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Posts tagged ‘Charles Lloyd’

Nov 20

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Sounds from silence

Gerald Clayton, Charles Lloyd and Marvin Sewell at the Barbican 17/11/23

Charles Lloyd’s set with his Ocean Trio at the Barbican on Friday felt like a voyage into the core of jazz. Together they created music full of warmth, humanity, experience and spontaneity, ranging from the gently probing lyricism of Lloyd’s tenor saxophone, flute and tarogato through Marvin Sewell’s stunning essay in Delta blues bottleneck guitar to the brilliant pianist Gerald Clayton’s ability to reinvigorate familiar gospel and Broadway material, enriching it with his own personality.

Lloyd is 85 now, and he wears those years with a hard-won but lightly born combination of wisdom and innocence. This is a man born in Memphis, Tennessee, of African, Cherokee, Mongolian and Irish ancestry, whose employers, friends, collaborators and sidemen have included B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Booker Little, Eric Dolphy, Chico Hamilton, Cannonball Adderley, Keith Jarrett, the Beach Boys, Brad Mehldau, Billy Higgins, Jason Moran, Bill Frisell and Lucinda Williams. Even now, his sense of creative adventure remains undimmed. And what you still feel at one of his concerts, even after he has delivered the benediction concluding with “Om shanti shanti shanti”, is that he can’t bear to stop now.

In one way or another, all music emerges from silence. As part of the 2023 EFG London Jazz Festival, Lloyd’s group was preceded on to the Barbican stage by another trio, that of the tenor saxophonist and composer Mette Henriette Martedatter Rølvåg, whose first album appeared on the ECM label in 2015. On Friday she, the pianist Johan Lindvall and the cellist Judith Hamann played pieces from its follow-up, Drifting, released last year. Maybe none of the company’s releases comes closer than Mette Henriette’s music to the ideal expressed in ECM’s famous early slogan: “The most beautiful sound next to silence.”

This was quiet, patient music constructed from slow lines and careful tonal combinations, but none the less intense for an absence of overt drama. Early in her career, Mette Henriette was being told that she sounded like various prominent free-jazz saxophonists before she had even heard of them, although really she sounds like no one but herself. This was the second time I’ve seen her in concert, and on both occasions she demonstrated through her music as well as her poised presence a marked ability to cast a spell over an audience who may not have known much, if anything, about her in advance.

There was no shortage of drama in the short duo set played by the pianist Pat Thomas and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey at Café Oto on Saturday night: half an hour of relentless dynamic and textural contrasts followed by a spirited encore of “A Night in Tunisia” that lasted barely a minute, so short that it didn’t even reach the middle eight. The intensity with which ideas were investigated and compressed made it seem quite enough to satisfy any listener.

Thomas belongs to the school of jazz pianism that proceeds from Ellington through Monk, Elmo Hope, Herbie Nichols and Andrew Hill, splintering off via Cecil Taylor to Alex von Schlippenbach, Misha Mengelberg and Alexander Hawkins. He’s a player of great intellectual weight but also of emotional power, and his partnership with the extraordinary Sorey produced great dividends.

I once heard Sorey hit a very large gong with unimaginable force and precision, producing a sound of such volume that I feared it was going to bring down the walls of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Although some of the climaxes he devised with Thomas were quite ferocious, there was no such threat to the fabric of Café Oto. His command of the dynamic spectrum is such that at one moment, when the dialogue was at its most refined, almost transparent, he spent several seconds waving his wire brushes above his drums and cymbals, striking nothing at all. In the silence, I’ll swear you could hear him playing the air.

May 25

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In Underground London

Underground London 2

I’ve taken a lot of pleasure in recent days from listening to Underground London, a three-CD set that attempts to recreate, through a mosaic of recordings, the feeling of being a certain kind of person in London in the first half of the 1960s, someone either growing out of, or who had been a little too young for, the full beatnik experience in the 1950s, but looking for similar sensations in a changing time: free speech, free jazz, free verse, free love.

