Andrew Charles Cyrille was born November 10, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York, to a family of Haitian descent. He began playing in a drum and bugle corps at age eleven and was working in a trio with guitarist Eric Gale by his mid-teens. He studied science at St. John's University before turning his full attention to music at the Juilliard School and New York's Hartnett School of Music in the late 1950s and early 1960s, taking early drum instruction from fellow Brooklyn drummers Willie Jones and Lenny McBrowne (who introduced him to Max Roach) and, starting in 1958, from Philly Joe Jones, who became his primary influence.

Cyrille's first professional engagement was as an accompanist to singer Nellie Lutcher, and one of his earliest recording dates was Bill Barron's 1962 Savoy session Hot Line, featuring Coleman Hawkins. Trumpeter Ted Curson introduced him to pianist Cecil Taylor when Cyrille was eighteen, though regular work together would come later. Through the early 1960s he built his reputation as a sideman, recording repeatedly with vibraphonist Walt Dickerson (This Is Walt Dickerson!, 1961; Relativity, 1962; To My Queen, 1963) and appearing with Mary Lou Williams, Roland Hanna, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Junior Mance.

In 1964, Cyrille succeeded Sunny Murray as Cecil Taylor's drummer, beginning an eleven-year association that ran through 1975 and put him at the center of Taylor's most influential recordings. He appears on both of Taylor's landmark Blue Note albums, Unit Structures (recorded May 19, 1966, with Jimmy Lyons, Alan Silva, and Henry Grimes) and Conquistador! (recorded that October with trumpeter Bill Dixon added), and continued documenting the Unit into the early 1970s on releases including Akisakila and Spring of Two Blue J's (both 1973). Even while anchoring Taylor's group, Cyrille kept a separate teaching life, serving as artist-in-residence at Antioch College in Ohio from 1971 to 1973, the same school where Taylor himself later held a residency.

Cyrille had already begun recording under his own name during the Taylor years, cutting the unaccompanied solo percussion album What About? in Paris in 1969 for the BYG Actuel label. In 1974 he and drummer Milford Graves recorded the duet album Dialogue of the Drums, which grew out of a series of mid-1970s "Dialogue of the Drums" concerts that also involved drummer Rashied Ali; a decade later Cyrille joined Graves, Famoudou Don Moye, and bebop pioneer Kenny Clarke for the all-percussion session Pieces of Time (Soul Note, 1984). In 1975, the year he left Taylor's employ, Cyrille formed his own working band, Maono, built around tenor saxophonist David S. Ware and trumpeter Ted Daniel; the group's catalog through the early 1980s included Celebration (1975), Junction (1976), Metamusicians' Stomp (1978), Special People (1981), and The Navigator (1983), the last two adding pianist Sonelius Smith.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s Cyrille moved through an increasingly wide range of duo and small-group settings: Nuba (1979, with vocalist Jeanne Lee and alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons), Something in Return (1988, again with Lyons), a duo record with Swiss pianist Irène Schweizer (1989), the free-improvised summit Andrew Cyrille Meets Brötzmann in Berlin (1983, FMP), and a recurring partnership with pianist Borah Bergman beginning with The Human Factor (1993). He also led the Andrew Cyrille Quintet on My Friend Louis (1992, with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman) and Ode to the Living Tree (1995, with Lake and David Murray). In 1997 he became a founding member of the collective trio Trio 3 with saxophonist Oliver Lake and bassist Reggie Workman, an ensemble that continued for two decades and later added pianists Geri Allen, Vijay Iyer, and Jason Moran as a rotating fourth voice.

Cyrille's output continued unabated into the 21st century, including duo concerts with Anthony Braxton issued as Duo Palindrome 2002 (Intakt, 2004), the Mary Lou Williams Collective session Zodiac Suite: Revisited (2006), and Route de Frères (2011, TUM), a tribute to his Haitian heritage recorded with guitarist Alix Pascal, baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, and Haitian percussionist Frisner Augustin. In 2016 he signed to ECM Records and debuted the Andrew Cyrille Quartet, with guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Ben Street, and pianist/electronics player Richard Teitelbaum, on the widely praised The Declaration of Musical Independence; the group's ECM catalog continued with the trio session Lebroba (2018, with Frisell and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith) and The News (2021, with pianist David Virelles). In 2022 he, bassist William Parker, and trumpeter Enrico Rava recorded 2 Blues for Cecil, a tribute to Cecil Taylor following Taylor's 2018 death. Cyrille has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition (1999), a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works commission (2019), the Vision Festival Lifetime Achievement Award from Arts for Art (2019), and the Doris Duke Artist Award (2020). As of 2026 he continued to teach improvisation ensembles at the New School's School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York and to perform regularly, including an August 2026 week-long engagement at the Village Vanguard with his ECM-era quartet.

Cyrille built his language from American mainstream drumming, Philly Joe Jones's crisp swing above all, but also Max Roach's melodic conception of the kit, and redirected it toward Cecil Taylor's dense, structure-driven free playing, where meter dissolves into constantly shifting cross-rhythms and dynamics rather than a steady pulse. AllMusic critic Chris Kelsey called him among the "pre-eminent free jazz percussionists to emerge from the 1960s," writing that "few vanguard drummers can play with his grace, authority, unflagging energy, and power tempered by a trademark sense of propriety." That range let him move between the all-percussion extremes of Dialogue of the Drums and Pieces of Time, the more compositional small-group writing of his own Maono band, and the more harmonically grounded ECM-era quartet and trio work of his eighties, where his touch on brushes and cymbals against Bill Frisell's guitar sits in a markedly more lyrical register of the same vocabulary.