Two Jersey Drum Legends Collaborate On What Might Be The Jazz Album Of The Year
Billy Hart and Andrew Cyrille by Owen Howard
Ancestral (Whirlwind Records), by alto saxophonist-composer-producer-educator-author John O’Gallagher, brings together—for the first time—two giants of jazz drumming, both from Montclair in Essex County. Billy Hart, 84, and Andrew Cyrille, 85, recorded Ancestral with O’Gallagher and guitarist Ben Monder at Sound On Sound in Montclair. Its avant-garde leanings and spontaneous composition just might make it the jazz album of 2025.
You’d think these two octogenarian drummers would relax and rehash their considerable achievements by playing the music they’ve played for decades with people like Herbie Hancock, Wes Montgomery, McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, Pharoah Sanders, Eddie Harris, Cecil Taylor and Coleman Hawkins. You’d be wrong. Ancestral is out there, but still accessible. They’re stretching the limits of the music in unimaginable ways. Their shared sense of time itself molds, flattens, flutters and shakes with incessant invention. You’d think you were listening to two 20something drummers hellbent and hungry to write their own rules, as they go out on a limb so far yet always come crashing back to the main beat on time like the cavalry in an old-fashioned western. It is, in a word, stunning. Thrilling, even.
The eight tracks were done mostly in first takes. “Under The Wire” swings, but it also skips and dips like Monk. The energy in “Profess” bubbles and floats like the late Philly drum legend Paul Motian’s work with Keith Jarrett. “Quixotica” is like a fun-house maze that temporarily traps you within its hall of mirrors. Always changing, disorienting even, things evolve quick and it’s over. “Postscript” ends things on a collective improvisation.