The first disc starts with Ornette Coleman’s “W.R.U.”, ends with Jimmy Smith’s “Autumn Leaves”, and includes Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading “Dog”, Allen Ginsberg reading “America”, a track from Red Bird, the jazz-and-poetry EP Christopher Logue made with Tony Kinsey, and György Ligeti’s “Atmosphères”. The second opens with Jimmy Giuffre’s “Jesus Maria”, ends with Albert Ayler’s “Moanin'”, and includes Ravi Shankar’s “Raga Jog”, Jack Kerouac reading from On the Road and Visions of Cody, and the Dudley Moore Trio playing the theme from Beyond the Fringe. The third opens with Cecil Taylor’s “Love for Sale”, ends with Thelonious Monk’s “There’s Danger in Your Eyes, Cherie” and includes Davy Graham and Alexis Korner playing “3/4 AD”, Aldous Huxley reading from The Visionary Experience, the MJQ playing “Lonely Woman”, Luciano Berio manipulating Cathy Berberian’s voice in “Visage”, and “A Rose for Booker” by the Chico Hamilton Quintet, with Charles Lloyd.

Add in Stockhausen, Don Cherry and John Coltrane, Annie Ross, John Cage and David Tudor, Sonny Rollins, Sun Ra, Eric Dolphy and Joe Harriott, and you get the idea. And to set up the mood for the sort of extended listening session the set deserves, I’d suggest candles in Chianti bottles, something vaguely cubist on the wall, the Tibetan Book of the Dead on the coffee table, and a black polo-neck sweater, or perhaps a chocolate-brown corduroy jacket. And if the party is going well, maybe a Beatle or two, in an adventurous mood, will drop by on the way home from Abbey Road.

But it’s not really a joke, or a caricature. There’s a lot of completely wonderful stuff here, some of it revealing new qualities when isolated from the context of its original full-album setting (an underrated virtue of anthologies or compilations). And practically everything is on the edge of something, some new discovery, some unexplored territory worth taking a risk to reach. How exciting was that?

* The photograph of Allen Ginsberg outside the Royal Albert Hall was taken in 1965 by John Hopkins and was used in the poster for the International Poetry Incarnation held on June 11 that year. It’s included in the booklet accompanying Underground London: Art Music and Free Jazz in the Swinging Sixties, which is on él records, via Cherry Red. 

Jan 20

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January 20, 2017

us-flagWith three hours to go until the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States, the coffee shop I frequent was playing the Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself”. That’s a record with a lot of American history in it, one way and another: a message delivered by a mixed group of black and white singers and musicians, showing how music can provide encouragement, comfort and even guidance.

The saxophonist Charles Lloyd and the singer Lucinda Williams have chosen to mark today’s events by releasing an eight-minute version of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War”, streamable on Spotify here. It was recorded live at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, California, on November 28 last year, three weeks after the election, with Bill Frisell on guitar, Greg Leisz on pedal steel, Rueben Rogers on bass and Eric Harland on drums. That’s a real A Team, and together they give Dylan’s song the full treatment: harsh, menacing, an ebb and flow of emotions but underneath simmering with rage.

As a teenager in Memphis in the 1950s, Lloyd played with B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf and Bobby Bland. He is 78 years old now, and has performed in public through 12 presidencies, counting this latest one. “The world is a dog’s curly tail,” he says in the press statement accompanying the release. “No matter how many times we straighten it out, it keeps curling back. As artists we aspire to console, uplift and inspire. To unite us through sound across boundaries and borders and to dissolve lines of demarcation that separate us. The beautiful thing is that as human beings, even under the most adverse conditions, we are capable of kindness, compassion and love, vision and hope. All life is one. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll succeed. We go forward.”

Feb 26

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Feat. Bill Frisell

Bill Frisell at home 2There was a time, seven or eight years ago, when I came to the conclusion that Bill Frisell was simply making too many records. I fell out of the habit of automatically buying his new releases because he seemed to be spreading himself too thin. Good Dog Happy Man (1999) and Blues Dream (2001) are still two of my all-time favourite albums, but I tend to prefer him nowadays as a contributor to other people’s records — something to which his particular expertise is well suited. Used sparingly, the characteristics of his playing add texture and flavour, just like King Curtis or Steve Cropper once did.

