Charles Lloyd: The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow

Those of us who were going to jazz festivals in summer 1966, and were lucky enough to catch the Charles Lloyd Quartet, will likely have one tune in particular imprinted on our memories. That was because "Forest Flower" so precisely reflected the acid-drenched zeitgeist blossoming in Europe and the US. Lloyd, Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette recorded the piece at the Monterey festival in September 1966, and when Forest Flower was released in early 1967, it was the first jazz album to chime with the new counterculture. It might be argued that John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965) had already hit the spot, or that Pharoah Sanders' Tauhid (Impulse!, 1967) was a close runner-up, but in its first year, Forest Flower massively outsold both those albums. Anyway, relative sales figures aside, all three discs could be filed next to Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde (Columbia, 1966) and the Beatles' Revolver (Parlophone, 1966).

And still, in 2024, Lloyd is ringing the bell, sounding simultaneously of the moment and in the tradition on the 2CD set The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, with a new quartet completed by pianist Jason Moran, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Brian Blade. Moran and Grenadier have recorded with Lloyd before; Blade is the new guy (though Lloyd writes in his liner notes that Blade was scheduled to perform with Lloyd's band at New York's Town Hall in 1995, graciously bowing out when a post-operative Billy Higgins declared himself fit enough to rejoin the lineup).

Some of the material on the new album will be familiar to Lloyd's audience—"Cape To Cairo," for instance, goes back to 1995's All My Relations (ECM), "Balm In Gilead" to 2000's The Water Is Wide (ECM). But the treatment is different, just as Lloyd's multiple recordings of "Forest Flower" have changed over time, adhering to the concept the poet T.S. Eliot put forward in his essay Tradition And The Individual Talent: "The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past." Lloyd continues to be altered by the present as much as he is directed by the past, as demonstrated here on "Monk's Dance," "The Ghost Of Lady Day" and "Booker's Garden" (a salute to fellow son of Memphis, Booker Little) and, less literally, throughout the rest of the album.

In his liner note, Lloyd, referring to the Forest Flower era, says: "Ever the dreamer—as a young man—I naively thought I could wipe out the ugliness in the world with beauty... For a brief time we perceived a change, but it was not lasting and began to crumble. [But] in my wildest dreams I never imagined the world to be in this place. Now."

But Lloyd is not giving up the struggle. He concludes his liner note thus: "And so, All My Relations, my inclination to put down the saxophone and go back to the woods has been staved off for another season. This is my offering to you."

P.S. Delve into Lloyd's 1964 to 2024 archive here.

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