Andrew Cyrille and Milford Graves | Dialogue of the Drums | Vision 24

Milford Graves and Andrew Cyrille recount stories on how they first met, and the two drummers continue a decades long collaboration with a duet at Cyrille’s Lifetime Achievement celebration at the Vision Festival, a set named for the 1974 lp "Dialogue of the Drums," the first release on the now legendary IPS (Institute for Percussive Studies) Records founded by Cyrille and Graves.

“Andrew’s been a great friend and colleague for over 50 years. Our relationship is beyond words. It’s something special, that only comes around a few times in anyone’s life.” - Milford Graves

Filmed and recorded on June 11, 2019 for AFA’s Vision Festival 24 at Roulette, Brooklyn.

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Andrew Cyrille was born in Brooklyn, New York to Haitian immigrant parents. Cyrille’s Haitian background and participation in drum and bugle corps shaped his early musical development. He would soon begin playing with jazz masters like Coleman Hawkins and Mary Lou Williams, before beginning an 11 year tenure with Cecil Taylor from 1964 to 1975. Throughout his career he has committed to investigating the full timbral and melodic quality of the drums, resulting in a series of solo and collaborative percussion albums, including projects with Milford Graves, Rashied Ali, Don Moye, and Kenny Clarke. A highly sought after collaborator for his vision and creative finesse, Cyrille has also worked extensively with dancers, poets, and visual artists. https://www.andrewcyrille.com/

Milford Graves (b. 1941, Jamaica, Queens) is a percussionist, acupuncturist, herbalist, martial artist, programmer, and professor. A pioneer of free Jazz, Graves was a member of the New York Art Quartet, whose iconic first recording in 1964 featured LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) reading his poem "Black Dada Nihilismus." In 1967, he played at John Coltrane’s funeral. A consummate autodidact with a syncretic approach, Graves invented a martial art form called Yara based on the movements of the Praying Mantis, African ritual dance, and Lindy Hop in 1972. Shortly thereafter, Graves joined the Black Music Division at Bennington College, where he taught for 39 years and is now Professor Emeritus. In 2000 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and began to study human heart vibrations to better understand music’s healing potential, and in 2015 he received the Doris Duke Foundation Impact Award. He is the subject of a critically acclaimed, feature-length documentary, Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018), directed by his former student, Jake Meginsky, with Neil Young.
https://www.milfordgraves.com/

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Video editing by Moon Lasso http://moonlasso.com/
Sound by Stephen Schmidt.

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