde, or avant-jazz, and free jazz to be synonymous, though others consider there to be a distinct difference between the two; avant-jazz dismisses traditional harmony but usually has a predetermined structure that welcomes improvisation. Deciding on specific notes before shows, as Cecil Taylor did every once in a while, is one way of determining structure.
But Taylor is most known for developing the genre of free jazz, which, as the name suggests, is without structure or predeterminations. Both genres were developed in the 50s and 60s in response to the development of bebop and modal jazz a decade prior. The musicians of free and avant-jazz felt limited to the confines of bebop and began experimenting with ways to dismantle the fixed chord changes and tempos.
Cyrille studied drumming at Juilliard, before there was a jazz program. He learned the rudiments, which he’s described as strict beats for soldiers. But playing with Taylor opened him up to new ways of drumming. Cyrille describes his improvisations with Taylor as dialogues, each exchanging a bit of information, putting forth a certain rhythm, beat, or sound that may open up an entirely new conversation. Each had to master their own instrument, not only knowing what it could do, but also knowing how to break down traditional ways of doing it.
Some fell in love with free jazz, but many thought Taylor to be very controversial, believing this free genre to be an abomination to jazz music. By the 1950s, people had grown accustomed to hearing a certain number of chords applied to a certain number of bars with a certain amount of repetition. Musicians like Taylor followed that to some extent, playing a group of chords for a certain period of time, beginning a phrase and following it to its natural conclusion. But his songs didn’t necessarily include a meter. Instead he would play an extended meter, allowing plenty of room for improvisation.
Only a couple times did Taylor ever give Cyrille directions, perhaps instructing him to play a particular beat a certain amount of times. But he mostly left it to Cyrille, believing him to be the master of his own instrument and waiting to be inspired by what this drummer had to offer. Cyrille learned to explore the drums in ways he had never thought of before, coming to rehearsals with new ideas about foot-play, playing in the spaces, accompanying, and coordinating. He used his own sense, and thanks to Taylor, he was able to move beyond the conventions of traditional jazz music.
Cyrille came a long way from the bugle corps’ march-style drumming; free jazz opened him up to entirely new ways of playing the drums. Cyrille officially joined Taylor’s unit in 1964 and recorded the landmark album Unit Structures a couple years later. He followed Taylor throughout Europe to play in his quartet and to Japan to record Akisakila in 1973. They made seven albums as a group, and they collaborated on one more album, Incarnation, in 1999.
Playing the drums is a continual learning process for Cyrille—he’s more familiar with the potential of his instrument than he was 30 years ago and is more comfortable improvising. If anything’s changed about his playing, Cyrille says, it’s that he, and to some extent Taylor, has mellowed out. He’s matured, in a sense, his effort smoother, his playing more calm and confident.
Words by Libby Peterson
Music | The New Vanguard
Andrew Cyrille’s Late-Career Renaissance
by NATE CHINEN
October 17, 2016
New York Times
Andrew Cyrille honed his skills in almost every conceivable setting, from high school orchestra to Brooklyn jazz bars. Credit Laurel Golio for The New York Times
Andrew Cyrille opens one of his two new albums, “The Declaration of Musical Independence,” with a syncopated figure on a snare drum, as taut and riveting as a military cadence. Then he adds cymbals and kick drum, giving the phrase a sinuous curve just as the rest of the band enters. What they’re playing is “Coltrane Time,” an obscure piece by John Coltrane, and Mr. Cyrille shows the way forward with a regal, flowing self-possession.
He has been working this way more or less since the 1960s, reshaping jazz’s rhythmic syntax while engaging with its lineage. A tireless workhorse in the avant-garde, Mr. Cyrille, 76, deserves substantial credit for helping to unlock a freer pulse and purpose in the music, slipping away from a metronomic framework while preserving a rigorous attention to form.
“I used to spend time with older jazz drummers like Philly Joe Jones and Max Roach,” Mr. Cyrille said in a recent interview from his home in Montclair, N.J. “They would always say, ‘You’ve got to make your contribution.’ So that was always in my head. When you find yourself, you have to find your path.” Mr. Cyrille’s entire body of work suggests a fulfillment of that conviction, carried out with little concern for outside approval.
He still hasn’t been named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the lifetime achievement honor bestowed on some of his former collaborators, like the pianists Cecil Taylor and Muhal Richard Abrams and the multireedist Anthony Braxton. But Mr. Cyrille has managed something just as meaningful, bringing his ideas into increasingly mainstream circulation without a hint of dilution. His work on fine recent albums by the pianist David Virelles and the bassist Eric Revis, and with the collective Trio 3, begin to make the case for a late-career renaissance.(Trio 3, with Oliver Lake on alto saxophone and Reggie Workman on bass, will be at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola on Oct. 27.)
Both “The Declaration of Musical Independence” and “Proximity,” a duo recording with the saxophonist Bill McHenry, bolster that impression, if not close the case entirely. A pair of albums with divergent sonic features but a similar ethos of discovery, they highlight Mr. Cyrille’s insight, ingenuity and subtle mastery of touch.
“There’s so much clarity in his playing,” said the guitarist Bill Frisell, who appears on “The Declaration of Musical Independence” alongside Richard Teitelbaum on synthesizers and piano and Ben Street on bass. “It doesn’t swallow you up. And he strikes this perfect balance between instigating something and also responding to what’s going on around him. That’s the most amazing feeling in music, and Andrew’s got that really strong.”
Mr. Cyrille is a gregarious conversationalist, quick to illustrate any point. Born in Brooklyn to Haitian immigrants, he recalls being a small child and accompanying his mother to community meetings, where the great hand drummer Alphonse Cimber would often be playing.
He honed his skills in almost every conceivable setting, from high school orchestra to Brooklyn jazz bars. He studied at Juilliard even while holding a gig with the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji. By the mid-1960s, when he started working with Cecil Taylor, he had a wealth of experience to draw from. “I had been playing dances and parties, bar mitzvahs and polkas,” he said. “I had been in the drum and bugle corps.”
Mr. Cyrille had also provided musical accompaniment for classes associated with the June Taylor Dancers, improvising rhythmic cues for kinetic movement. “That’s, in a sense, how I learned to solo,” he said. “So when I got with Cecil, I was able to do all of that stuff. One time he asked me, ‘How do you hear rhythm?’ I said, ‘I hear it in relationship to dance.’”
During a more than decade-long tenure with Mr. Taylor, who set a high bar for free improvisation, Mr. Cyrille refined new rhythmic strategies. His freedom of expression on the job was absolute, so it was up to him to establish a style that, in his words, “was concrete, and in acknowledgment of people like Kenny Clarke, Philly Joe Jones, Art Blakey and Max Roach.”
Mr. Cyrille also prioritized a kinship with his fellow free-jazz drummers. He learned “Coltrane Time” from Rashied Ali, Coltrane’s last drummer, who passed it along like a family heirloom. In 1974, Mr. Cyrille released the album “Dialogue of the Drums,” a collaboration with Milford Graves. “Pieces of Time,” released a decade later, features Mr. Cyrille and Mr. Graves alongside Mr. Clarke, a bebop progenitor, and Famoudou Don Moye, of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Louder
One track from “Pieces of Time” — the jaunty “Drum Song for Leadbelly,” inspired by one of that bluesman’s old recordings — resurfaces on Mr. Cyrille’s new album with Mr. McHenry. “Proximity” otherwise features a balance of simmering idylls and hard-nosed sparring sessions, with drums and saxophone always mutually engaged. The album is lean and dry but hardly austere: It feels dynamic and fully realized, a product of intense real-time exchange.
“The Declaration of Musical Independence” has a more ethereal footprint, partly because of the instrumentation: Mr. Frisell is a guitarist who can evoke the flicker of sunlight and shadow, and Mr. Teitelbaum favors the abstraction of sculptural sound. At Mr. Cyrille’s behest, every musician on the album contributed a new tune, and they created a few others on the spot. “Begin,” by Mr. Frisell, is a brief dose of swinging mischief; “Say,” by Mr. Street, is a gorgeous, watery ballad.
The composition that Mr. Cyrille brought in was “Dazzling (Perchordially Yours),” a process piece in which each musician elaborated on an assigned set of chords, finding common purpose through trial and error. Playing the tune with brushes, Mr. Cyrille sketches a tempo with clear forward motion but no strict cadence.
“One can define time as ‘the duration of that which changes,’” he said, briefly letting the phrase sink in. “We think of time as something like 1-2-3-4, or a clock that goes ‘ticktock, ticktock.’ But people who lived before clocks, they would look at the sun or the moon, see when the rooster started crowing. That meant ‘time’ for them. So it would change.”
