Albums Of The Year – Number 2: Mirror by Charles Lloyd
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Deeply meditative and tender the Charles Lloyd Quartet showed an unquenchable thirst for striving towards an ideal on Mirror, as Lloyd himself puts it, to face up to personal inadequacies and reach a spiritual space in a spirit of humility – it’s about “falling down and getting up,” he has said.
A sentiment we surely all can applaud.
Mirror is imbued with a lot of love, containing many of the distilled musical and life experiences of Charles Lloyd, one of the great figures of jazz who since the 1960s, has looked to the sky and within himself to allow his music to connect with people the world over.
Lloyd’s quartet, pianist Jason Moran, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland, is a formidable and powerful improvising force live, its latent vigour is certainly captured in concert on Rabo de Nube released to celebrate Lloyd’s 70th birthday two years ago.
But on this new album in a coup de musique the quartet shows to awesome effect what it can also do in the studio in a more thoughtful vein. The variety of material on Mirror is indicated by the range of Lloyd originals, ‘Desolation Sound’ and the title track, plus reinterpretations of original tunes from the Water Is Wide album as well as two Monk pieces, three gospel-infused tunes and the Brian Wilson song ‘Caroline No’ from the Beach Boys stone classic Pet Sounds also recall the time when Lloyd featured on the Beach Boys album Surf’s Up.
Lloyd also tellingly contributes a spoken word meditation to ‘Tagi’, inspired by sacred Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, and the idea of music as a never ending stream and a force of nature. It was ‘Tagi’ that transformed the CLQ’s recent concert at the London Jazz Festival into a special occasion.
With the aura of Coltrane, spirituals and deeply felt jazz standards, Mirror is a stunning achievement. Its power is in its simplicity, and its capacity to move, something that made a direct impact on so many Jazzwise writers this year. We’ll all be listening to this album for years to come
– Stephen Graham