Evocation documents a live free-improvised performance of three pioneers of free and experimental music as well as innovative improvisers at Roulette Intermedia in Brooklyn in October 2011 – master drummer Andrew Cyrille, polymath guitarist-reeds player Elliott Sharp and electronic music composer-pianist Richard Teitelbaum, co-founder of the seminal Musica Elettronica Viva who passed away in April 2020. Teitlebaum and Cyrille first met while recording Leroy Jenkins’ Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival of America (Tomato, 1979) and Teitelbaum joined Cyrille Quartet for The Declaration of Musical Independence (ECM, 2016). Sharp has congenial encounters with Teitelbaum at festivals and conferences but this was the first time that these three masers played together.
This spontaneous performance flows naturally like a close and profound conversation between old and like-minded friends, morphing constantly and in unpredictable manners between the abstract and the referential, the exotic, the dramatic and the ritual. Like the title of the album suggests, it evokes lasting impressions and summons tender memories of a mysterious, immersive presence. This performance highlights also the deep listening dimension of this immediate and highly nuanced improvisation, and as Cyrille told Howard Mandel, who wrote the liner notes: «The point is to have it be equilateral, to be able to hear each other and yourself in context of the whole».
Individually and as a trio, Cyrille, Sharp and Teitelbaum seek to explore and discover how sounds arise from, contribute and are organized in a greater whole, without surrendering to familiar structures or narratives. Sharp used his electronics set to feed sounds to Teitelbaum so he can sample Sharp’s sounds and reintroduce them into the mix, and Teitelbaum did the same with Cyrille’s sounds, thus creating a well-integrated conceptual feedback system where all three musicians could recycle their own and the others’ ideas. This inspiring performance reveals more and more insightful ideas with each listening.
Eyal Hareuveni
Andrew Cyrille (dr, perc), Elliott Sharp (8-string gb, bcl, elec), Richard Teitelbaum (p, computer, sampler)
