Lebroba, the title of Andrew Cyrille’s recent trio recording, conjures all manner of exotic imagery — a medieval castle in Spain, perhaps, or some obscure African musical instrument, or maybe a multi-headed monster from Greek mythology. Its origins, however, are a bit less esoteric. “Lebroba” is an acronym, a portmanteau containing the first letters of the birthplaces of its participants — trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s Leland, Mississippi; drummer Cyrille’s Brooklyn, New York; and guitarist Bill Frisell’s Baltimore, Maryland. The concept wasn’t designed to highlight the regional signatures of those places, but rather to honor the geographical roots of the three players.
A dreamy amalgam of their individual voices,
Lebroba unfolds graciously, unhurriedly, beginning with a spacious read of Frisell’s “Worried Woman,” a song from his 2010 recording
Beautiful Dreamers. The tension and aggression of the original melts into a freer, looser, more melancholic ambience. Cyrille converses quietly with his bandmates. He shades their plaintive melodic statements with the sibilant shimmer of cymbals and snare, the low rumble of the kickdrum like a hint of distant thunder. The song fades to a drumstick tapping metal, a shiver-inducing sound that evokes the quintessence of loneliness.
That metallic sound segues beautifully into the next tune, Smith’s “Turiya: Alice Coltrane Meditation and Dreams: Love,” Cyrille’s plashing cymbals and ruminative accents quietly echoing Elvin Jones’ work with John Coltrane. Frisell’s sparse, angular lines on the title track, a simmering blues through which Smith’s muted trumpet twines like cigarette smoke, follow a riff Cyrille wrote while composing the tune: “Leland, Mississippi/To Brooklyn, New York/Brooklyn, New York to/Baltimore, Maryland” — you can actually sing along with it.
Throughout the album, Cyrille, 79, comments, colors and carves out architectural spaces for his trio mates, his subtle, sublime touch determining — as much as Smith and Frisell — how the music will ultimately sound. While his name has not always been the most prominent on album covers, and his vision not always the guiding light for sessions, Cyrille has been making other artists sound better for nearly 60 years. In fact, his career will be celebrated at this summer’s Vision Festival (June 11-16) in Brooklyn with a lifetime achievement award and performances alongside longtime colleagues such as Smith, fellow drummer Milford Graves and explosive saxophonist Peter Brötzmann.
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Wadada Leo Smith, Bill Frisell, and Andrew Cyrille (Photo: Courtesy ECM Records)[/caption]
On Cyrille’s first recording, 1961’s
This Is Walt Dickerson!, his hushed yet sparkling cymbals are the first sounds listeners hear, and his cracking snare provides a steely counterpart to Dickerson’s lyrical vibraphone. In an interview in
JazzTimes, the late Dickerson raved about the drummer’s “flourishes, nuances [and] bracketing the different motifs. He was awesome.” Of Cyrille and pianist Andrew Hill, also on the record, he said, “I don’t consider them musicians; I consider them artists in the highest sense. They’ve surpassed that category, musicians.” Recorded about the same time,
The Hawk Relaxes, a set by the iconic Coleman Hawkins (see sidebar), finds Cyrille in swinging, supportive mode, for the most part sublimating his voice in service of the session.
Cyrille would find a true champion in idiosyncratic pianist and composer Cecil Taylor, with whom he played for a dozen years and who urged Cyrille to play exactly what he felt was right for the situation. “On occasion, and this was very, very rare, maybe once or twice,” Cyrille recalls, “I would say to him, ‘What do you want me to play? Is this OK?’ He’d say, ‘You know what drummers do. Play 2 against 3.’ And that’s all he would say. I didn’t even really know what he was talking about. He was quoted [in a
DownBeat interview] and he said I had a way of playing with him that gave him something that he could be fed by and that he could feed me. And that’s more or less how I played with him, and that’s the way I play with everybody that quote-unquote ‘plays free.’ So it’s just a matter of how you’re thinking about what you’re doing and the concept that you’re playing.”
No matter the setting, from larger ensembles to duos and trios, Cyrille remains the ultimate team player, providing exactly what is needed in terms of guiding or responding to his fellow musicians. He finds ways to express himself artistically, as well, but never at the expense of the music.
“I think of myself as a tailor who’s making a suit of clothes for somebody,” he explains. “I have to make the clothes for them in a particular way that fits them, something that they like, something that I like. So when I’m drumming, I’m thinking about the people that I’m playing with. I want to make them sound good. I want to sound good. I want them to like what I’m doing. I want to like what I’m doing. And, of course, I would like for the people who are listening to be impacted the same way, with something they can appreciate.”
