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Charles Lloyd
JUMPING THE CREEK
(ECM)
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Charles Lloyd continues his late-period flowering. It would be difficult for him to surpass Which Way Is East (ECM), last year’s double-disc duet record with the drummer Billy Higgins, where the two masters encompassed the whole world of their music — West Africa, Brazil, India, Mississippi, Coltrane, Ornette, Charlie Parker (the album was recorded in 2001, before Higgins’s death in May of that year). Here, working with pianist Gerri Allen, bassist Robert Hurst, and drummer Eric Harland, Lloyd maintains his run, imbued with Coltrane-like mysticism and fierceness and a bebopper’s sense of flow and form. When he’s not working up a Trane-ish fury on tenor, the phrases are tumbling out of his horn with rough-hewn spontaneity and perfection. "Ne me quitte pas (If You Go Away)" repeats Jacques Brel’s simple minor-key melody like some Middle Eastern prayer before its elaborations turn furious. "Angel Oak" is a stately Coltrane-like spiritual. This and the "Georgia Bright Suite" are 13-minute intimate epics, solo order and tempo shifts unfolding unpredictably but inevitably. The title track is in straight-ahead swing time, with Allen providing Herbie Hancock–like tensile single-note lines. The School of Miles is also apparent in Lloyd’s "Candido Perdido," with its fast-snipping hi-hat and insistent kick-drum cross-rhythms and Lloyd finding his inner Wayne Shorter in his asymmetrical phrasing and glottal attack. Lloyd’s occasional use of the soprano-like taragato and an Ornette-like alto only increases the variety and depth of the album. (The Charles Lloyd Quartet appears this Thursday and Friday, April 14 and 15, at Scullers, in the DoubleTree Guest Suites Hotel, 400 Soldiers Field Road at the Mass Pike; call 617-562-4111.)
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