The Declaration of Musical Independence is the first album Andrew Cyrille recorded as a leader for ECM, released in 2016 when the drummer was in his mid-seventies. Born in Brooklyn in 1939, Cyrille is known for his long partnership with Cecil Taylor and for the collective Trio 3 with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman. This quartet with Bill Frisell, Richard Teitelbaum and Ben Street trades solos for space, suggested pulse and electronic colour.
The session took place in July 2014 at Brooklyn Recording in New York, produced by Sun Chung, with Rick Kwan as recording and mixing engineer. Frisell plays guitar, Teitelbaum synthesizer and piano, Street double bass. The studio was the first place the four met as a band, though Cyrille had history with each of them. He had recorded with Frisell on a session led by the Danish guitarist Jakob Bro. He made three albums with Street and the pianist Søren Kjaergaard, and he had played with Teitelbaum since the 1970s. Cyrille told ECM he wanted "a true quartet project", with every member contributing music.
The album opens with Coltrane Time, a John Coltrane tune the saxophonist never recorded, introduced by a snare pattern Cyrille learned from Rashied Ali, who had it from Coltrane himself. Frisell's Kaddish sets a slow, melancholy line over distant mallets. Three pieces are credited to all four players, among them Dazzling (Perchordally Yours), built on single chord hits and the silences between them. Teitelbaum's Herky Jerky, with its composer on piano, is the most angular track, and Frisell's Song for Andrew No. 1 ends the record with fast drumming beneath a slow-singing guitar.
Reviewing the album in The Guardian, John Fordham wrote that "it all swings without regular swing, sounding fluently melodic, though much of it is cell-like and episodic". On NPR's Fresh Air in October 2016, Kevin Whitehead described a record "more about atmospheres and soundscapes where you can't always tell who's playing what", with Teitelbaum as its key voice. DownBeat made it an Editor's Pick, and Kevin Le Gendre in Echoes thought it could be a career highlight for the drummer. Cyrille had appeared on ECM and WATT records decades earlier, with Marion Brown, Carla Bley and the Jazz Composer's Orchestra.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2430, first released on 23 September 2016, with liner notes by Ben Young.
