Evento
SEXTA 10 NOVEMBRO - 21H30
Andrew Cyrille, bateria
Richard Teitelbaum, sintetizador, piano
Ben Street, contrabaixo
Ben Monder, guitarra
15,00 eur / 12,50 eur c/d
Born in the United States of America and of Haitian descent, Andrew Cyrille (b. 1939) is considered one of the most influential drummers of contemporary jazz. Often associated with the avant-garde jazz trends of the sixties and the seventies of the twentieth century, Cyrille has gained wide recognition due to his collaboration with Cecil Taylor, probably the most important pianist of North-American free jazz. However, a careful analysis of the drummer’s career, both as leader as well as sideman, leads us to the conclusion that Cyrille, besides being a great free jazz drummer, is also a musician with an unique artistic vision and with a personal style of playing and composing which allowed him to build a body of work of great consistency, as soloist and alongside with some of the most relevant musicians of contemporary jazz, such as Walt Dickerson, Butch Morris and Bill Frisell, besides the aforementioned Cecil Taylor.
Born and raised in New York, Andrew Cyrille studied music in the prestigious Julliard School, having had drummer Willie Jones as professor, who introduced him to the legendary Max Roach. After a first introduction to the city’s jazz scene, a period during which he played with trumpeter Ted Curson, among other relevant jazz musicians, Cyrille was invited to join one of Cecil Taylor’s ensembles, replacing Sunny Murray. At that moment, the two musicians began a prolific artistic and musical partnership which lasted more than ten years and gave birth to some of the most innovative free jazz albums in jazz’s history. In 1971, Andrew Cyrille released his first record under his own name, entitled What About?, in which he expresses a conceptual approach to drums and an idiosyncratic musical identity based on a spatialized and angular style of playing, heavily influenced by African tribal music. Meanwhile, he founded a drum duet with drummer Milford Graves and began to collaborate with saxophonist Dave S. Ware. Afterwards, Andrew Cyrille proceeded his deeply personal artistic path, getting involved with several collaborative projects with essential figures of contemporary jazz, such as Carla Bley, Rashied Ali and Anthony Braxton, while at the same time recording and performing his own compositions in the context of bands such as Maono, The Group and Trio 3 (with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman) and in partnership with other musicians, namely Swiss improviser Irène Schweitzer.
After several years of relative obscurity, Andrew Cyrille’s career has recently experienced a kind of rebirth, and the drummer was rescued from forgetfulness due to his critically acclaimed album “The Declaration of Musical Independence”, released in 2016 by the prestigious record label ECM and recorded by a remarkable set of musicians featuring electronic music pioneer Richard Teitelbaum, bassist Ben Street and guitarist Bill Frisell (who, in Guimarães Jazz 2017 edition, will be replaced by Ben Monder). In this album, which will be the main focus of this concert, Cyrille, a drummer of an impressionistic and textural musical language, develops a music somewhere between written composition and improvisation, punctuated by the extraordinary interpretative capacities of the instrumentalists who accompany him.
“The Declaration of Musical Independence” is a remarkable example of the irreducible artistic singularity of a great jazz musician, a singularity which, after fifty years of continuous activity, remains utterly intact, that being the reason why the title of the album holds a deep symbolic meaning: the music of the future will be independent, or won’t be.