11.11.2024 | Artist
“Good drummers,” the Wall Street Journal observed, “offer firm grounding for adventurous music. Great ones open up altogether fresh landscapes. Andrew Cyrille belongs comfortably in the latter category.” Cyrille, who turned 85 last Sunday, was there at the beginning of the ECM story, opening up the landscape in Marion Brown’s Afternoon of a Georgia Faun in the summer of 1970. And you can hear him again on Jakob Bro’s forthcoming album Taking Turns, due for release at the end of this month.
Masterful drummer Cyrille, born in Brooklyn in 1939, has inspired successive generations of improvisers and made major contributions to the development of creative music. Early in his career he played with Coleman Hawkins, Mary Lou Williams, Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard and many others. From the mid-60s he was closely associated with Cecil Taylor and helped to shape the fluid language of his intense, high-energy musical concept. Cyrille also recorded, alongside Taylor and the massed ranks of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, playing Michael Mantler’s music in 1968, and a decade later toured with Carla Bley’s ensemble, a period documented on the WATT album European Tour 1977.
More recent appearances on ECM include several albums as a leader, hailed in the press as a “late career renaissance” for Cyrille: The Declaration of Musical Independence, with Bill Frisell, Richard Teitelbaum and Ben Street (2016), Lebroba, with Frisell and Wadada Leo Smith (2018), and The News, with Frisell, Street and David Virelles (2021). Andrew Cyrille can also be heard on guitarist Ben Monder’s album Amorphae (2016).
