Bill Frisell, Andrew Cyrille and Kit Downes – Breaking the Shell

The jazz veterans Andrew Cyrille and Bill Frisell have many feathers in their well-worn caps, whether one plucks at the percussionist’s iconic sets of the early sixties with Walt Dickerson and Ahmed Abdul-Malik, his pioneering free jazz alongside Cecil Taylor and Milford Graves, or the guitarist’s cultivation of the ECM sound during the eighties. They have also done more than most to define the modern jazz trio, with Frisell a part of Paul Motian’s longstanding trio with Joe Lovano, a model for his own many dalliances with the form, while Cyrille, the saxophonist Oliver Lake and bassist Reggie Workman, once part of the ‘new thing’, upheld the spirit of sixties improvisation and the seventies loft scene through Trio 3, who after three decades finally disbanded in 2022 following their last performances at Dizzy’s Club in New York City.

Life goes on and their new record develops a collaborative partnership which began with Cyrille’s quartet album of 2016, his first as a leader for ECM Records, a rapt and richly acclaimed late-career benchmark with the keyboardist Richard Teitelbaum and the bassist Ben Street adding flourishes to The Declaration of Musical Independence. Now embarking on a more unconventional trio album, Cyrille and Frisell join forces with the organist Kit Downes for Breaking the Shell, which they have billed as a ‘meditation on sonancy’.

Organ stops come in four types or timbres. Wide flue pipes carry the sound of flutes, diapasons or principals are the backbone of the pipe organ, and narrow flue pipes share the brightness or piquancy of strings, while reed pipes with their vibrating brass strips are suitably reedy. Breaking the Shell was recorded over two warm spring days in May of 2022 at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, a restored building in the West Village neighbourhood of Manhattan whose pipe organ boasts 27 stops and 1,670 pipes, with Downes the Deadeye co-founder and Norma Winstone and Lucy Railton collaborator all over his instrument.

It is the reedy and billowing sounds of the pipe organ which make Breaking the Shell stand out as something unique, as Downes from the outset on ‘May 4th’ layers a low drone with winding and watery flute rushes. At other times that drone gives way to sputtering stops or short phrases which chime like sine waves or celestial transmissions, while from the middle of the record Downes begins to emit these wafting organ chords which he allows to dissipate or simply hang, as Cyrille and Frisell get to work shaping and shading the eleven compositions. At its most cosmic or refined Breaking the Shell can evoke the utopian minimalism of Promises by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra while the record also shares rhythmic similarities with Owl Song by Ambrose Akinmusire, a limpid clearing where the saxophonist was also joined by Frisell plus the drummer Herlin Riley.

For this is a woodsy set which finds something cosmic or immeasurably vast through the looming conifers and cracked twigs of the forest, as Cyrille plays railway track percussion, barrelling down the rickety line in his conductor’s cap, clearing obstacles or eagerly laying down ties and ballast, while Frisell noodles on his guitar with loose plucks and lilting lines briefly ceding to gutsy strums which might drive their chosen composition. The overall effect is of shaded pools, steeped but sparkling in a dappled light, with Cyrille’s deftly animated cymbal work often to the fore, as Frisell’s guitar goes into overdrive on ‘Kasei Valles’, which conjures backwoods rambles as much as its namesake martian canyons, while ‘El’ features the cellist Railton whose verdant bows jibe with the oscillations of the organ and Frisell’s folksy yet probing harmonics.

‘Southern Body’ and ‘Sjung Herte Sjung’ by turns broach Americana and Norwegian folk, through pleading steam whistles and queasy Wurlitzer passages, some headlong and slapdash percussion plus guitar loops and effects, while from the plunging ‘Cypher’ the palette becomes a little bit darker and more metallic. On ‘Proximity’ the drummer Andrew Cyrille indulges his rare penchant for balladry before ‘Este a Székelyeknél’ closes Breaking the Shell as a reworking of the Hungarian Sketches of Béla Bartók, turning those impish orchestral voices and Székely melodies into a nocturne full of misty wandering while those train cries sound out in the distance.