Bill Frisell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Andrew Cyrille (photograph by Jesse Chung, courtesy of ECM)
This coming Friday ECM will release a new recording led by jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille. It is a trio album on which Cyrille is joined by Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet and Bill Frisell on guitar. The title is Lebroba, which is a contraction of Leland, Brooklyn, and Baltimore, the respective cities in which the three trio members were born. As may be expected, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders for those who can’t wait.
I first became aware of Cyrille through his work with Cecil Taylor. While Cyrille was well versed in providing a steady beat behind adventurous jazz improvisations, Taylor allowed him the freedom to discover and express a distinctive voice of rhythms that were as loath to establish a solid backbeat as atonality was to allow for a dominant-tonic cadence. Since his departure from Taylor, Cyrille has been consistently finding new avenues of musical expression through his percussion resources, pursuing a mission best described by the title of his debut album with ECM, The Declaration of Musical Independence. On that album he led a quartet that included Frisell. He is also the percussionist for Trio 3, in which he is joined by saxophonist Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman on bass.
The five tracks on Lebroba are not, strictly speaking, “committed” to arrhythmic drum work any more than they are committed to atonal lines coming from the trumpet and the guitar. It would be fairer to say that, just as the theoretical infrastructure of dissonance involves establishing ambiguities, many (if not all) of which are never resolved, ambiguity lies at the heart of how Cyrille deploys his percussive “themes,” which often reveal themselves with the rhetoric of hesitant conversation with the other two players. One might say that the music that emerges amounts to some kind of a quest, but one in which the journey itself is more significant than whether or not the goal is attained.
Over the course of those five tracks, each of the players has at least one opportunity to serve as “composer;” and “TGD” is basically a joint improvisation by all three of them. The most ambitious track, however, comes from Smith in the form of a suite in four movements (played without interruption) dedicated to Alice Coltrane. The track lasts seventeen minutes; and, if I have parsed the listing in the booklet correctly, the titles of the four movements are “Turiya,” “Alice Coltrane,” “Meditations and Dreams,” and “Love.” The titles of the last two movements clearly reflect on the music of Alice’s husband John (both his own music and tunes of others he particularly liked), while turiya is a Sanskrit word that refers to an integration of three states of consciousness, waking consciousness, dreaming, and dreamless sleep.
The overall rhetoric of the album is one of quietude. Even in the midst of bursts of energy, several of which emerge from the spontaneity of “TGD,” there is a sense that all paths eventually lead to serenity. To the extent that one can approach the entire album as a joint product of three composers and improvisers, this is music that strays from “established” practices of chamber music (even those of composers like Pierre Boulez and Morton Feldman) as much as it departs from “received wisdom” about jazz trios. As one who is perfectly content to throw category boundaries to the winds, I have to say I am fascinated every time I encounter a recording of Cyrille at work; and I come away wondering where his next recording project will take him.
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