He went on, “How you deal with it, from one moment to the next, depends on the culture that you come from.” Then he laughed, but in a way that made it clear he was serious.
An Andrew Cyrille Primer: 5 Recommended Albums
Cecil Taylor, ‘Unit Structures’ (Blue Note, 1966) This album, deservedly a free-jazz landmark, presents Mr. Cyrille as the ideal improvisational partner, meeting every swarm and surge in Mr. Taylor’s pianism with his own rumbling poise.
Leroy Jenkins, “Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival of America” (Tomato, 1978) The violinist Leroy Jenkins made this album in a contemporary classical vein, with Mr. Teitelbaum on synthesizer, George Lewis on electronics and Mr. Cyrille in alert and supple form.
Andrew Cyrille & Maono, “Metamusicians’ Stomp” (Black Saint, 1978) Mr. Cyrille featured several of his compositions on this earthy and exploratory album, featuring a captivating young tenor saxophonist, David S. Ware, alongside the slashing trumpeter Ted Daniel.
Milford Graves, Andrew Cyrille, Kenny Clarke, Famoudou Don Moye, “Pieces of Time” (Soul Note, 1984) An intergenerational drummer’s summit featuring compositions by all four members (Mr. Cyrille has two) and a spirit of selfless camaraderie.
Trio 3 + Vijay Iyer, “Wiring” (Intakt, 2014) The powerfully insightful collective Trio 3 — Oliver Lake on alto saxophone, Mr. Workman on bass, Mr. Cyrille on drums — has made several fine recent albums with guest pianists. This one, featuring Mr. Iyer, is a knockout.
Articles in this series will examine jazz musicians who are helping reshape the art form, often beyond the glare of the spotlight.
A version of this article appears in print on October 18, 2016, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Jazz Drummer’s Late-Career Renaissance. Order Reprints| Today's Paper
Review
Music Reviews
Two New Records Showcase The Range Of Jazz Drummer Andrew Cyrille
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October 3, 2016
Heard on Fresh Air
by Kevin Whitehead
Proximity highlights the potential of the drums, while The Declaration of Musical Independence emphasizes soundscapes. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says Cyrille's albums are a study in contrasts.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. Andrew Cyrille is a particularly versatile jazz drummer who came up swinging behind Coleman Hawkins and Mary Lou Williams and then played free jazz with Cecil Taylor. Cyrille has led his own bands and percussion ensembles and has explored the rhythms of Haiti and played in duos that blur the sound of drums and electronics. Andrew Cyrille has two new albums out. Our jazz critic Kevin Whitehead has a review.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW CYRILLE QUARTET COMPOSITION, "FABULA")
KEVIN WHITEHEAD, BYLINE: Andrew Cyrille with tenor saxophone Bill McHenry from their duo album "Proximity." The drummer contains multitudes and two contrasting new records on different labels only hint at his range. "Proximity" is all about the drums and their melodic potential, and we'll get back to it. Cyrille's other album, for quartet, is more about atmospheres and soundscapes where you can't always tell who's playing what. That record's called "The Declaration Of Musical Independence."
(SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW CYRILLE QUARTET COMPOSITION, "DAZZLING (PERCHORDALLY YOURS)")
WHITEHEAD: The key player on Andrew Cyrille's album "The Declaration Of Musical Independence" is Richard Teitelbaum on electronics. He and Cyrille had been crossing paths since the '70s. And the drummer loves matching his sound to Teitelbaum's synthesizer and manipulated samples. Guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Ben Street also know about mutable sound. And the players may dive into those ambling atmospherics even where the drums provide more definition and direction.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW CYRILLE QUARTET COMPOSITION, "COLTRANE TIME")
WHITEHEAD: John Coltrane's tune "Coltrane Time," which he never recorded. In those rare moments when Andrew Cyrille's quartet plays in tempo, his drums are very much part of the conversation, not the backdrop for it. The liveliest tone is Richard Teitelbaum's tumbling "Herky Jerky," with the composer on piano.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW CYRILLE QUARTET COMPOSITION, "HERKY JERKY")
WHITEHEAD: Andrew Cyrille is such a team player on his quartet album, he can leave you wanting more drums. And for that, there's the duo record "Proximity," where his trap set is fully exposed and saxophonist Bill McHenry doesn't get between it and us. Cyrille's tour de force is his drum-set version of Leadbelly's dance ditty "Green Corn." The clackety playing on the rims harks back to early jazz great Baby Dodds.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW CYRILLE AND BILL MCHENRY COMPOSITION, "DRUM SONG FOR LEADBELLY")
WHITEHEAD: In a way, Andrew Cyrille's new albums are two sides of the same coin. Drummers are concerned with tambour, as well as rhythm with the sounds and textures the drum kit can make. Cyrille's diverse new records just emphasize different aspects of the methods and materials he uses every time he sits to make music at the drums.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANDEW CYRILLE AND BILL MCHENRY COMPOSITION, "BEDOUIN WOMAN")
GROSS: Kevin Whitehead writes for Point of Departure and TONEAudio and is the author of "Why Jazz?" After we take a short break, Maureen Corrigan will review a new novel by Emma Donoghue, who wrote "Room," which was adapted into a film last year starring Brie Larson. This is FRESH AIR.
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ANDREW CYRILLE - ANTHONY BRAXTON
DUO PALINDROM 2002. INTAKT CD 088 / 2004
Interview with Andrew Cyrille by Ted Panken
Andrew Cyrille. Photo by Dominik Huber
Ted Panken: Let's discuss the dynamics of your pieces on the two albums. You recorded "The Loop" on a solo album in the '70s.
Andrew Cyrille: The first time I played "The Loop" in public was in duet with Butch Morris many years ago, when he and David Murray first came to New York. The loop, to me, is like a figure-8 laying on its side, like the infinity sign. You go back and you go forth, back and forth. It goes, DINK-duht-duht-DANK, DINK-duht-duht-DANK. Then on top of that, I improvise a rhythm with the drumsticks on the drumset, stating the basic rhythm on the hi-hat and bass drum, with that feeling of looping. I explained that to Anthony, and asked him to improvise something within this concept.
I recorded "Water, Water, Water" with Mor Thiam on "Ode To The Living Tree." The concept came from the feeling of being on Gorie Island, which was a slave point of embarkation in Senegal. I thought of those people moving through the door of no-return, getting on those ships, and being in those places of confinement. I thought about being in one of those slave holds, and the buoyancy of the ship moving up and down on the water. The code is a 6/8 Ghanaian beat, and I supported it with independent rhythms with the sock cymbal in the left and the bass drum.
Ted Panken: "The Navigator" is from a quartet you did with Sonelius Smith for Soul Note.
Andrew Cyrille: I wanted a rhythm that projected some kind of march, and that was a section from the beginning of "The Navigator." It's very interesting about me and water. I'm not sure what it all means. I'm a water sign, as they say, but I don't necessarily believe in that kind of stuff.
"Dr. Licks" is a brand-new piece, a sketch that comes out of notes I wrote to some drum licks. Anthony brought some information to it, and played it very well. We had to practice it a few times, because the way I wrote it was relatively difficult. I'd have to use my brain to play the music again, even though it's my tune.
Ted Panken: What's your performing history with Anthony Braxton?
Andrew Cyrille: We did a recording in 1988 on Tristano music [Hat Hut] with Jon Raskin, bassist Cecil McBee, and pianist Dred Scott. But I first met Braxton in Paris when I went there with Cecil Taylor in 1969. Maybe it was during that BYG Festival business, when all the musicians were in Paris, and I recorded with Grachan Moncur and Jimmy Lyons, and did the solo album "What About." I met Braxton in the street, he introduced himself, and we started to get to know each other. I'd been hanging out with Philly Joe Jones, who told me, "Yeah, man, I knew Braxton could play. You know how I knew? I watched the way his fingers moved." And we laughed. But I looked up to Joe, and his endorsement made me consider Anthony.
As the years went by, I checked out Braxton occasionally. I remember once someone put out the word that he'd said something derogatory about drummers, and I went up to him at the old Five Spot and asked him about it. He said, "Me? No, man. I play with drummers all the time. Drummers are some of my favorite people." You know how he talks. Later on, I heard his duet recording with Max Roach. On a number of occasions, he told me that I was one of his favorite drummers and that one day he'd like to do a duet with me and also with Roy Haynes. I don't know if he ever did one with Roy, but here I am, number two.
