Andrew Cyrille, Wadada Leo Smith, Bill Frisell

CD version. Lebroba brings together three independent thinkers of creative music, the drummer Andrew Cyrille, the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and the guitarist Bill Frisell, in a trio without bass. The title joins the first syllables of their birthplaces, Leland, Brooklyn and Baltimore. It is Cyrille's second album as a leader for ECM, after The Declaration of Musical Independence, and it is the first time Smith and Frisell recorded together. The music is spare, melodic and full of space, with the meter implied more often than stated.

All three have long histories with the label. Cyrille first appeared on ECM on Marion Brown's Afternoon of a Georgia Faun in 1970, Smith with his own Divine Love in 1978, and Frisell on Eberhard Weber's Fluid Rustle in 1979. Cyrille and Smith first played together in the early 1970s, when AACM musicians were moving to New York, and met again in the late 1990s in the bassist John Lindberg's quartet. The producer Sun Chung suggested the reunion. The session took place in July 2017 at Reservoir Studios in New York, with Rick Kwan as engineer, and the booklet carries notes by Kevin Whitehead.

Each player brings in material. Frisell's Worried Woman opens the record as a slow, open ballad, with Smith's full tone in the lead over throbbing guitar chords. Smith's Turiya: Alice Coltrane Meditations and Dreams Love, a four-part suite of written and open sections, unfolds over seventeen minutes, and the drums play freely in its last moments. TGD, credited to all three, was made up on the spot. In his own pieces, including the title track and the closing Pretty Beauty, Cyrille rarely puts the drums in front. "I didn't want to play all the time", he has said, describing rhythms with spaces between them and playing that answers the others melodically.

In DownBeat in 2019, Bill Milkowski praised the way Cyrille underpins the album with "a combination of grace, zen-like restraint and authority". In The New York Times, Giovanni Russonello called the three "masters of improvising minimalism" and heard the album as a cooler companion to Smith's own Najwa. Reviewers also pointed to the references to the blues and to West African guitar in the title track, and to how naturally the trio works without a bass.

This is the CD edition of ECM 2589, released in November 2018.