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[Giant Steps]
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Real to real
Charles Lloyd’s maverick modes
BY JON GARELICK

At 64, Charles Lloyd likes to say, "The other shore is calling, and yet I still feel younger than springtime." Lloyd is like that, his metaphors steeped in the spiritual and the vernacular. The parables of the Sufi mystics and the deities of the jazz tradition are common reference points. Plenty of musicians — jazz and otherwise — are loath to describe their music in words (the music speaks for itself, after all), but Lloyd is a special case. In the midst of a story about the Duke’s men, he’s likely to remind you that "you can’t build a house on a bridge, we’re all just passin’ through here."

So don’t depend on Lloyd, who comes to Scullers next weekend, January 24 and 25, to guide you through the musical specifics of his exquisite new double CD, Lift Every Voice (ECM). How, you might ask him, is he able to hold our interest over the entire course of the 15-minute, down-tempo opener, "Hymn to the Mother"? The entire piece unfolds over a simple drone figure by pianist Geri Allen (a kind of two-chord "om"), first with guitarist John Abercrombie building delicate figures, and with the leader not entering on tenor saxophone for a good five minutes. How exactly did that band pull it off? What kind of special instructions did Lloyd confer on his quintet?

"Well, first of all, I have to correct something," he says over the phone from his home in Southern California, a soft, engaging Delta drawl coloring his words. "This whole thing about time and vision and velocity and quantum mechanics and all that kind of stuff — what I’m simply saying is: it’s just breathing. When we recorded ‘Hymn to the Mother,’ we were in a zone where it wasn’t 15 minutes, it was just a prayer to the mother. It wasn’t long at all." He adds, "When you listen to it, I hope it doesn’t feel long or laborious."

Not in the least. So maybe Lloyd could shed some further light on how it was done? "They did a radio documentary on me once, and they asked Abercrombie, ‘What is Charles like and what does he tell you to do?’ And John says, ‘He doesn’t say play a C7 over a B-minor, he just says, "Give me some Robert Johnson on the banks of the Ganges with his feet in the water." ’ I don’t know what I said to him! You’ve got to understand that I’m in a state too when this is all going down, and this isn’t choreographed in a missionary kind of way — it’s in full lotus."

Lloyd’s career has had a remarkable trajectory. As a teenager in Memphis, he played with blues and R&B gods like Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and Johnny Ace, and with jazzheads like Booker Little, George Coleman, Phineas Newborn Jr., and Harold Mabern. When he moved to LA, in 1956, to go to USC (where he eventually earned a master’s degree), he hooked up with a nascent scene that included Ornette Coleman, Billy Higgins, Eric Dolphy, Scott LaFaro, and Charlie Haden. He first earned recognition in the jazz press in the writing he did for the Chico Hamilton band when he succeeded Dolphy in the sax/flute chair.

But it was the original Charles Lloyd Quartet, formed in 1966, that turned him into a phenomenon. Lloyd had connected with Keith Jarrett, who was backing singers in Boston’s Paul’s Mall while Lloyd was playing in the adjacent Jazz Workshop. The Quartet, with Lloyd, Jarrett, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and bassist Cecil McBee (eventually replaced by bassist Ron McClure), created a stir at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival. Producer/manager George Avakian booked the band into Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, and soon they were playing the psychedelic-rock circuit. For a while, as rock crushed jazz’s commercial viability, there were only two figures who were guaranteed to turn out a crowd: Miles Davis and Charles Lloyd.

When you look back now, it’s difficult to understand what it was about Lloyd’s music that helped him cross over. He wasn’t playing "jazz rock" — he played straight-ahead, Coltrane-influenced acoustic jazz. Yes, there was a funk or rock backbeat here and there, and on the 1967 Live at the Fillmore album Love-In (Atlantic), there was a cover of Lennon/McCartney’s "Here, There, and Everywhere." But at times, Jarrett’s solos went into knuckle-crunching chords and clusters worthy of Cecil Taylor. Meanwhile, Lloyd’s attractive Coltrane-ism (those sheet-like scales and arpeggios, the upward-leaping cry) were being tempered with a kind of brawny, angular bop that anticipated David Murray, and by some beautiful, Africanized flute playing.

Writer and WBUR/90.9 FM jazz commentator James Isaacs, a Lloyd fan, points out that the band’s youth and attire helped cross them over — Jarrett was in his early 20s, the young virtuoso of the moment. And they dressed the part — while Miles Davis was buying suits from Charlie Davidson at Harvard Square’s Andover Shop, Lloyd and company were donning fringed vests, paisley shirts, bell bottoms, and beads, and they wore their hair long. And then there was that repertoire. They had good original tunes (by Lloyd and Jarrett) when, as Jazz Workshop booker Fred Taylor recalls, "it was the standard stuff that was getting killed. . . . People like Dizzy and James Moody were struggling to do business."

It wasn’t long, though, before the jazz police caught up with him. Critic Frank Kofsky blasted the young player for co-opting Trane in a piece headlined "Charles Lloyd Is a Fake," and soon there was no more uncool player among the cognoscenti than Lloyd (unless it was Dave Brubeck). This despite some fine albums and a couple of all-star sessions on Columbia that are still valued by collectors. Not that business was bad. Lloyd’s band was the first modern jazz group to play the Soviet Union, and his management considered booking him into stadiums. But Lloyd more or less dropped out and, among other things, taught transcendental meditation. Or, as he now tells it, "I turned my back on the machinery that was gong to make me . . . a something, a product." He laughs quietly. "I didn’t have any eyes for that, I wanted to let the stuff run free."

Albums continued to come, but it wasn’t until Lloyd joined boutique label ECM, in 1989, that his career began to take off again. Over the course of nine albums, ECM has surrounded him with one all-star session after another — Bobo Stenson, Higgins, Abercrombie, Brad Mehldau, Dave Holland, Billy Hart.

Lift Every Voice is typical of him in its quiet intensity, but he’s probably never delivered a better song sequence. Modal drones like "Hymn to the Mother" alternate with blues and chordal pop like Billy Preston’s "You Are So Beautiful" and Marvin Gaye’s "What’s Going On," the great Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodríguez’s "Rabo de nube" and "Te amaré," Billy Strayhorn’s "Blood Count," the Ellington rarity "I’m Afraid," and a "Go Down, Moses" that recalls Coltrane at his urban-spiritual deepest. Lloyd plays long, floating lines in a gorgeous, light tone that’s filigree’d with note clusters of a rich, nubby texture. The album was provoked by the events of September 11 — the day Lloyd’s band were scheduled to go into New York’s Blue Note in Greenwich Village. Instead, they played that Friday. When Lloyd got home and sat at the piano, the tunes poured out of him, originals as well as pieces he’d played before September 11, or remembered from his Memphis childhood.

"I wish I could be the tail of a cloud and come down and wash away your tears and sorrows," he recites from "Rabo de nube." He’d been playing the piece before New York, but afterward it took on a deeper significance. "Some people from Paris came up to me and said, ‘My goodness, you played ‘Rabo de nube!’ People had tears, people were smiling." Thirty-five years after the San Francisco love-ins, Lloyd says, he’s still interested in "how the music moves through space. I play across the bar lines. . . . I’m still trying to change the world, but what can I do? I don’t have a job here. I just break out in song."

The Charles Lloyd Quintet with John Abercrombie, Geri Allen, Bob Hurst, and Billy Hart play Scullers next weekend, January 24 and 25. Call (617) 562-4111.

Issue Date: January 16 - 23, 2003
The Giant Steps archive
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