Ted Panken: What was your early sense of the dynamics of his music? How would you describe his musical personality?
Andrew Cyrille: A lot of times what defines great musicians isn't necessarily the melodies, or even the harmonies they play, but the rhythm. And the way Anthony assigned rhythm seemed a little different pointillistic, you might call it. In other words, BEEP bop, BOOP. Buh-bu-bup. Buh-bup. But when we played Lennie Tristano's music, which were more or less straight-up-and-down bebop lines like "Lennie's Pennies," based on "Pennies From Heaven," then he came into another light. His playing wasn't pointillistic and staccato, but legato.
Ted Panken: Meaning he adopted various approaches depending on the context.
Andrew Cyrille: Exactly. Which is the sign of a great musician, somebody who is flexible and has studied and learned the language.
Ted Panken: In a broader sense, what was your impression when you encountered the AACM guys 35 years ago? Perhaps more than any other New York musician of your period, you embraced the aesthetic that they were articulating when they moved east. Between 1964 and 1975, Cecil Taylor was into pretty much a take no prisoners attitude a very different aesthetic.
Andrew Cyrille: Cecil is one of the great people in my musical life, and he let me know that I could do anything with anybody, any time I wanted to. I've never stopped learning. I love to explore different ideas with people and see what I can do with those ideas on the drums. Muhal Richard Abrams asked me to participate in his concerts. I took Henry Threadgill and Fred Hopkins to Europe after Steve McCall quit Air. I worked with Wadada Leo Smith, and with George Lewis and Leroy Jenkins and Richard Teitelbaum, who all were in touch with each other.
Earlier, I'd met Chicago musicians like Julian Priester and also John Gilmore, whom I'd worked with in Olatunji's band. On a couple of occasions way back when I played with Sun Ra and the Arkestra. As a matter of fact, Sun Ra used to come to my house when I was living in Brooklyn; he and [vibraphonist] Walt Dickerson would show up early in the morning. I did some gigs in Brooklyn with Clifford Jordan, and with Charles Davis, who lived around the corner from me. So when the second wave came in, hey, I had feet in the bebop and in the avant-garde camps. But I also knew that to do something different from other drummers, it had to be conceptually acceptable to a lot of those AACM people or to someone like John Carter. I had to bring this stuff to life. A lot of that music is written. But the page isn't playing the music, it's the person.
Ted Panken: Are there different challenges for you in dealing with, let's say, the less pulse oriented forms of drum music? Did you have to develop new techniques or a different vocabulary?
Andrew Cyrille: That's an interesting question. Most of the time, I think about myself as using pieces of the language that I have learned from seeing and hearing the traditional greats, like Jo Jones, Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones and Baby Dodds or Frankie Dunlop and Rufus Jones in the big bands. Buddy Rich, to some degree, who was a speed merchant.
Ted Panken: That came in handy with Cecil!
Andrew Cyrille: Well, that's right! When I was working with Illinois Jacquet, he had Jo Jones in his head, and I had to give him some of it. On "Robbins Nest" and "Flying Home," certain things would happen that brought forth certain climaxes things that you might say were scientifically proven! They reached certain peaks, made certain descents, and returned to those peaks. You had to know what to do. Of course, I was young and didn't know a lot about Jo Jones, and sometimes I got frustrated because I couldn't give Jacquet everything he wanted all the time. Then, again, I don't necessarily think that I had to, because I was trying to find my own place and do my own stuff, which maybe he didn't like. He was stronger than I was. He was the bandleader, and I was finding my way. But still, he hired me.
Anyway, I can use all the stuff I've learned in the things I do today, even playing in 2/2 way back with Nellie Lutcher. So for instance, if I'm doing a duet with Braxton or Greg Osby, I might think of playing with a two-feeling for a part, or maybe even the whole, and maybe stretch the meter. Then it's up to THEM to deal with what I'm putting down. So it isn't that I don't use my techniques or vocabulary. But I might use them differently.
Ted Panken: Do you approach the interactive aspect of playing drums differently in different configurations?
Andrew Cyrille: It depends upon the music. The composer dictates my information on what to do. If David Murray's Big Band is playing Billy Strayhorn's "Passion Flower" and Carmen Bradford is singing, I've got to play in a way that allows them to deliver something in the Ellington mode. I do that with everything, regardless of the concept.
Ted Panken: A lot of pianists say they think of the piano as an orchestra. Do you think of the drumkit as an orchestra?
Andrew Cyrille: You could very well say that. The set has so many different parts, and you can get so many combinations out of the different pieces of sound you can find within those parts, and generate the sounds in a way that isn't what some people might consider noise. I guess it has to do with the drummer's attitude, too. If you think it's noise, then perhaps you won't make any music. But if you think it's music, then it's a different story.
Another thing you've got to remember is that the "jazz drummer" and the Rock and Fusion people, too comes out of a metrical sense of time, and the rhythms the Africans play are a lot of the basis of the feeling that jazz musicians play off of, like the shuffle beat. For example, many jazz pieces still are written off the rhythmic motif called the quarter-note, and I'd say that damn near 85 % of all the music written in jazz is based on the dotted eighth and sixteenth beat.
Ted Panken: So 30 years ago, when you're making "Akisakila" with Cecil Taylor, your patterns and responses are constructed off these very elemental building blocks from African music.
Andrew Cyrille: Precisely. And from those building blocks you can thrust a certain kind of feeling or many kinds of feelings. When I worked with Mary Lou Williams, I said to her, "Gee, Mary Lou, I'd like to play the ride beat differently and still play the music." She said, "Well, if you did that, a lot of people wouldn't hire you." So if I'm playing BANG-DING-A-BANG, DING-A-BANG with Jacquet, and then I say, BANG-DING-A-DANG, and let a couple of beats go and no space, or say, BANG-DING-A-BANG, BANG, DING-A-BANG, DINGABANG-DINGABANG, DANG-DANG, DINGABANG, DANG-DANG, DINGABANG, he'll say, "What the fuck are you doing, man?! Swing!"
All I'm saying is that certain things will elicit certain responses. Musicians deal with emotions; you can make people feel certain ways by the notes and scales you play. It's the same with the drums. If I want you to march, I'll play a march. If I want you to waltz, I'll play something in 3/4. Then I can augment or contract. I can play rhythm just like we're having a conversation. I'm not talking to you in 4/4 meter, one-two-three-four, here-I-go-Ted, you-can-hear-me-talking...
Ted Panken: It's not iambic pentameter.
Andrew Cyrille: Right. So sometimes when I'm playing music, I think in the same way as when I speak to you. But I'm still using the words I've learned. Maybe I can go in the dictionary, find out the meaning of another word and bring it into my vocabulary. But it just further clarifies what I'm trying to say.
Ted Panken: When we did the Blindfold Test for Downbeat a few years ago, I presented you a Braxton-Max Roach piece. You said, "Most of Max's rhythms are very clear. They're distinct and anchored. How he thinks of some of those original rhythms, and executes them with such clarity and weight, using motives and theme-and-variation construction, is amazing." It seems that in this recital, more or less, you play from that perspective. After Max and Braxton, I presented you a Cecil Taylor-Tony Oxley duo. You said: "The drummer sounded as though he was matching Cecil's panorama of sound colors and textures and dynamics, rather than playing his own contrasting rhythm, as, say, a Max Roach would. So there wasn't very much push-and-pull, the polarity that sometimes generates electricity, which brings forth another kind of magic and generates another kind of feeling. I think usually in improvisation, a lot of the invention comes from people playing their own rhythms and motifs in keeping with whatever their concept of the music is." You described two different aesthetics in discussing these separate duets, and it seems very much that you're in the former camp.
Andrew Cyrille: Yes, I would say so. To me, very often Tony plays these glisses of rhythms. Which is cool. But sometimes, too, you could take pieces of those glisses and make certain rhythms from them. I can't say that's all Tony does. But my general impression is that this is how he plays at least with Cecil. Maybe when he was working with Bill Evans years ago.
Ted Panken: Well, when it was time to play time, he played time, and when it was time to play with Cecil...
Andrew Cyrille: But time can also be pointillistic. And he doesn't do that. He plays glissando time. People use these terms, and I come up with them sometimes, too. It's difficult to explain sound and feeling in words. All of us are human beings, and we have to try to relate whatever we do to our bodies on this planet! So we can't get too far out, but sometimes we can make analogies as to what we think and feel, from whence these ideas come. So you come up with stuff like "liquid time." Liquid time to me would be like water, where you get motion, but not separation. Think about a river or the ocean. Don't you see motion? Don't you see rhythm? But is it divided?
