Lebroba, the title of Andrew Cyrille’s recent trio recording, conjures all manner of exotic imagery — a medieval castle in Spain, perhaps, or some obscure African musical instrument, or maybe a multi-headed monster from Greek mythology. Its origins, however, are a bit less esoteric. “Lebroba” is an acronym, a portmanteau containing the first letters of
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Wadada Leo Smith, Bill Frisell, and Andrew Cyrille (Photo: Courtesy ECM Records)[/caption]
On Cyrille’s first recording, 1961’s This Is Walt Dickerson!, his hushed yet sparkling cymbals are the first sounds listeners hear, and his cracking snare provides a steely counterpart to Dickerson’s lyrical vibraphone. In an interview in JazzTimes, the late Dickerson raved about the drummer’s “flourishes, nuances [and] bracketing the different motifs. He was awesome.” Of Cyrille and pianist Andrew Hill, also on the record, he said, “I don’t consider them musicians; I consider them artists in the highest sense. They’ve surpassed that category, musicians.” Recorded about the same time, The Hawk Relaxes, a set by the iconic Coleman Hawkins (see sidebar), finds Cyrille in swinging, supportive mode, for the most part sublimating his voice in service of the session.
Cyrille would find a true champion in idiosyncratic pianist and composer Cecil Taylor, with whom he played for a dozen years and who urged Cyrille to play exactly what he felt was right for the situation. “On occasion, and this was very, very rare, maybe once or twice,” Cyrille recalls, “I would say to him, ‘What do you want me to play? Is this OK?’ He’d say, ‘You know what drummers do. Play 2 against 3.’ And that’s all he would say. I didn’t even really know what he was talking about. He was quoted [in a DownBeat interview] and he said I had a way of playing with him that gave him something that he could be fed by and that he could feed me. And that’s more or less how I played with him, and that’s the way I play with everybody that quote-unquote ‘plays free.’ So it’s just a matter of how you’re thinking about what you’re doing and the concept that you’re playing.”
No matter the setting, from larger ensembles to duos and trios, Cyrille remains the ultimate team player, providing exactly what is needed in terms of guiding or responding to his fellow musicians. He finds ways to express himself artistically, as well, but never at the expense of the music.
“I think of myself as a tailor who’s making a suit of clothes for somebody,” he explains. “I have to make the clothes for them in a particular way that fits them, something that they like, something that I like. So when I’m drumming, I’m thinking about the people that I’m playing with. I want to make them sound good. I want to sound good. I want them to like what I’m doing. I want to like what I’m doing. And, of course, I would like for the people who are listening to be impacted the same way, with something they can appreciate.”
Cyrille excepts Smith and Frisell from that equation. The wide-open vistas of rural Mississippi deeply influenced the trumpeter, providing him with a sense of space that continues to permeate his often-haunting music. “It opens you up to this natural, horizontal view,” Smith told The Village Voice. And Frisell, who grew up in Denver, Colorado, was affected not just by the horizontal, but the vertical. “Wherever I go, I’m really affected by the air in different places,” he told JAZZIZ in 2009. “Every time I go in the mountains, I get this incredible emotional rush. I don’t know what it is. … It’s not just the way things look or the way the people look, but something in the air. And it somehow affects the way music would happen in those places.”
Differences in regional diction and culture were much more pronounced when Cyrille was growing up, before technology leveled some of those distinctions. Born into a Haitian family, he frequently heard the Creole patois of his parents and their friends and the music they would play at social gatherings. However, his own speech patterns reveal no discernible trace of his ethnic heritage, and his professorial locution hardly brings to mind the harsh nasal honk of the stereotypical Brooklynite. But make no mistake, the borough burrowed deep into his consciousness.
Brooklyn was alive with music in the 1940s and ’50s. Cyrille joined the neighborhood drum and bugle corps in grade school, and benefitted from the tutelage of established drummers such as Willie Jones (Thelonious Monk, Lester Young), Lenny McBrowne (Randy Weston, Booker Ervin) and Lee Abrams (Illinois Jacquet, Dinah Washington). “I remember Willie Jones inviting me over to his house and he had a trap set,” Cyrille recalls. “And he said, ‘You begin to do one thing with your right foot, another thing with your left foot, another thing with your right hand, another thing with your left hand.’ So that was much different from playing marches [in the drum and bugle corps]. You would have to orchestrate around the trap set within the concept of the music you were playing.”
By his teen years, Cyrille had purchased a drum set of his own and was playing gigs with classmates such as guitarist Eric Gale and pianist Leslie Brathwaite. Polkas, calypsos, mambos, Cyrille played them all, enriching his vocabulary with a variety of rhythms and textures as he developed and seasoned his chops.
Willie Jones had also introduced the young Cyrille to Max Roach, who grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. As good fortune would have it, Roach married the sister of Bernard Wilkinson, Cyrille’s school friend, and lived right around the corner. When Roach was out of town, Cyrille would practice on his drum set, which he kept in the cellar. But it was another legendary jazz drummer, Philly Joe Jones, who truly took Cyrille under his wing when he was about 18.
“I became very close with Joe,” he says. “I just wanted to be involved with someone who played the drum set a little differently from the way Max played. So I befriended Philly Joe, and I started taking a couple lessons with him, and eventually Joe used my drums on some of the gigs and some of the record dates he made. So I got a lot of ‘on-site instruction.’ Not only from having him show me certain drum techniques, but also from being on the scene when he would record with people like Stan Getz or Miles Davis or Bud Powell; I was at several of those sessions. I would also see him at the clubs. Sometimes Joe would let me sit in with some of the musicians he would be working with, like Cannonball and Coltrane and Lee Morgan and Kenny Dorham. He asked them to let me play.”
Cyrille also received formal academic training — at New York’s now-defunct Hartnett School and later at Juilliard — while he was learning on the bandstand. It was at Hartnett that he met Cecil Taylor. Trumpeter Ted Curson invited him along to a rehearsal with Taylor, who asked the drummer if he wanted to sit in. They would later interact on the jazz scene, and obviously Cyrille made an impression on the pianist. When drummer Sunny Murray left Taylor’s band in 1964, Taylor hired Cyrille. So how does one go from playing ballads and blues with Coleman Hawkins to playing some of the most abstract, avant-garde music imaginable with Cecil Taylor?
“Well, you go very musically,” Cyrille replies. “When I went to work with him, it was just something I had to figure out. Because he was not playing in the traditional way, not playing changes or meter the way they had been done, I just had to think, ‘Well, how am I gonna play with this person? What am I gonna do with what he’s doing?’ Sometimes you think of what you had been doing — playing time, playing 4/4 — and you try that, but it doesn’t work. So I said, ‘Well, I have to try to find something else to do.’ There was always some space for me to make certain commentary or to lead or to bring one section of a theme or a motif to the next section. Drummers do that. They open doors, close doors.”