Charles Lloyd: “The thing is I want to share the music. I’m still on a mission and it can’t happen – this is plague time…”

It was a very special day in the life of saxophonist Charles Lloyd. But even he didn’t know quite how special it would turn out to be. The occasion was his 80th birthday, which was celebrated in fine style with a concert at the Lobero Theatre, California’s oldest continuously operating theatre, dating back to 1873. It’s Lloyd’s hometown venue – he’s played there more times than anywhere else in the world – but it was only on the short drive back to his home, as the sound of applause ringing in his ears finally subsided, that he began to realise quite how significant the concert had been. His 80th birthday concert yes, but as Lloyd puts it, “I don’t relate to being an ‘old guy’, you know?” What counted was the music. With Charles Lloyd it’s always about the music, and that night of 15 March, the eleventh Thursday of 2018, something special had happened.

Lloyd’s wife, Dorothy Darr, his soul mate, confidante, manager, producer and number one fan, wanted Lloyd’s 80th to be the most memorable occasion possible and designed the evening to make it so, not least because 15 March was Lloyd’s actual birthday.

“Dorothy is the producer and organiser and she got all these people together and she documents everything I do now,” says Lloyd. “She’s aware – I don’t want to say of my mortality – but for years now we carry a sound engineer and she has him document everything I do. So the Lobero Theatre concert was going to be recorded anyway. Dom Camardella is my sound engineer and he came and recorded us that night at the theatre because it’s all home grown. Dorothy made sure it was done in the best way we could”.

Assembled that night was Lloyd’s regular group of Gerald Clayton on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass and Eric Harland on drums. Guests for the evening were guitar prodigy Julian Lage; the President of Blue Note records, Don Was (who guested on bass on two numbers); and Booker T Jones on Hammond B3 and piano. Booker T Jones is of course none other than the Booker T who had a mega hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1962 with ‘Green Onions’ with his band the M.G.’s; a 45rpm record described as ‘one of the most popular rock and soul songs ever’.

It was a one-of-a kind line-up for a one-of-a-kind night, which was captured on the album set 8 (Blue Note), signifying Lloyd’s eight decades. The album ranks as one of Lloyd’s finest in his distinguished career and the deluxe edition is a three-LP box set plus two CDs and a DVD of the concert, together with a photo montage of previously unseen Lloyd iconography in book form that tells Charles’ story with two splendid black and white photos of the great man by Darr, who produced the whole project.

Charles Lloyd (photo: Dorothy Darr)

While its tempting to say Lloyd’s choice of repertoire might seem a career retrospective – after all, ‘Dream Weaver’ gave its name to Lloyd’s historic debut on the Atlantic label in 1966; ‘Forest Flower’ its name to Lloyd’s best-selling live album recorded at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival; while ‘Island Blues’ came from Lloyd’s Of Course, Of Course and the historic album Love-In, recorded live at the Fillmore at the height of California’s Flower Power movement – it’s only half true. It’s also about conjuring fresh mojos out of old spells, as Lloyd is quick to point out: “Today I bring everything I have ever played, but I try and maintain ‘a beginner’s mind’. I have both the benefit of experience and the desire for new discoveries. You can’t bring everything you know all at once, that’s the error of youth. I’m not denying the young Charles, but as my character becomes whole the music gets better”.

While several songs also come from Lloyd’s current repertoire – ‘La Llorona’, ‘Shenandoah’, ‘Abide’ – there are also songs that when you peer beneath the sophisticated eloquence of their performances on 15 March, 2018, you discover a route to better understand the enormous depth of Lloyd’s experiences in jazz that give rise to his stature as an artist today.

Take the song ‘Dream Weaver’: “Well, playing it on my 80th birthday concert, it had a freshness, it had a vibrancy and it’s still a vehicle for us to explore the unknown, to get deeper into the mystery of what that ‘Dream Weaver’ thing is, I still identify with the piece and it still informs me of dreams, aspirations and hope for a better world – I’m a dreamer and somehow music has always given me inspiration and consolation, and I want to bring that to others”.