Ted Panken: You can extrapolate Max Roach's theme-and-variation-on-a-design approach to rhythm and Tony Oxley's glissandos, or washes of color, as representating Afro-diasporic and Modernist European approaches to improvising. But these streams have converged during the last thirty years in great part because of the willingness of the AACM musicians to embrace the forms and structures of Euro-Modernism, and evolution of Europe's own free jazz community. Do you have any reflections on how these developments might be manifested in this performance by you and Anthony Braxton?
Andrew Cyrille: As an African-American, I'm very much European, too, because this is what we learned, this is our culture this is another piece of who we are. For example, David Murray participated in the last thing I did with Irène Schweizer. How in the world can Irène Schweizer, me and someone like David Murray get together and play on a stage if we don't inherit certain things from each other's culture? Does it have to be so cut-and-dried? You say Europe, you say Africa, you say America. Well, yeah, you'd have the polarity when musicians from Africa and from Europe did not play together. But as we have evolved...
Ted Panken: But Stockhausen didn't think about using the sound of Sonny Rollins or John Coltrane; Pierre Boulez didn't use Hank Jones or Oscar Peterson to improvise within a piece. Those are very different attitudes towards what music is. But that convergence is embodied within the AACM or Cecil Taylor. It is a kind of paradigm shift.
Andrew Cyrille: But you see, all these things are works in progress. How do I know that Boulez won't call me up and say, "Come on, Andrew, play some drums" for one or another thing? It's an evolutionary process. Some people want to see what will happen when they put, say, acid and a base together. Sometimes nothing will happen, sometimes you get an explosion, sometimes you get a fantastic hybrid or mutation. People say, "Yeah, we should have thought about that all the time," but sometimes it's just an accidental combination. I can get together with people who come from another cultural base than I do, and at this point of the evolution of civilization and the planet, I'm influencing them and they're influencing me.
Ted Panken: So as the world gets smaller, these kinds of interactions become more common and less exotic.
Andrew Cyrille: That's right. It's less exotic than before. Maybe if I went to play with some Amazonian Indians, some different stuff would come out.
Ted Panken: Peter Kowald was interested in taking folk musicians out of their local contexts, and creating a broad dialogue from their discrete vocabularies.
Andrew Cyrille: There's only one human race, for the simple reason that we all can have offspring with anybody on the planet. So conceptually, the same thing could be possible in terms of culture! Braxton and the guys from Chicago dealt with some European forms into which they filtered some Africanisms, so to speak: That's what jazz has always been anyway. From the spirituals through the gospels... Well, maybe the gospels were a little different. But take those harmonies by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They're singing some of those European hymns about Jesus and God. Each generation has experienced this reprocessing according to the dynamics of the time in which they live. Some times are better than others.
Ted Panken: We've spoken a lot about concept, but not much about feeling. And obviously, the way you play in an improvisation pertains directly to the way you feel. You'll feel one way with Cecil Taylor and another way with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman. You'll feel another way with Mark Dresser and Marty Ehrlich, another way with John Carter, another way with Muhal or Irène Schweizer, another way with Richard Teitelbaum, another way with Vladimir Tarasov, and another way with David Murray. How does it feel to play with Braxton?
Andrew Cyrille: It feels good! I can't say it feels bad!
Ted Panken: But let's address the distinctions that make the difference, even though they all made you feel good.
Andrew Cyrille: I always have to look at the way I get to how I feel. Then I have to understand what we mean when we're talking about feelings. Feelings usually come from some experience. You feel good or you feel bad. When you hear a sound, your brain says, "Gee, this is going through my body," because sound travels through the skin and it's a physical feeling.
In a musical sense, I have to find out what's on the page. Let's put it this way. Braxton gives me a score, and he's playing one line, I'm playing the other line, and then we come to a part that contains what you might call a sketch, where he puts these lines and figures, and he says, "Play whatever you think or feel about this." Let's say the symbols on the page are venetian blinds. I'm thinking, "Well, what do I feel about venetian blinds, and how can I interpret venetian blinds on the drumset?" I can go from left-to-right and right-to-left, left-to-right to right-to-left, left-to-right to right-to-left, and I can do that, say, from snare drum to tom-tom, from snare drum to tom-tom, back-and-forth and back-and-forth and back-and-forth. And just from that motion, a motion like a windshield wiper blade, I'll be able to get a sound. I'll get some kind of rhythm. Now, how does that make me feel? Does it make me feel good? Yeah, it could, if I'm doing it and I'm not flubbing, and the flow is very clear to me. You gave me another idea in terms of a rhythm: OOM-BOOM, OOM-BOOM, BOOM-BOOM; I could do it slower or I could do it faster looking at the Venetian blinds. What Anthony does in relationship to what I do also makes me feel a certain way. When he's playing, I might think, "Where is he going with this? How can I play this to make him move into another area or feel he wants to create something with what I've given him before we move on." That happens on the record. Sometimes he'll imitate me, play back verbatim the rhythms I played. It's interesting and it's cute, and it makes me laugh. So in that light, it makes me feel good. Look, it's like asking somebody if the cup is half-empty or half-filled, and I don't want to start talking about what I don't like, because it ain't about that. All I can say about how it felt to do the thing with Anthony in relationship to John Carter is that it has to do with what they cooked up for me to eat and taste and digest. Both relate to each other, even though they may be on opposite sides of the pendulum. What else can I say than that I feel good?! I thought it was a grand recording. Some magical things happen. Some things that come out of the tradition, where you have theme-and-variation, but I feel that other things weren't quoted or stated in past presentations. It's a great project and I think it will stand the test of time.
Conducted and edited by Ted Panken, New York 2003. © Intakt Records
THE WHITNEY MUSEUM PRESENTS OPEN PLAN: CECIL TAYLOR
A Sunset Performance by the Pioneer of Free Jazz Drumming, Andrew Cyrille.
Photography and Text by Chelsea Kozak
From February 26 through May 14, 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents Open Plan, an experimental five-part exhibition using the Museum’s fifth-floor as an open gallery, free of interior walls. As the largest column-free museum exhibition space in New York, the space spans 18,200 square feet alongside floor to ceiling windows with breathtaking views east into the city and west to the Hudson River.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Jazz Drummer Andrew Cyrille perform under the sunset in the Whitney Museum’s current Open Plan: Cecil Taylor exhibit. Cyrille is considered to be one of the greatest free jazz drummers of his generation. His avant-garde style of drumming was unlike anything I had ever heard. In between sets, he would shout out letters of the alphabet with vigor. Cyrille is just one of many performers included in the Whitney’s current 5th floor exhibition organized by curators Jay Sanders, Lawrence Kumpf, Greta Hartenstein, and Andrew W. Mellon.
The exhibition celebrates Cecil Taylor’s extraordinary life and work through ongoing performances alongside documentation of his life represented through audio, videos, photographs, poems and more. Cecil Taylor, born in 1929, is considered to be one of America's most groundbreaking living musicians. His revolutionary work in free jazz includes a multitude of different musical styles and was considered radical improvisation throughout the 1960s.
Other artists and performers included in the ongoing exhibition include: Hilton Als, Cheryl Banks-Smith, Clark Coolidge, Steve Dalachinsky, Thulani Davis, Chris Funkhouser, Henry Grimes, Tristan Honsinger, Nathaniel Mackey, Dianne McIntyre, Jemeel Moondoc/Ensemble Muntu, Tracie Morris, Fred Moten, William Parker, Enrico Rava, A.B. Spellman, Anne Waldman, Heather Watts, among others.
Lear more about the exhibit here
black history in white times
Seven interviews with Andrew Cyrille
by The Public Archive | Published: December 6, 2015
[Andrew Cyrille: Brooklyn-born avante garde jazz drummer of Haitian descent.]
A fireside chat with Andrew Cyrille, Jazz Weekly (date?)
Body and Soul: An Interview with Andrew Cyrille, Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (2010).
Interview with Andrew Cyrille, Intakt Records (2003).
Andrew Cyrille: DownBeat interview: directors cut (2004).
Andrew Cyrille: Art Science, Part 1, JazzTimes (2011).
“All That’s Rhythm!” A Chat With Drummer Andrew Cyrille, Washington City Paper (2012).
Dialogue of the Drums: Andrew Cyrille, The Black Perspective in Music (1975). [Paywall]
Image: Paul Osipow, Riccochet (1997-99). Used as cover art for the album Route de Frères by Andrew Cyrille with Haitian Fascination on Tum Records.