The job of being an accompanist is much underrated these days, so it’s good to welcome the arrival of two outstanding new albums on which Frisell fulfils that role: first with the saxophonist and flautist Charles Lloyd on I Long to See You and second with singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams on The Ghosts of Highway 20. They’re very different, of course, but they benefit equally from the guitarist’s modest, graceful touch.

When I interviewed him for the Guardian in 2002, Frisell explained a personal evolution that had begun with his first 45, the Beach Boys’s “Little Deuce Coupe”. Then came the Beatles and Manfred Mann — “that’s where I heard the blues for the first time” –followed by the Rolling Stones, John Mayall and the Paul Butterfield band. “I was coming to the blues backwards,” he said, “by figuring out where the English bands were getting a lot of their stuff from.” He may be in his sixties now, but he’s kept a sense of discovery in his music, whatever company he happens to be keeping.

I Long to See You finds Lloyd and Frisell tackling some familiar material, such as the saxophonist’s “Of Course Of Course” and “Sombrero Sam”, and a version of “Shenandoah” that doesn’t quite match the sublime reading Frisell and Ry Cooder contrived on Good Dog Happy Man. The biggest surprise is a resolute instrumental version of Dylan’s “Masters of War”, while the soulful Spanish traditional song “La Llorona”– previously recorded by Lloyd — invites Frisell to display his innate lyricism. Guest appearances by Willie Nelson on “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” and Norah Jones on “You Are So Beautiful” are pleasant but not exactly essential.

The track that justifies the album’s existence, however, is its closer, the 16-minute “Barche Lamsel”. Named after a Buddhist prayer, it allows Lloyd (its composer), Frisell and their three bandmates — the steel guitarist Greg Leisz, the bass guitarist Reuben Rogers and the drummer Eric Harland — to improvise a dreamy five-minute intro on a single chord before drifting into a pulse defined by the drums  for a delicately funky jam that would once have been described as “spaced out”.

The concerns of The Ghosts of Highway 20 are more earthly in tone but no less spiritual in nature, if much less comforting. Lucinda Williams’ ravaged voice and bar-room country-blues songs do not trade in reassurance. Her America is a place of wayfaring strangers fleeing the past and seeking refuge from the future. As the poet of this world of lost highways and dangerous glances, Williams is rivalled only by James McMurtry.

Like its predecessor, 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone (which also featured Leisz and Frisell), this one is a two-disc set. The extra length offered by the format would exhaust the capacity of most singer-songwriters, but it seems ideally suited Williams’ temperament. Although her songs are often skeletal, they need to stretch out and breathe inside arrangements that create their own sense of time. On “Louisiana Story” the two guitarists sit either side of the parched voice, carefully picking out a double commentary against a tempo that flows like a thin stream of black treacle.

* The photograph of Bill Frisell is by Monica Frisell.

Aug 4

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Zen archer

Charles Lloyd 1There’s a poignant moment during Arrows into Infinity, a new biographical film about Charles Lloyd, when the saxophonist recalls a conversation by the bedside of his old friend and colleague Billy Higgins in 2001. The great drummer, who is close to death, declares that they’ve got to keep working on the music. “He’s like 90lb,” Lloyd says. “I said, ‘Are you going to get off this bed and come back and play with me?’ He said, ‘I didn’t say I’d be there, but I’ll always be with you.'”

Lloyd is a spiritual man, which accounts for his absence from music for several years in the 1970s. In conventional career terms, his withdrawal made no sense. His late-’60s quartet, with Keith Jarrett on piano, had sold plenty of records and made connections beyond the usual jazz audience; they had played the Fillmore and toured behind the Iron Curtain. He had appeared as a guest on recordings by the Beach Boys (Holland, 15 Big Ones, MIU) and the post-Morrison Doors (Full Circle). Nevertheless he chose to drop out, in response to the music industry’s unwelcome expectations. “They wanted me to become a product,” he says in the film. “And to become a product, I would have to be predictable. I wasn’t looking for fame or fortune. I was looking for the zone, the holy grail of music. That was my salvation, because I had heard it and I knew what it was. That was my saviour. It was the light.”