“I think of myself as a tailor who’s making a suit of clothes for somebody. I have to make the clothes for them in a particular way that fits them, something that they like, something that I like.”
Cyrille, Smith and Frisell convened to record
Lebroda at Reservoir Studios in midtown Manhattan. Smith had the longest commute, about 80 miles from his home in New Haven, Connecticut, while Cyrille simply had to cross the Hudson from his place in Montclair, New Jersey. (His weekday drive to his teaching gig at The New School in Greenwich Village usually takes him about 30 minutes.) And Frisell, who recently moved from his longtime home in Seattle to Brooklyn, could choose from a variety of transport options.
“A lot of musicians come from certain places to New York, and then there’s a homogenized sound which becomes part of a New York sound,” observes Cyrille, talking by phone from his home on a Saturday afternoon just after Thanksgiving. “Now, yes, people who come from certain areas, if they’re there for a certain period of time, then I think that you do have a sound that comes from that area. But you have to remember, too, with [the influence of] radio and television, a lot of the accents that come from different parts of the country are kind of homogenized. So, more or less, everyone sounds — not the same, but very close.”

Cyrille excepts Smith and Frisell from that equation. The wide-open vistas of rural Mississippi deeply influenced the trumpeter, providing him with a sense of space that continues to permeate his often-haunting music. “It opens you up to this natural, horizontal view,” Smith told
The Village Voice. And Frisell, who grew up in Denver, Colorado, was affected not just by the horizontal, but the vertical. “Wherever I go, I’m really affected by the air in different places,” he told
JAZZIZ in 2009. “Every time I go in the mountains, I get this incredible emotional rush. I don’t know what it is. … It’s not just the way things look or the way the people look, but something in the air. And it somehow affects the way music would happen in those places.”
Differences in regional diction and culture were much more pronounced when Cyrille was growing up, before technology leveled some of those distinctions. Born into a Haitian family, he frequently heard the Creole patois of his parents and their friends and the music they would play at social gatherings. However, his own speech patterns reveal no discernible trace of his ethnic heritage, and his professorial locution hardly brings to mind the harsh nasal honk of the stereotypical Brooklynite. But make no mistake, the borough burrowed deep into his consciousness.
Brooklyn was alive with music in the 1940s and ’50s. Cyrille joined the neighborhood drum and bugle corps in grade school, and benefitted from the tutelage of established drummers such as Willie Jones (Thelonious Monk, Lester Young), Lenny McBrowne (Randy Weston, Booker Ervin) and Lee Abrams (Illinois Jacquet, Dinah Washington). “I remember Willie Jones inviting me over to his house and he had a trap set,” Cyrille recalls. “And he said, ‘You begin to do one thing with your right foot, another thing with your left foot, another thing with your right hand, another thing with your left hand.’ So that was much different from playing marches [in the drum and bugle corps]. You would have to orchestrate around the trap set within the concept of the music you were playing.”
By his teen years, Cyrille had purchased a drum set of his own and was playing gigs with classmates such as guitarist Eric Gale and pianist Leslie Brathwaite. Polkas, calypsos, mambos, Cyrille played them all, enriching his vocabulary with a variety of rhythms and textures as he developed and seasoned his chops.
Willie Jones had also introduced the young Cyrille to Max Roach, who grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. As good fortune would have it, Roach married the sister of Bernard Wilkinson, Cyrille’s school friend, and lived right around the corner. When Roach was out of town, Cyrille would practice on his drum set, which he kept in the cellar. But it was another legendary jazz drummer, Philly Joe Jones, who truly took Cyrille under his wing when he was about 18.
“I became very close with Joe,” he says. “I just wanted to be involved with someone who played the drum set a little differently from the way Max played. So I befriended Philly Joe, and I started taking a couple lessons with him, and eventually Joe used my drums on some of the gigs and some of the record dates he made. So I got a lot of ‘on-site instruction.’ Not only from having him show me certain drum techniques, but also from being on the scene when he would record with people like Stan Getz or Miles Davis or Bud Powell; I was at several of those sessions. I would also see him at the clubs. Sometimes Joe would let me sit in with some of the musicians he would be working with, like Cannonball and Coltrane and Lee Morgan and Kenny Dorham. He asked them to let me play.”
Cyrille also received formal academic training — at New York’s now-defunct Hartnett School and later at Juilliard — while he was learning on the bandstand. It was at Hartnett that he met Cecil Taylor. Trumpeter Ted Curson invited him along to a rehearsal with Taylor, who asked the drummer if he wanted to sit in. They would later interact on the jazz scene, and obviously Cyrille made an impression on the pianist. When drummer Sunny Murray left Taylor’s band in 1964, Taylor hired Cyrille. So how does one go from playing ballads and blues with Coleman Hawkins to playing some of the most abstract, avant-garde music imaginable with Cecil Taylor?