← For Tommy Flanagan’s 83rd Birthday Anniversary, A 1994 Interview on WKCR
March 26, 2013
An Uncut Blindfold Test With Andrew Cyrille from The End Of The ’90s
I don’t recall exactly when master drummer Andrew Cyrille joined me to do a DownBeat Blindfold Test—maybe 1998 or 1999. In any event, his responses were incisive, on-point, and thought-provoking. Here’s the uncut transcript of the proceedings.
* * *
1. Steve Coleman & Council of Balance, “Day One,” Genesis, RCA, 1997. “Day One” (1997), with Miguel “Anga” Diaz and George Lewis. (four stars)
The thing that struck me the most were the lush harmonies. It sounded like some kind of electric piano using some kind of synthesized accordion-sounding timbres sometimes. The piece reminds me in some ways of Stanley Cowell’s Piano Choir, Handscapes; I know it’s not that, but it kind of reminded me of that. It’s hard to tell who the drummer is because he or she is playing so much within the context of the accompaniment to the arrangement, and with all those polytonalities which dominate it’s kind of hard to hear anything that would identify him distinctly. There is good interplay with the horns; it’s really good. I’m going to take a guess. It sounds like it could be something that Andrew Hill has done. I’ve never heard this piece, but it kind of sounds like him. I was trying to figure it out. I said, “Gee, I’ve heard that sound before,” the way the piano player is playing — and as I listen to it more, it kind of does sound like Andrew. So I’ll take a guess. Could it be Billy Drummond on drums. [“There’s a large percussion choir and a trapset drummer.”] That’s kind of what I thought, too. But see, sometimes… Well, it didn’t sound like it there, but you can also do percussion nowadays with synthesizers, but perhaps not on this. It sounds a little too organic; I agree with you. It sounds like they’ve been playing in 6/8 for a good portion of the time. I’d give it four stars. I can’t tell you exactly who the drummer is. [That’s a Steve Coleman thing for a 30-piece big band with Cuban drummers; the drummer is Sean Rickman and the pianist is Andy Milne.] I thought of Steve Coleman also.
2. Milford Graves, “Ultimate High Priest”, Real Deal, DIW, 1991. (Graves, solo percussion)
[IMMEDIATELY] That’s my man. That’s Milford. The recording is very good. You can tell the sound of his various pitch…the sliding of tonality that Milford gets from the way he tunes the drums and the way he strikes them with the sticks, etc. It’s almost like a rubber sound. A lot of it comes out of the sound of the tabla also, which he hears a lot of what he does coming out of that. Fantastic polyrhythms, energy, creativity, clarity. Good chops. Yeah, only Milford does this kind of thing like that. I don’t think you can find an original like him. Five stars.
3. Billy Higgins, “Shoulders”, Mosaic, Music Masters, 1990.
Rashied Ali. [No.] This is a person to me who if it’s not Max Roach, has been listening to Max Roach. It sounds like some of the constructs Max would play. He’s playing very good antiphonal phrasings, got a good control over dynamics, techniques. Knows what he wants to play. Strong. Good use of space. Could be Billy Higgins. [You got it.] Four-and-a-half stars.
4. Tommy Flanagan Trio, “Verdandi,” Sea Changes, Evidence, 1996. (Flanagan, piano, composer; Lewis Nash, drums; Peter Washington, bass.
I’ll take a guess on that one, and I think that might be Lewis Nash playing drums, with Tommy Flanagan, and maybe Peter Washington on bass. Lewis is dotting all the i’s, and strong. He’s up on the one! He’s doing what he’s supposed to do in relationship to that music, and you know where he is all the time. And of course, he’s coming up with some great inventions in the traditional style of jazz. I would say all of the great brush players like Kenny Clarke and Ed Thigpen and Philly Joe would have to give kudos to that playing. In honor and with dedication… Because I could hear it, that Lewis is working very hard on the drums to make sure that we all remember from whence we came and what’s happening on the contemporary scene, I’d have to give him five stars for that.
5. Tony Williams, “Sister Cheryl” (#1), Live In Tokyo, Blue Note, 1992. (four stars) (Williams, drums; Wallace Roney, trumpet; Bill Pierce, saxophone; Mulgrew Miller, piano; Ira Coleman, bass)
Whoever that was, it sounds like…there was something in the sound of the drums… By that I mean that he had tuned the drums a certain way, and he was playing with the tones that he tuned the drums to. And he was playing his song from within. It was a very spiritual-sounding solo. Melody drums. It was very easy listening. It sounded very smooth. He had very good dynamic shapes, the highs and the lows, the space. There was not a lot of flash and technical splash. And the playing was in 4/4, but it sounded like he was playing from a triplet matrix. You could count something like that in a 12/8. It was very good control. It reminded me in some ways of something Michael Carvin would do, except that Michael’s touch is a little heavier. But it sounds like something that might come out of Michael Carvin. Or maybe even Idris Muhammad. It was like an Ahmad Jamal kind of piece; it reminded me of the piece “Poinciana” with Vernell Fournier playing the rhythm where he’d play on the bell of the cymbal the “and” of the count, like the one-AND-two-AND-ting-ting, and then he would play that other rhythm in the left hand off of one of the toms, like the small tom on the left side, and then of course with mallets. It was a very good introduction to the horns.
Now, I’ll just take a guess and say it was Idris Muhammad maybe with some kind of arrangement by John Hicks on piano. I’m not sure. [AFTER] Really. Ooh. I’m surprised, because Tony usually plays with a lot more rhythmical complexity. But now that you say it, I could understand why it is Tony. That was very good. In this case, I think Tony wanted to reach some people in another way, not in his usual way of playing the drums. I’d give that four stars.
6. Evan Parker-Barry Guy-Paul Lytton, “The Echoing Border Zones”, 50th Birthday Concert, Leo, 1994.
That was very interesting. They got great phonics, and very creative saxophone playing. It started off in such a brooding-like manner, and the players were really listening to each very closely, I can tell, coming in and out of each other in terms of who was playing what sound, and one would add or lay out… In other words, they were extrapolating very well together, editing, giving-and-taking with each other. It reminded me of some kind of organic mass which was percolating over some kind of heat, maybe like before a volcano erupts. It sounds like these guys have been playing with each other for a while. I think the bass was aiming more for the kinds of harmonics that he could get out of the instrument, things that normally people wouldn’t try to get in the more traditional mainstream way, and out of his aim for harmonics that kind of projected his sense of rhythm, and consequently, melody. In other words, it’s kind of reversed. It would seem as though he would get the rhythm first… Well, maybe, too, that’s part of it, but then you would get your melody and then you would aim for your harmonics. But it sounded as though he was going for the harmonics out of which he got his rhythm. But one could say, too, that you can’t have any kind of motion without rhythm being first, because in a sense, that’s what rhythm is — it’s movement. 5 stars.
Now, it kind of sounds like it could be somebody like Evan Parker, and of course the bass playing could be somebody like Barry Guy, and I think the drummer’s name is Paul Lytton. I can tell these cats have been listening to each other for a while. It kind of comes out of that Peter Kowald direction of bass playing, but Kowald is heavier. I was going to say, it’s that kind of European style of total improvisation. I’d give that five stars. Because those cats were intense, and they were dedicated, and they were thinking. It’s very interesting, the kind of sounds that they were getting. I liked that.
7. Charles Moffett, w/ Kenny Garrett, Geri Allen, Charnett Moffett, “Sunbeam” , General Music Project, Evidence, 1997/1994.
That was a very interesting, like Middle-Eastern theme. They started off with a nice three-quarter melody, and the drums came through very clear. There’s a good strong and clear saxophone solo; the phrasing was strong. The piano did a lot of long-metered playing against the up tempo of the drums. Of course, you can play fast, but you can play fast in what they call long-metered or an augmented style, which means that you play it twice as slow, and in that way the sound of the drums came through. It kind of reminded me of the drums being the clothesline on which the laundry of the other voices were being hung.
I can’t exactly tell you who the drummer was. His solo didn’t knock me out that much. I don’t know. The piano playing sounded to me a little like Geri Allen. I couldn’t tell you who the other musicians were. [Charles Moffett, Charnett and Kenny Garrett] Kenny Garrett came to mind, and I can hear the strength of the playing. It sounds like the kind of strength that Kenny Garrett plays. But I didn’t hear some of the familiar kind of things I’ve heard Kenny Garrett play. Now, I haven’t listened to Kenny Garrett a great deal, but I’ve heard him some, so I have some feeling for the weight of his sound. It came to mind, but I just didn’t say that was him. Geri I’ve been listening to for a while, and there are some licks she plays that are identifiable — I’ve played with her on a number of occasions. I’d give that one 3½ stars.
