2004 · Album
Duo Palindrome 2002. Vol. 1
Recorded October 2002, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut · Intakt Records · Produced by Not specified
Two Masters Meeting After Decades Apart
Braxton and Cyrille share their decades of musical innovation with fearless spontaneity and warmth.
This is what happens when two musicians who shaped free jazz decide to finally sit down together in the same room. Anthony Braxton on reeds and Andrew Cyrille on drums had spent decades inventing separate languages—Braxton building architectures from reed multiphonics and compositional systems, Cyrille developing a vocabulary of textural drumming that went far beyond timekeeping. By 2002, they had never really recorded together, which makes these sessions at Wesleyan University feel like a conversation that should have happened long ago.
What distinguishes this pairing is how neither player defers to the other. Cyrille's drumming here isn't accompaniment; it's a co-composer responding in real time to Braxton's tonal shifts and structural ideas. The two move between original compositions and standards with equal ease, sometimes romantic, sometimes pushing into territory that sounds genuinely alien. The album doesn't announce itself as a masterpiece, but it has what matters—two musicians who trust each other enough to be genuinely surprised.
Rex Butters wrote for All About Jazz that the sessions "overwhelm any notion of 'reeds and drums,'" and he's right. Jason Bivins, reviewing for One Final Note, noted the albums possess "the very ease and warmth that so many haters have long professed absent from Mr. Braxton's music." This late-career meeting matters not as a summary statement but as proof that two uncompromising artists could still find joy in collision.
Who's playing
Andrew Cyrilledrums
Anthony Braxtonreeds