But the song has history. It first crops up on the album Manhattan Stories (Resonance) in 1965 with a group Lloyd led with Gábor Szabó on guitar, Ron Carter on bass and Pete La Rocca on drums. Yet in a matter of months, Lloyd was debuting on the Atlantic label with a completely new group with Keith Jarrett on piano, Cecil McBee bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, a group that very quickly became one of the most popular in jazz. So what brought about such a transformation?

“Well, to be honest”, begins Lloyd, “I left Cannonball Adderley in 1965 – I played with him for about two years and that was a beautiful rhythm section with Joe Zawinul, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes – I grew a lot in that situation. When I left, I went out on the road with [guitarist] Gábor Szabó who had been my team-mate in Chico’s [Hamilton] group, Albert Stenson [bass], and Pete LaRocca, who was a great drummer who was playing with me in the city.

“So we went out on the road but the problem was that – to be candid with you – Gábor and Albert Stenson were medicating with ‘tragic magic’, which is a nice way to describe heroin. They were in a different zone to Pete La Rocca and myself and the thing fell apart out on the road, Albert Stenson OD’d a couple of times, Gábor would bring him back to life, and we were out there struggling, playing the Chitlin’ circuit, the night clubs and all that. However, I received a call during that time from Keith Jarrett whom I’d heard when I was with Cannonball. I’d heard him when he was a student up in Berklee when we were playing in the Jazz Workshop downstairs and he was playing in the bar upstairs at street level accompanying a singer. I liked him, he would run downstairs to listen to me all the time when I was with Cannonball, and he said he would like to play with me if and whenever possible.

Charles Lloyd (photo: Dorothy Darr)

“So he calls me on the road and said he was out on the road with Art Blakey and he’d heard I was now out with my own group, and he wanted to play with me. I said, well if you’re with Blakey that’s where you are, he said ‘No, no, no, this is not where I am, I want to be with you’. So I said, ‘When we get back to New York we will discuss it’, because I knew the situation with Gábor and Stenson wasn’t tenable any longer. So when I returned to New York, DeJohnette had always wanted to play with me too, so I put together the group with DeJohnette, Keith and Cecil McBee [on bass]. The first gig we played together in that formation was in Baltimore, at the Left Bank Jazz Society, and there were 400-600 people in a big hall there, and when we had played they went crazy and afterwards someone came up to me and said, ‘Do you know what just happened?’, I said ‘No’, he said, ‘A group was born here!’ It was magical and we had two or three great years together, it was a beautiful situation of exploration and so ‘Dream Weaver’ just carried on”.

Interestingly, ‘Dream Weaver’ on the 1966 Atlantic version is in two parts, ‘Meditation’ and ‘Dervish Dance’, which touch base with the burgeoning free jazz movement Ornette Coleman had given focus to with his Five Spot debut in New York City in 1959. So given Lloyd’s group connected with a younger, rock audience (without playing rock), how did they react? “Well the first thing is we were very sincere”, explains Lloyd. “We didn’t change our music for them, we were doing what we did and we were young explorers and we were out there exploring every night because this is a music of freedom and wonder, we knew that and we would go exploring every night. I came up at that time with Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, they were older than me but they encouraged me, Ornette – I heard him one night at a jam session and he came up to me and said, ‘You can really play the saxophone, but that doesn’t have a lot to do with music!’ And he began to talk to me about intervals, and keys and scales and stuff like that and he won me over because of his playing, it was so soulful and so special, he stood on Bird’s [Charlie Parker] shoulders but he had his own cosmology and his own language.

“So I grew up among a lot of free playing, as I did in my youth with Bobby Hutcherson and Scott LaFaro and Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden and all these guys around LA – Don Cherry. I met Ornette when I was 18, and we had a bond that lasted for life, the same with Billy Higgins, so I have been really blessed to be in the right place at the right time. So I had this exploring thing in me all the time – but here’s what I think. Because we were so sincere with what we were doing, I think that it grabbed people, especially young people who were open at that time for something that would move them”.

