Charles Lloyd
September 2000

Interview By
Chris Hovan

The Water Is Wide
ECM
2000

The Water Is Wide
Reviewed By
Chris Hovan
Glenn Astarita
David R. Adler

Other Reviews
Canto
Canto
Forest Flower
Just Before Sunrise
Just Before Sunrise
Just Before Sunrise
Voice In The Night
Voice In The Night

Photo © Matt Thayer

Credited by many musicians with anticipating the World Music movement by incorporating the cadences of many cultures in his compositions as early as the late1950s, Lloyd describes his music as having always "danced on many shores." As Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times, "Mr. Lloyd has come up with a strange and beautiful distillation of the American experience, part abandoned and wild, part immensely controlled and sophisticated." From the moment he first came to prominence as the young music director of the Chico Hamilton Quintet in 1960, Lloyd began to take audiences on journeys that traversed enormous distances. Over nearly four decades, his compositions have punctuated the post-bop period, embraced the traditional musics of a host of world cultures and ciphered the psychedelic 1960s with avant-garde improvisation. Lloyd was one of the first jazz artists to sell a million copies of a recording (Forest Flower) and then he surprised us by walking away from performing just at the point that he was dubbed a "jazz superstar." Actually he was just following a trajectory that was taking him closer to the essence of the music he was hearing.

Charles Lloyd was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 15, 1938. Like New Orleans, 400 miles to the south down the Mississippi, Memphis has a rich river culture and musical heritage saturated in blues, gospel and jazz. Lloyd's ancestors are African, Cherokee, Mongolian and Irish, a lineage that was never undermined by the racism of the time. He was given his first saxophone at the age of 9 and riveted to 1940's radio broadcasts by Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, he was transported by jazz. Lloyd's early teachers included pianist Phineas Newborn and saxophonist Irvin Reason and his closest childhood friend was the great trumpeter Booker Little. As a teenager Lloyd played jazz with saxophonist George Coleman and was a sideman for blues greats Johnny Ace, Bobby Blue Bland, Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King.

Classical music also exerted a strong pull on the young Lloyd, and in 1956 he left Memphis for Los Angeles to earn his Master's in music at USC where he studied with Halsey Stevens, a foremost Bartók authority. While his days were spent in academia, Lloyd spent nights getting educated on the job in L.A.'s jazz clubs, playing with Ornette Coleman, Billy Higgins, Scott La Faro, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Eric Dolphy, Bobby Hutcherson and other leading west coast jazz artists. He also was a member of the Gerald Wilson big band.

In 1960 Lloyd was invited to become music director of Chico Hamilton's group when Dolphy left to join Charles Mingus's band. The Hungarian guitarist Gabor Szabo and bassist Albert "Sparky" Stinson soon joined Lloyd in the band. Hamilton's most memorable albums for Impulse Records, Passin' Through and Man from Two Worlds, featured music arranged and written almost entirely by Lloyd, and during this period of prolific composing he was also finding his unique voice as a saxophonist.

Lloyd jumped into the New York club scene of the early 1960s, playing at the Five Spot, Birdland, Half Note, Jazz Gallery, Slugs and Village Vanguard and soon befriended many of the jazz masters he so admired -- Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Coleman Hawkins and Miles Davis, among others. A memorable collaboration took place between Lloyd and the Nigerian master drummer Babatunde Olatunji, with whom the saxophonist played when he wasn't on the road with Hamilton.

In 1964, Lloyd joined the Cannonball Adderley Sextet, and performed alongside Nat Adderley, Joe Zawinul, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes. That year he also signed with CBS Records and began to record as a leader. Lloyd's Columbia recordings, Discovery (1964) and Of Course, Of Course (1965) featured sidemen including Roy Haynes and Tony Williams on drums, Richard Davis and Ron Carter on bass, Gabor Szabo on guitar and Don Friedman on piano and led to his being voted Downbeat Magazine's "New Star."