He moved from Malibu to Big Sur, married an artist named Dorothy Darr, and established a different sort of life, his performing for a while largely restricted to playing the oboe at readings by his neighbours Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder. Not until 1980 did the French pianist Michel Petrucciani pay him a visit and entice him back to the public stage. Since then he has re-established himself as an important figure, recording a series of albums for the ECM label, where he was teamed first in a quartet with the pianist Bobo Stenson and then with other partners including Higgins, the guitarist John Abercrombie, the pianist Geri Allen, the tabla master Zakir Hussain and the singer Maria Farantouri.

His current quartet features Jason Moran (piano), Ruben Rogers (bass) and Eric Harland (drums), young men who clearly relish their interaction with a veteran whose sound and ideas become more exquisitely distilled with each passing year. It’s a fine band, a perfect setting for his breadth of vision. Here they are at a French jazz festival in 2011, giving Brian Wilson’s “Caroline, No” a rather different treatment.

Born in Memphis in 1938, Lloyd listened to Lester Young and Charlie Parker as a teenager and played R&B with Howlin’ Wolf and Junior Parker before leaving for Los Angeles. I first heard him as a key member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet of 1962-63, one of my favourite groups of the time. Lloyd wrote virtually all of the group’s material, which — like his own tenor-playing — took its inspiration from John Coltrane’s innovations and marked a fruitful change of direction for Hamilton, away from chamber jazz and towards something more robust. The distinctive flavour of the quintet’s sound came from the guitar of Gabor Szabo, who loved drones and could summon the effect of a sitar, a koto, an oud or a saz, blending particularly well with Lloyd’s flute. They made three albums as a quintet — Drumfusion for Columbia, Passin’ Thru for Impulse and A Different Journey for Reprise — and one as a quartet, Impulse’s Man from Two Worlds, which also included the first version of Lloyd’s “Forest Flower”, which became a hit for his own quartet a few years later.

The recordings with Hamilton are all available on CD, and Passin’ Thru remains one of my favourite albums of the era, not least thanks to the powerful grooves sustained by the phenomenal young bassist Albert Stinson. Here’s a track called “El Toro”, which shows why Stinson was good enough to sub for Ron Carter with Miles Davis and would surely have become a major figure on his instrument had he not died from a heroin overdose while touring with Larry Coryell in 1969, aged 24.

Drugs were another reason why Lloyd dropped out. “I hit a wall and I couldn’t really function,” he says. “At a certain point I began to suffer musically and I began to suffer spiritually. I had to go away.” His studies in philosophy and religion got him through it, with the help of Dorothy Darr, who has produced and directed Arrows into Infinity with Jeffery Morse, gathering historic TV and concert footage from the ’60s (London, Newport, Antibes, Tallinn etc), film of recent performances with the current quartet, and of duets with Billy Higgins, giving us a chance to enjoy again the drummer’s matchless sense of swing and unforgettable smile. There are interviews with Herbie Hancock, Jack DeJohnette, Robbie Robertson, Jim Keltner, Don Was, Zakir Hussain, Geri Allen and many others — including, amazingly, Lewis Steinberg, the original bass player with Booker T and the MGs, who knew the young Lloyd in Memphis. There’s also a delightful sequence of Lloyd playing pool with Ornette Coleman; the two were friends in LA in the ’50s.

Lloyd himself, however, is the most interesting witness to the journey that took him from Howlin’ Wolf to Zakir Hussain. The film tells a fascinating story of survival and self-realisation in which his gentle wisdom is as impressive as his music.

* The photograph of Charles Lloyd is from the booklet accompanying Arrows into Infinity, which is released by ECM.