Another tune, ‘Forest Flower’, perhaps the one most indelibly associated with Lloyd as a result of his hit album of the same name recorded at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 18, 1966. It’s an album that literally reveals the first flowering of Lloyd’s group with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette. “‘Forest Flower’ first comes up with Chico Hamilton [for whom Lloyd was musical director], that was around 1962 or 1963, it’s an interesting version, it’s on A Man From Two Worlds”, says Lloyd. “I first recorded it with Chico, it was an organic piece way before the Flower Generation. What was happening was [Eric] Dolphy left Chico to join [Charles] Mingus and I received a call from a wonderful musician named Buddy Collette, who had been Eric Dolphy’s teacher, and he was a big fan and friend of mine and he would recommend me for gigs in LA. All my friends had left and moved to New York in 1960 – actually they [Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins] left in 1959 and played The Five Spot for a year, that’s something that never happens any more. At the time I was teaching school to save enough money to move to New York, that was my idea. I had been teaching for a couple of months and I got a call from Buddy Collette saying, ‘I know you’re teaching but I know you want to play there’s a ticket for you to go to New York, go east, you could do it!’”

One of the highlights on the expanded edition of 8 is a version of ‘Green Onions’ with Booker T on Hammond B3 organ, Don Was on electric bass, Julian Lage on guitar and Eric Harland on drums. On it, Lloyd digs deeply into the blues and lets rip with passion, intensity and authenticity, drawing on his vast experience gained firsthand as a teenager in the bands of the great blues masters such as Howlin’ Wolf, BB King and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland.

“The blues comes and haunts me because it’s part of my background”, reflects Lloyd. “It was quite a move playin’ with those blues guys, Howlin’ Wolf – I mean, no one ever shook a building like he did, and I watched women pull his pants down on stage and I’m a kid in my teens and I couldn’t believe that, you know! Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, he was very instructive to me when he told me I played his song ‘Teach Me (How To Love You)’ better than anyone who ever played it – but just before I played it he told me he’d whip my ass if I screwed it up!

“Anyway, in my Memphis days Booker T was almost a decade behind me, so when I left Memphis he was still in Junior High, and later on his ‘Green Onions’ had my dear friend Lewie ‘Polk’ Steinberg [a member of Booker T. & The M.G.’s from 1962-65] playing bass on there; I’d grown up with him and he played with me on my first gig. But of course, Booker and I knew each other through the years because we’d run into one another. I read that he said I was a big hero to them growing up because I had notoriety in their eyes. I would see Booker around campus, he later became a vegetarian and he cleaned up his life, he was a very straight arrow guy, I’d see him at festivals at Monterey and different places around the globe, and I knew at some point I was going to invite him [to play with me] but of course it was Dorothy [Darr], my better half, who invited Julian Lage and Booker T to that event – she made an event out of it! I wasn’t aware she was doing that, she brought them together for me and we had a semblance of a soundcheck and we went off on it. I asked Booker, I offered him to play ‘Green Onions’ and he told me he had written a song for me, and he wanted us to play it, so I said, ‘Let me hear you play it’, so he went over to the piano at soundcheck and he sang and played this song, and I said, no you do it, and that was ‘Song for Charles’ [again, on 8].

“And he did a beautiful version. He did that, and on ‘Green Onions’, I deferred to him. I said ‘What do you want me to do on ‘Green Onions’?’ and he said, ‘Just preach!’ So I don’t know, I just did what I did and I made an offering, and although we hadn’t played it together before I think the soil was correct. You know, you can have great musicians get together and if the chemistry is right, if the inclination and the dedication to the music is right, great magic can happen”. And it did.

But for a while, the eternal musical storyteller is unable to share his music with audiences because the whole world has closed down.

“I had a very busy schedule that was supposed to start in March, but we were advised to isolate and we have been isolating and we continue to do so. We are fortunate, we live in a rural area, we’re up on a hill overlooking the sea, and we have lots of land around us, so we’re blessed like that but the thing is I want to share the music. I’m still on a mission and it can’t happen – this is plague time.

“I have become a friend of solitude for many years since our normal daily life is spent at home when we’re not touring, but the unknown of this virus is the threat, it’s the big threat for all of us, and I have such compassion and tears for all of humanity.

“I pray for all of the mothers and children who we have already lost and it saddens me greatly what has happened to humanity, and I just pray that we all come through this around the world”.

This interview originally appeared in the June 2020 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today!