Lloyd embarked on a solo career in 1965 after leaving Cannonball Adderley to form his own quartet, a brilliant ensemble that introduced the jazz world to the talents of pianist Keith Jarrett, drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Cecil McBee. Their first release together was a studio recording, Dream Weaver, followed by Forest Flower: Live at Monterey (1966). Forest Flower made history as one of the first jazz recordings to sell a million copies and the album's firsts continued as it became a stunning crossover success that appealed to a popular mass market and gained heavy airplay on FM radio. The Quartet was the first jazz group to appear at the famed Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco and other rock palaces and shared billing with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cream, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

Touring the world, the Lloyd quartet found a warm reception in Europe as it appeared at the new jazz festivals in Montreux, Antibes, Molde, and returned to the U.S. to deliver stunning performances at the Newport and Monterey Festivals. The acoustic group fused virtuoso improvising with a constantly changing combination of musical tropes, incorporating the challenge of avant-garde or "free" jazz with elements of non-Western music, impressionistic harmonies and occasional rock rhythms in open-ended musical flights that echoed the free spirit of the psychedelic 1960s. Electric jazz/rock germinated in a series of original performances that, ironically, were acoustic. Miles Davis and other jazz figures were highly influenced by Lloyd's explorations and soon plugged in to play to the young fans that Lloyd had reached through his acoustic explorations.

In 1967 Charles Lloyd was voted "Jazz Artist of the Year" by Down Beat and the Quartet was invited to tour the world. Its performances in the Far East, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc nations of Europe often marked the first time these audiences had heard an American jazz group live. At the peak of the Cold War in 1967, Lloyd made headlines when his Quartet became the first jazz group from the U.S. to play in the USSR by invitation of the Soviet people rather than through government sponsorship. Its first stop was Tallinn and subsequent concerts took place in Leningrad and Moscow.

And then, at the height of his career, Lloyd disbanded the quartet and dropped from sight in the early 1970s, withdrawing to pursue an inner journey in Big Sur, the wild haven that had previously attracted other artists and seekers including Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes, Henry Miller, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Jean Varda and Jamie DeAngulo.

It wasn't until 1981 that Lloyd moved to break a decade of silence when a remarkable 18 year-old pianist from France, Michel Petrucciani, arrived in Big Sur and Lloyd was compelled to help introduce this gifted artist to the world. This led to U.S., European and Japanese tours in 1982 and 1983 with Petrucciani on piano, Palle Danielsson on bass and drummer Son Ship Theus. British jazz critic Brian Case called Lloyd's return "one of the events of the 1980s." The group produced a special edition cassette Night Blooming Jasmine, and two live records, Montreux '82 and A Night in Copenhagen, which also features Bobby McFerrin and recently was reissued by Blue Note Records. After helping Petrucciani receive the recognition he deserved, Lloyd again retreated to Big Sur.

In 1986, after being hospitalized with a nearly fatal medical condition, Lloyd rededicated himself to this music. When he regained his strength in 1988 he formed a new quartet with the renowned Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson and their collaboration continues to this day. When Lloyd returned to the Montreux Festival in 1988, Swiss critic Yvan Ischer wrote: "To see and hear Charles Lloyd in concert is always an event, not because this saxophonist has been at quite a few crossroads, but also because he seems to hold an impalpable truth which makes him a thoroughly original musician...This is what we call grace."

Over the years that followed, the group, sometimes referred to by Lloyd as the "full-service orchestra of love," toured Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Japan, as well as U.S. and Canada. Lloyd appeared at jazz festivals in New York, Montreux, North Sea, Paris, Antibes, Vienna, London, Madrid, Stuttgart, Kiel, Milan, Istanbul, Montreal, Toronto, Atlanta and New Orleans.

In 1989, seven years after he had made his last album, Lloyd returned to the studio to record Fish Out of Water (1990) for ECM Records. The project marked the beginning of a new wave of Lloyd compositions and recordings and ECM's producer, Manfred Eicher, compared the recording to a Giacometti painting, saying "I really believe this is the refined essence of what music should be. All the meat is gone, only the bones remain." Lloyd's decade-long association with ECM continued with Notes From Big Sur (1992), The Call (1994), All My Relations (1995), Canto (1997), Voice in the Night (1999) and now The Water is Wide (2000).

Lloyd continues to maintain an active touring schedule today. In April of 1997, he returned to Tallinn to commemorate the 30-year anniversary of his performance there in 1967, and people came from hundreds of miles to join in the celebration of his return to Estonia. The concert with his quartet was once again a triumph and in his rave review Down Beat's Tom Conrad wrote: "When they got to 'Forest Flower', the ascent and affirmation in the final notes brought the crowd to its feet as if they had been lifted on an updraft of air."

1999 marked the release of Charles Lloyd's Voice in the Night, an inspired project with drummer Billy Higgins, guitarist John Abercrombie and bassist Dave Holland that Entertainment Weekly hailed as "a triumph". The International Herald Tribune called it the acclaimed composer-saxophonist's "best record in years."

The Water is Wide was recorded December 1999 and released in the US on August 22nd 2000.