“Well, you go very musically,” Cyrille replies. “When I went to work with him, it was just something I had to figure out. Because he was not playing in the traditional way, not playing changes or meter the way they had been done, I just had to think, ‘Well, how am I gonna play with this person? What am I gonna do with what he’s doing?’ Sometimes you think of what you had been doing — playing time, playing 4/4 — and you try that, but it doesn’t work. So I said, ‘Well, I have to try to find something else to do.’ There was always some space for me to make certain commentary or to lead or to bring one section of a theme or a motif to the next section. Drummers do that. They open doors, close doors.”
“Drummers do that. They open doors, close doors.”
Lebroba marks Cyrille’s second recording as a leader with the ECM label. His first, 2016’s exquisite
The Declaration of Musical Independence, also prominently featured Frisell, along with synthesizer/piano player Richard Teitelbaum and bassist Ben Street. He also contributed shimmering accents and intriguing compositions to Ben Monder’s 2015 ECM release
Amphorae. However, Cyrille’s history with the Munich-based label goes back several decades to adventurous saxophonist Marion Brown’s 1970 recording
Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, his subtle percussive touch conjuring the footsteps of a forest creature rustling through undergrowth on the pastoral title track. Cyrille says he spoke with label head Manfred Eicher about doing a recording of his own for ECM at the time — a proposed session with saxophonist Sam Rivers, bassist Charlie Haden and keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith — but the fledgling imprint simply didn’t offer him enough money to make it viable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyrgERZc_Go
Not that money was his key concern. The jazz scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s was bursting with creative vitality. Cyrille had the opportunity to engage with artists from the boundary-shattering Chicago-based AACM, more so when many of them moved to the Northeast. The burgeoning avant-jazz scene developing in France, particularly around the BYG Actuel studios in Paris, also drew the drummer into its orbit; his very first recording under his own name, 1971’s solo-drum excursion
What About?, was released by the label. He’d also play on Actuel albums by saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, his bandmate in Cecil Taylor’s group, and trombonist Grachan Moncur, the latter of which featured AACM saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell.
It was also in France that Cyrille first met saxophonist Oliver Lake, his bandmate of nearly 30 years in the still-extant Trio 3 with bassist Reggie Workman. The communication among the veteran players reaches near-telepathic levels, as reflected on the extraordinary recordings they’ve released, on their own and with guest pianists such as Vijay Iyer and Geri Allen. Their 2017 release, the aptly titled
Visiting Texture, represents their first studio album as a trio, as earlier efforts captured them live. This past year, they brought their sophisticated music as far as China.
Cyrille’s relationship with Wadada Leo Smith also goes back several years. He recalls meeting the trumpeter in Connecticut during an AACM concert. The pair contributed to a track for Dave Douglas’
Metamorphosis series recordings and performed with a group — also featuring pianist Myra Melford and drummer Susie Ibarra — at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which critic Nate Chinen listed among his top jazz shows of 2017. So, when producer Sun Chung, who had worked with Cyrille on
The Declaration of Musical Independence, suggested the drummer team up with Smith and Frisell for a follow-up recording, Cyrille jumped at the chance.
While
Lebroba utilizes musical concepts Cyrille developed on
Declaration — a way of playing that NPR jazz critic Kevin Whitehead describes as an “elliptical new style” in the album’s liner notes — he doesn’t view it as a continuation of the previous album, despite Frisell’s singular presence. “For each recording, you have to have another idea of how you’re going to go forward, what you’re going to do,” Cyrille explains. “So, for this particular date, I had to think of something that would feature, of course, Wadada, or at least have him be part of what I had in mind musically, with him and Frisell. So it wasn’t necessarily a continuation. It was just another date with two stellar people.”
To Cyrille, musicians’ signature sounds are as distinctive as their speech patterns. The music he composes, even the way he plays, is determined by the people on the session. And that mode of thinking has grown exponentially since he nervously agreed to play behind Coleman Hawkins all those years ago.
“I have students who ask me, ‘How do I develop my sound?’” he says. “I never really thought about it that way. I just did what I do, and it comes out a certain way. Sometimes I think it has to do with the timbre of the way your voice is. That’s the way you sound. … So when you think of somebody like Monk, the way he plays piano, it’s the weight that he hits the keys with, and I guess if he had studied classical piano, maybe the teacher would say, ‘No, you can’t hit the note this way, you have to bend your hand.’ But for us, with what we do with this freedom that we call ‘jazz,’ the way it comes out is the way it comes out. And sometimes that personalization is the thing that is very attractive to people.”
— Bob Weinberg