8. Idris Muhammad-George Coleman, “Night and Day”, Right Now, Cannonball, 1997.
Sounds like Blackwell. [LATER] Now, whoever that drummer was with the saxophone player… Certainly most of these guys have a command of the Bebop language. At first I said it was Blackwell because of the high tuning of the drums, and in a sense that kind of playing comes out of the Max Roach playing of songs, melody drums that remind you of what the song is, even though Max plays more patterns that he’s developed over the years and they’re weighted in certain ways. It sounds like this guy was a little more flexible, but thinking with those kinds of constructs as far as drums playing a song. The thing about this guy — as I listened to it more — and Blackwell, was that Blackwell’s rhythmic inflections are different. How he assigns his rhythms, the weight… Of course, Blackwell plays a lot of different kinds of polyrhythms, especially in the solos. This guy played polyrhythms, but they weren’t as independently coordinated or as complex as Blackwell would play the rhythms. Of course, Blackwell invented those rhythms and he played them to a T, his way. I mean, they were there when he wanted them, and any time he decided to issue them, they were there. But this fellow didn’t sound like Blackwell, even though the way you think about tunes like this is more or less the same. I mean, there’s a pattern to the tunes, so you just improvise according to what you hear and what you think on the instrument that you have. This duet also reminded me what Philly Joe Jones and Sonny Rollins did some years ago on “Surrey With the Fringe On Top.”
I’m going to take a guess. It could be Phil Woods and Bill Goodwin. No? Then I’m off on that. But I will say that the drummer was interpreting “Night and Day with the language of the drums, and it was very clear that the tune was right on the money. [AFTER] Very good. I’d give that four stars. Right on.
9. Max Roach & Anthony Braxton, “Spirit Possession” (#5), Birth & Rebirth, Black Saint, 1978.
[IMMEDIATELY] That’s Max Roach! [LATER] I think it was with Braxton. Max’s quality has always been of the highest order. You kind of know that it’s Max becaue of the weight of his sound and, of course, how he tunes the drums also. Max tunes his drums high, let’s say in comparison to Art Blakey; Blackwell listened to Max a lot, and he tuned his drums high also. Max plays a lot of stuff. In this particular piece I heard him playing in several different meters. The opening number, of course, sounded to me like it was in 6/4. But the outstanding thing about it was where he was laying his bass drum and sock cymbal, where he was placing those beats, and it was almost like a 5/4 rhythm, but he just added the extra beat which made it 6. If you listened to it again and had to take one of those beats out and have it repeated, it would be like a 5/4. Max plays a lot of those different kinds of rhythms. Then he went on to something that had the classic bebop drummer’s pattern of SPANGALANG, SPANGALANG; a lot of us say that is dotted 8 and 16th in the written nomenclature. Some people would like to think of it as the quarter-note triplet with the middle triplet missing followed by the quarter note. It’s just a matter of interpretation. The feeling is just about the same. I guess one could think about it in 6… Most of Max’s rhythms are very clear. They’re distinct and they’re anchored. How he thinks of some of those original rhythms if amazing. There’s a definite thought process that he puts in. I know he has to work on it. He thinks of something, he comes up with a rhythm, and then he executes it on the drums. And I know he has to practice that. He has to work on it. That’s why it comes out with such clarity and such weight. His independent coordination has always been excellent. He is a motif and a theme constructionist, and doing that on the drums, he usually lays down some kind of musical melodic rhythmical bed for the players — in this case Braxton, the soloist — to feed off of or play from. Much of his thought process reminds me of traditional African drumming in terms of repetitive ostinato. The only thing is, with him it’s that it’s being done from the African-American perspective as far as the trap set — or, as he calls it, the multi-percussion set — is concerned. He is a consummate theme-and-variation improviser. Braxton was playing typically Braxton, but playing off of the rhythms that Max was laying down as a foundation. For the person that Max Roach is and my great admiration for his enduring ability and for the contribution that he has made to the jazz scene and to jazz drumming, I’d have to give him five stars plus on that one.
10. Cecil Taylor-Tony Oxley, “Stylobate 2,” Leaf Palm Hand, FMP, 1988.
You know, I don’t even want to say the guy’s name! [LAUGHS] Because he means so much to me. He’s part of what my life has been for many years. Cecil Taylor, of course, on the piano. The drummer sounded as though he was matching color textures with Cecil’s panorama of sound colors and textures and dynamics rather than playing his own contrasting rhythm as, say, a Max Roach would. So there wasn’t very much push-and-pull there, give-and-take. There wasn’t a lot of the polarity which sometimes causes electricity, which brings forth another kind of magic, and generates another kind of feeling also. I think usually in improvisation a lot of the invention comes from people playing their own rhythms, motifs, themes in keeping with whatever their concept of the music is. I can’t say there was anything wrong with the way this drummer was playing, which says that he was listening very closely to what Cecil was doing, and there was a certain kind of synthesis that was coming together, a certain kind of unison. Sometimes unisons are good, but sometimes they don’t make for the most interesting of listening, like when you have, again, these contrasting poles. Like, for instance, the way Coltrane and Elvin used to play with each other, which made for some fantastic magic. Could the drummer be Tony Oxley? For the drummer, I would say 3½-4 stars.
11. Jeff Watts, “Wry Koln” Citizen Tain, Columbia, 1998. W/ Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland.
The way it started out was very interesting, the contrast of fast and slow themes moving to swing. At first, because of the construct of the drummer’s rhythm, I thought maybe it could be Blackwell and Joe Lovano. But as it moved into the piece, it’s probably somebody else. A lot of the time it seemed the drummer was leading the rhythmical changes between the swing sections, the Latin sections and the tempo changes. It sounded as though the drummer is a studied and educated musician in both the traditional and contemporary ways of drumming, with a good feel, and he has an excellent knowledge of how to augment the melodic sound of the instruments with the sound placement from the drums. Because you can hit the instrument in so many different places to get various I would have to say drum melodies or drum pitches, drum variations. Obviously, this person has been playing the instrument for a long time, because he knows where those sounds are and he knows where to go get them. It’s almost like his thinking and technique in terms of knowhow to get those sounds are simultaneous. So that takes some time being with the instrument to know how to do that, and to really make music and not just noise… We can talk about that, too, but I’ll just leave it right there for now. There were elements of free playing. It was like bebop and beyond. And to me, in a sense, the concept, though different from the kinds of rhythms, melodies and harmonies that Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Paul Lytton played, the interplay kind of reminded me of them — though this music was not avant garde in that sense. It sounded like these guys had been playing together for a while, too. I don’t know if they had been playing together as long as Parker, Lytton and Guy have been together. I say that because maybe the level of improvisatory interaction among the players could have been — I don’t know — a little more intimate. But sometimes, when certain things are being played in a certain way, there’s not a whole lot you can do that’s outside the parameters of the given. I’Which doesn’t take away from the excellence of what they were doing, because I think they knew what they were doing and they knew what they wanted to do, and they pulled it off.
I’ll take a guess. It could be Jeff Watts with Branford Marsalis or maybe with Joe Lovano, or maybe it could be Billy Hart with Joe Lovano. [AFTER] For the acknowledgements of these fine gentlemen of jazz, who are carrying the information forward, I’d say four stars.
12. Kenny Barron-Roy Haynes, “Madman”, Wanton Spirit, Verve, 1994.
Here the piano was the lead voice in terms of the direction and description of the music, and the drummer was playing what he heard in relationship to that. In this case, in some ways, the piano sounded like it had a McCoy Tyner perspective, with the left hand playing that heavy bass-like accompaniment and the right hand playing the melodic lead. Sometimes I heard the left hand and the right hand being played in unison. I don’t know the name of the drummer with McCoy. I haven’t heard them for a while. But they have quite an integration together with the sound. I’ll take a guess. Was that Horace Tapscott and Billy Hart? [AFTER] I was way off on that one. I could hear that now. I’d give that 3½ stars.
13. James Emery, Gerry Hemingway-Kevin Norton-Mark Feldman “Standing On A Whale Fishing For Minnows” (#7), Spectral Domains, Enja, 1998
That sounded as though it had an Asian flavored melodic theme. But as the piece moved forward, it lost that flavor to some degree. In this case, I thought the drummer played the music very intelligently. It was an extended form, and I thnk there had to be a lot of reading done in many parts of the arrangement. I think as the piece went from section to section, the drummer gave very good support and he played on parts of the instrument that made the sound that was on top come out very clearly. In other words, there was no obfuscation in terms of what he was playing with his accompaniment. I thought, too, that it was very good writing biy the composer. It sounded like it could have been almost a through-composed piece. But it did sound, too, like there was a lot of improvisation interspersed, so it wasn’t a through-composed piece, but there was a lot of composition that you had to have your head on and your eyes clear in order to know what was happening. I’m sure they rehearsed this a number of times, and it came off very-very well.
