Andrew Cyrille’s Latest Quartet Album for ECM

I first became aware of the adventurous drum work by Andrew Cyrille when I started to listening to Cecil Taylor recordings. By the time I left Silicon Valley and began to focus seriously on the nature of listening to music, my interest in Cyrille shifted to his work with Trio 3, which I first began to follow when I was writing for Examiner.com. More recently, Cyrille made his debut as a leader of a quartet album recorded for ECM, which was released a little less than five years ago. The other members of the quartet were Bill Frisell on guitar, Ben Street on bass, and Richard Teitelbaum on both synthesizer and piano. The title of the album was The Declaration of Musical Independence.

Andrew Cyrille, Bill Frisell, David Virelles, and Ben Street (photograph by Arianna Tae Cimarosti for ECM Records, courtesy of DL Media)

This past Friday ECM released a new album of the Andrew Cyrille Quartet entitled The News. Teitelbaum has been replaced by David Virelles, but both Frisell and Street are still in the quartet. Virelles also contributes as the composer of “Incienco” and shares composition efforts with Cyrille in “Dance of the Nuances.” Ironically, my knowledge of Cyrille was limited to recordings until this past July, when he served as drummer in the video recording session of Karl Evangelista’s Apura, which I had the good fortune to attend. It was only through physical presence that I could appreciate the complexity of his polyrhythmic riffs; and, as I later wrote, the experience “left me wondering if Cyrille had grown an extra pair of arms.”

Parsing polyrhythms is no easy matter, particularly when listening is not supplemented by observing the performers. As a result The News is anything but one of those sit-back-and-enjoy-the-listening albums. Even when Virelles is contributing little more than chord progressions, the timings of the shifts from one chord to the next are far from predictable. The good news is that the mixing by Rick Kwan affords clear listening to all four of the quartet members throughout the entire album. Thus, the listener is free to direct her/his attention where (s)he wishes when encountering any of the eight tracks on this recording.

In other words The News provides an experience in which the act of “semantic synthesis” owes as much to “active listening” as it does to the efforts of the performers. One might argue that such “active listening” has always been a part of making jazz, perhaps even when the jazz is being made by a solo pianist. (The solo pianist that comes to mind almost immediately is, of course, Thelonious Monk!) However, the idea that the listener might also be a “maker” only began to emerge during that last half of the last century; and an album like The News makes for a highly satisfying encounter that rewards active attention from the listener.