Jazz Articles about Charles Lloyd

like 419

Charles Lloyd: Dream Weaver - The Charles Lloyd Anthology - The Atlantic Years 1966-1969

by Chris May
August 18, 2008

Beautiful and absorbing though most of them are, Charles Lloyd's discs on ECM, with whom the reed player has been recording for almost twenty years, have tended to overshadow the wonderful albums he made with the Charles Lloyd Quartet for Atlantic forty and more years ago.With Atlantic, Lloyd notched up eight LPs recorded in the three years from 1966—radical discs which reflected the youth zeitgeist like no other jazz outfit—before the quartet imploded in the face of mutual ...

like 148

Charles Lloyd Quartet: Rabo de Nube

by Stuart Broomer
June 6, 2008

Charles Lloyd has an obvious knack for assembling bands; it's been apparent since he first launched his quartet in the mid '60s with Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette and Cecil McBee or Ron McClure. In the decades following he's often employed fine musicians with very different styles, including pianists Michel Petrucciani and Geri Allen, guitarist John Abercrombie and drummer Billy Higgins. His current group--with Jason Moran (piano), Reuben Rogers (bass) and Eric Harland (drums)--puts equal emphasis on youthful vigor and free ...

like 405

Charles Lloyd New Quartet in San Francisco

by Eric Benson
April 20, 2008

Charles Lloyd New Quartet Herbst Theater San Francisco March 28, 2008

Is there a point at which deeply spiritual music becomes too ethereal for its own good? A point at which both message and music are lost on an earth-bound audience?

John Coltrane's late-career immersion in the spiritual through turning upward toward the transcendent stands as jazz's most famous litmus test for listeners' tolerance of such theological directions. Fans of albums like Interstellar Space ...

like 348

Charles Lloyd: Rabo De Nube

by Budd Kopman
March 17, 2008

Jazz is a magical thing that exists, paradoxically, both in the unique existential moment of creation, never to happen again and on record, where crystallizing the ephemeral is attempted. Hearing jazz live can be a peak experience, but barring that, listening to a good recording of a great concert can come close, albeit vicariously.

Rabo de Nube captures a phenomenal show by the legendary, seventy-yer-old saxophonist/flutist Charles Lloyd, with his new quartet featuring pianist Jason Moran, bassist Reuben Rogers and ...

like 327

Charles Lloyd Quartet: Rabo De Nube

by John Kelman
March 13, 2008

Woodwind multi-instrumentalist Charles Lloyd has traversed considerable musical territory with nary a misstep across a dozen albums, since joining the ECM fold in 1989. Still, as undeniably fine as albums including Sangam (2006), Jumping the Creek (2005) and Which Way is East (2004) are, what Lloyd's been missing is a consistent line-up to rival his mid-1990s discs with pianist Bobo Stenson, bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Billy Hart, in particular the definitive Canto (ECM, 1997). Rabo De Nube ...

like 392

Charles Lloyd Quartet: Rabo De Nube

by Chris May
March 4, 2008

It's fitting that the shimmeringly beautiful Rabo De Nube, which is being released to celebrate reed player Charles Lloyd's 70th birthday on March 15, 2008, is a live album. Lloyd became a star forty years ago with a series of paradigm-shifting live discs recorded on a seemingly never-ending tour of the USA and Europe--seven of them altogether, starting with Forest Flower (Atlantic, 1966) and ending with Soundtrack (Atlantic, 1968).

Intentionally or not, Rabo De Nube, recorded in Switzerland ...

like 821

Charles Lloyd: His Mystical Journey

by Matt Leskovic
September 20, 2007

The life of Charles Lloyd has truly been the proverbial “long, strange trip."

The master reedman experienced an unmatched level of popularity for a jazz musician in the late 1960s. Lloyd (b. 1938) and his quartet, which featured a young Keith Jarrett on piano and Jack DeJohnette on drums, packed clubs and captivated festival audiences worldwide. Voted Jazzman of the Year by Down Beat Magazine in 1967, Lloyd was for a time the darling of both ...