The composer could be Henry Threadgill, that ensemble, with maybe Reggie Nicholson or Pheeroan akLaff or J.T. Lewis. Or maybe, it could be somebody like Dave Holland. No? Well, I thought of Muhal, but it didn’t have any piano. [AFTER] Very good. See, I’m not familiar with too much of their work. But for the work and the effort and the music put forth, five stars.
14. Lovano-Holland-Elvin Jones, “Cymbalism” (#6), Trio Fascination, Blue Note, 1998. (3 stars)
The saxophone player sounded like somebody who came out of the Sonny Rollins tradition. I’ll take a guess. It was Joe Lovano. This recording reminded me somewhat of the dates that Rollins did with Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach. The bass player sounded like…it could have come out of the walking bass lines of somebody like Mark Dresser or Mark Helias. I don’t think it was Mark Dresser; the way he plays his pizzicatos is a little heavier. Helias is not as percussive-sounding, let’s say, as Dresser is, but they kind of think similarly of that approach to walking bass in free playing. This is what I guess you’d call freebop. It could be somebody like Dave Holland, too. I’m not sure. As far as the drummer is concerned, I had a feeling that it could have been Jack de Johnette, but Jack plays fuller than that, playing more around the drums and getting different kinds of rhythms and shapes out of the drum set, with the bass drum accentuating beats in different places. As I continued to listen, I really couldn’t tell who the drummer was because he sounded rather generic. There was no solo for me to say, “Okay, this was so-and-so who I’ve heard before.” I can’t tell you who that was. What I could say, though, on a positive note is that the drummer played his role well. He didn’t take anything away from the music. But I don’t feel he added a lot to the music either to give it, in a sense, that other polarity I was talking about, to make you want to listen how both people were dialoguing with each other or how the group was dialoguing with each other. Three stars. [AFTER]
15. David Murray/Sunny Murray, “A Sanctuary Within, Parts 1 & 2”, A Sanctuary Within, Black Saint, 1991.
David Murray is the saxophonist, which is obvious from the characteristics. I’ll take a guess in this case, and say who the drummer is. In this particular piece moreso than the duet in the first part, I think I can identify the drummer because of the way he accompanies and how he places the beats, assigns his rhythms, and of course, how he plays to a large degree ametrically, even though the pulse is kind of there. Sometimes you find the meter, and by that I mean count. I’d like to say that was Sunny Murray. [Why was it harder on the duo?] Because it seems as though Sunny usually accompanies more space, and his sound variety is wider. His highs and lows are more definitive. And to me, it sounded as though playing in that context, he plays with more space, as I heard him. What was very interesting, too, is that the way the piece started out sounded as though it came out of a rhythmical shuffle, or shuffle rhythm, out of which the drummer got his perspective to play freely. So in that sense, one could say there was a certain kind of meter. But more so than that, because meter to me simply infers that you have a certain number of counts per bar. You count to 5 or you count to 3 or you count to 12 or you count to 12 or you count to 16 or you count to 2 — etcetera. There’s always an upbeat and a downbeat, and however long the phrase is with that kind of concept of playing in terms of meter, as far as composition is concerned… But in this case I got the information of the shuffle, but it wasn’t any particular placement as far as the number of counts were concerned. I’d have to say it was more of a rhythmical thrust, which had a beginning, it had its conclusion when Sunny decided that he wanted to stop or he wanted to start again. Of course, there was the attack, which is like the one. But there was also a resolution which came where he decided he was going to stop it and do something else. Then eventually out of that I heard the feeling of the shuffle, of his free playing. But I couldn’t really tell you that was Sunny from the duet part. But as far as the ensemble accompaniment, it was definitely his characteristics.
[David Murray obviously is the saxophonist. I think the drummer is Sunny Murray because how he places the beats and assigns his rhythms — and of course, how he plays to a large degree ametrically, even though the pulse is there. I couldn’t really identify Sunny from the duet in the first part, but with the ensemble in the second half he played with more space, with a wider sound variety, more definitive highs and lows — definitely his characteristics.]
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I would have to say the music that you offered me was challenging. It was a variety. Most of these compositions I never heard before, but I’ve heard almost all the players… I know Formanek a little bit and I know Hemingway quite a bit. Even though I know Gerry in another way also, as far as the kind of sounds he gets from his drums. Because he tunes his drums a little differently also, and a lot of the music that he composes, or that I’ve heard him compose in the past comes out of the sounds that he gets on the drums and how he integrates that with the sounds he wants from the instruments.
Also, I didn’t realize that there were as many duet recordings in existence as you offered here. Really! Of course, a lot of them were in context of larger ensembles, but still there were a number which, if you didn’t edit, sounded as though they were just duets with a rhythmical voice, the drums, and the melodic (and perhaps harmonic, if you want to use the piano) voice of the horns. I didnt hear was trumpet-and-drum duets or maybe even flute-and-drum duets, or a lot of string duets. Well, there aren’t too many recordings with drummers and bass players and drummers and violins playing together… You covered the broad palette of perspective of the music, with the tradition coming out of Swing, Bop, Neo-Bop to the combination of the “Avant Garde” unto itself.
Andrew Cyrille
b. November 10, 1939
b. November 10, 1939
Drummerworld
ANDREW CYRILLE
(b. November 10, 1939)
"A great drummer; a fine writer; and a wonderful bandleader; you pass him by at your peril."
--The Penguin Guide to Jazz
"A consummate modern drummer."
--The New York Times
Andrew Cyrille, born in Brooklyn on November 10, 1939, studied with Philly Joe Jones in 1958 and then spent the first half of the 1960s studying in New York at Juilliard and the Hartnett School of Music. At the same time, he was performing with jazz artists ranging from Mary Lou Williams, Coleman Hawkins, and Illinois Jacquet to Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard, Walt Dickerson, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, among others. He also played with Nigerian drummer Babtunde Olatunji and worked with dancers. In 1964 he formed what would prove to be an eleven-year association with Cecil Taylor, a gig that brought him new acclaim and established him in the vanguard of jazz drumming.
Starting in 1969, Cyrille played in a number of percussion groups with notable drummers including Kenny Clarke, Milford Graves, Don Moye, Rashied Ali, Daniel Ponce, Michael Carvin, and Vladimir Tarasov. Cyrille formed his group Maono ("feelings") in 1975, with its fluid membership dictated by the forces his compositions called for rather than vice versa. Since leaving Taylor's group, he has also worked with such top-flight peers as David Murray, Muhal Richard Abrams, Mal Waldron, Horace Tapscott, James Newton, and Oliver Lake, was the drummer on Billy Bang's A Tribute to Stuff Smith (Soul Note 121216), notable for being the last studio session of Sun Ra.
An artist-in-residence and teacher at Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio) from 1971 to 1973, Cyrille has also taught at the Graham Windham Home for Children in New York and is currently a faculty member at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His sterling work has earned him a number of grants and awards, mostly notably from Meet the Composer. Additionally, he has an educational video available from Alchemy Pictures.
Source: blacksaint.com
Andrew Cyrille plays:
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Photo by © Jean-Marc Facchini
Left to Right: Miya Masaoka with Andrew Cyrille and Reggie Workman
LEFT TO RIGHT: Reggie Workman, Oliver Lake, Andrew Cyrille
THE MUSIC OF ANDREW CYRILLE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH ANDREW CYRILLE:
Andrew Cyrille - "High Priest":
From the album ‘Special People’ (1980 /Soul Note):
Andrew Cyrille - drums, percussion
Ted Daniel - trumpet, flugelhorn
David S. Ware - tenor sax
Nick DiGeronimo - bass
The Andrew Cyrille Trio--October 3, 2013:
Andrew Cyrille & Maono Metamusician's Stomp:
Andrew Cyrille - drums, percussion
Ted Daniel - trumpet , flugelhorn, flute
David S. Ware - tenor sax
Nick DiGeronimo - bass
Andrew Cyrille & Milford Graves (1974)
Dialogue of the Drums:
Oliver Lake, Andrew Cyrille, Santi Debriano - at The Stone December 31, 2015:
Andrew Cyrille Quartet--"Kaddish":
Andrew Cyrille Quintet - Senegal-- 1994 (pt.2):
Andrew Cyrille--”Soul Brother”:
Andrew Cyrille--What About?--full album, 1969
Cecil Taylor Trio--Live in Jazz, 1973:
Cecil Taylor--Piano
Jimmy Lyons--Alto saxophone
Andrew Cyrille--Drums
Cecil Taylor Quartet--Student Studies--1966--Parts 1 and 2:
Cecil Taylor--Piano
Jimmy Lyons--Alto saxophone
Alan Silva--Bass
Andrew Cyrille--Drums
Andrew Cyrille - The Loop (1978) [full]:
Oliver Lake, Andrew Cyrille, Santi Debriano at The Stone, NYC - October 22, 2014:
Jimmy Lyons/Andrew Cyrille duet--"Exotique" (1982):
Nuba 1: Andrew Cyrille, Jeanne Lee--Poetry & Lyrics, and Jimmy Lyons, 1979:
Jazz Presents Andrew Cyrille @ The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music:
Andrew Cyrille and Maono--"My Ship":
Duo Palindrome
Andrew Cyrille & Anthony Braxton--2002:
Music in Us--From: The Navigator--1982:
Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille--'Other Afternoons'--1969--full album:
Jimmy Lyons-- alto saxophone
Lester Bowie-- trumpet
Alan Silva-- bass
Andrew Cyrille-- drums
Recorded 15. Aug. 1969 Paris
1. Other Afternoons
2. Premonitions............12:50
3. However...................20:20
4. My You.....................31:22
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Andrew Cyrille
Andrew Cyrille (drum set) performs with Bob Stewart (tuba) and Roy Campbell (trumpet)
Cyrille attended the Juilliard and Hartnett Schools of Music and worked with renowned jazz artists including Mary Lou Williams, Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet, Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard, Walt Dickerson, and Babatunde Olatunji. From the mid-sixties to the seventies, Cyrille collaborated with pianist Cecil Taylor; was a member of the choral theater group Voices Inc.; and taught as artist-in- residence at Antioch College. He organized several percussion groups featuring, at various times, notable drummers such as Kenny Clarke, Milford Graves, Famoudou Don Moye, Rashied Ali, Daniel Ponce, and Michael Carvin. Cyrille has toured and performed throughout North America, Europe, Africa, and the former USSR. He currently is a member of TRIO3, featuring Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman. He has received three NEA grants for performance and composition, two Meet the Composer/ AT&T- Rockefeller Foundation grants, and an Arts International award to perform with his quintet in Accra, Ghana, and West Africa. In 1999, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition.
Aired on rTV: 2007
Performance: April 21, 2007
Performers: Andrew Cyrille, Bob Stewart, Roy Campbell
Andrew Cyrille
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Andrew Cyrille
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photo by Shawn Brackbill
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Background information
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Birth name
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Andrew Charles Cyrille
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Born
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November 10, 1939 (age 77)
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Origin
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Genres
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Occupation(s)
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Musician, bandleader
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Instruments
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Associated acts
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Andrew Cyrille
Photo Hreinn Gudlaugsson
Andrew Charles Cyrille (born November 10, 1939) is an American avant-garde jazz drummer. Throughout his career, he has performed both as a leader and a sideman in the bands of Walt Dickerson and Cecil Taylor, among others.
Contents
Life and career
Cyrille was born on November 10, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York into a Haitian family.[1] He began studying science at St. John's University, but was already playing jazz in the evenings and switched his studies to the Juilliard School.[2] His first drum teachers were fellow Brooklyn-based drummers Willie Jones and Lenny McBrowne; through them, Cyrille met Max Roach. Nonetheless, Cyrille became a disciple of Philly Joe Jones, who in some performances such as Time Waits used Cyrille's drum kit.[1]
His first professional engagement was as an accompanist of singer Nellie Lutcher, and he had an early recording session with Coleman Hawkins.[3] Trumpeter Ted Curson introduced him to pianist Cecil Taylor when Cyrille was 18.[3]
He joined the Cecil Taylor unit in 1964, and stayed for about 10 years, eventually performing drum duos with Milford Graves. In addition to recording as a bandleader, he has recorded and/or performed with musicians such as David Murray, Irène Schweizer, Marilyn Crispell, Carla Bley, Butch Morris and Reggie Workman among others. Cyrille is currently a member of the group, Trio 3, with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman.
Discography
As leader
- What About? (BYG Actuel, 1971)
- Dialog of the Drums (IPS) with Milford Graves
- Junction (Whynot, 1976)
- Metamusicians' Stomp (Black Saint, 1978)
- Nuba (Black Saint, 1979)
- Special People (Soul Note, 1980)
- The Navigator (Soul Note, 1982)
- Irène Schweizer/Andrew Cyrille (Intakt, 1988)
- Something in Return (Black Saint, 1991)
- My Friend Louis (DIW/Columbia, 1992)
- X Man (Soul Note, 1993) with James Newton, Anthony Cox)
- Ode To The Living Tree (Evidence, 1997)
- Good to Go, with a Tribute to Bu (Soul Note) with James Newton, Lisle Atkinson
- Route de Frères (TUM, 2011)
- The Declaration Of Musical Independence (ECM, 2016)
As sideman
With Geri Allen
- The Printmakers (Minor Music, 1985)
With Ahmed Abdul-Malik
- Sounds of Africa (New Jazz, 1961)
With Billy Bang
- A Tribute to Stuff Smith (Soul Note, 1992)
With Bill Barron
- Hot Line (Savoy, 1962 [1964])
With Carla Bley
- European Tour 1977 (ECM, 1978)
With Jean-Paul Bourelly
- Jungle Cowboy (JMT, 1987)
With Charles Brackeen
- Attainment (Silkheart, 1987)
- Worshippers Come Nigh (Silkheart, 1987)
With Anthony Braxton
- Eight (+3) Tristano Compositions, 1989: For Warne Marsh (hatArt, 1989)
With Marion Brown
- Afternoon of a Georgia Faun (ECM, 1970)
With Dave Burrell
With John Carter
- Castles of Ghana (Gramavision, 1985)
- Dance of the Love Ghosts (Gramavision, 1986)
- Fields (Gramavision, 1988)
- Comin' On (hat Art, 1988)
- Shadows on a Wall (Gramavision, 1989)
With Walt Dickerson
- This Is Walt Dickerson! (New Jazz, 1961)
- Relativity (New Jazz, 1962)
- To My Queen (New Jazz, 1962)
- Jazz Impressions of Lawrence of Arabia (Dauntless, 1963)
- Tell Us Only the Beautiful Things (Whynot, 1975)
- Peace (SteepleChase,1976)
- Life Rays (Soul Note, 1982)
With Charlie Haden
- Liberation Music Orchestra (Impulse, 1969)
With Coleman Hawkins
- The Hawk Relaxes (Moodsville, 1961)
- The Jazz Composer's Orchestra (ECM, 1968)
With Leroy Jenkins
- The Legend of Ai Glatson (Black Saint, 1978)
With Oliver Lake
- Otherside (Gramavision, 1988)
- Edge-ing (Black Saint, 1993)
- Live in Willisau (Dizim, 1997)
- Encounter (Passin' Thru, 2000)
- Open Ideas (Palmetto, 2002)
- Time Being (Intakt, 2006)
- At This Time (Intakt, 2009)
- Refraction – Breakin' Glass (Intakt, 2013)
- Wiring (Intakt, 2014)
With David Murray
- David Murray/James Newton Quintet (DIW, 1991)
With Horace Tapscott
- The Dark Tree (hat Art, 1989)
- Aiee! The Phantom (Arabesque, 1996)
With Cecil Taylor
- Unit Structures (Blue Note, 1966)
- Conquistador! (Blue Note, 1966)
- Student Studies (BYG Actuel, 1966)
- Cecil Taylor Quartet in Europe (Jazz Connoisseur, 1969)
- Akisakila (Trio (Japan), 1973)
- Spring of Two Blue J's (Unit Core, 1973)
- Incarnation (FMP, 1999)
- Sunrise Sunset (1990)
References
Patmos, Michael (February 1, 2014). "Andrew Cyrille: Drum Dialogue" (PDF). Modern Drummer: 54–59. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
Bob Young and Al Stankus (1992). Jazz Cooks. Stewart Tabori and Chang. pp. 92–93. ISBN 1-55670-192-6.
- Case, Brian (October 4, 1975), "Make like a chimp (or choose your own alternative)", NME, pp. 28–29
External links
- Bill McHenry Quartet: Live At The Village Vanguard, Recent concert
- [1] video with Stefan Roloff