He’s a jazz legend who has been making music for more than seven decades.
Charles Lloyd has played with virtually every jazz great since the 1960s. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that the great’s have played with him.
Lloyd celebrated his 87th birthday with a concert. His lifelong love of jazz started when he was a child.
“A jazz station came in from New Orleans. I guess the wattage was enough it could reach me in Memphis. I put the radio on and I could hear Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and all that stuff. I got kinda bitten by the cobra, so to speak,” said Lloyd.
As a child, he thought he wanted to sing.
“I remember I was on an amateur show, and I won second prize. I was walking down the road in my neighbourhood. I remember a girl was approaching me and she said I didn’t deserve that prize. I kind of had to agree with her. She told me a truth. I always wanted to be a singer, but I didn’t have the voice for it,” he said.
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But jazz spoke to him and he knew he wanted to play it.
“It was the only thing that made sense to me. I already was perceptive in looking at the world and it was a dog’s curly tail. You weren’t going to straighten that thing out. So, I decided maybe I can with the beauty of music. I just had a bee in my bonnet, I guess. I kept bugging my mother to get me a saxophone. Finally, when I was nine, she got me one.”
His love of music took him to USC where he studied music. Then, as a performer, he lived in New York, Malibu, and Big Sur, before finally settling in the hills of Montecito.
Lloyd signed with Columbia Records and released his debut album Discovery! in 1964. In 1965, he formed his first great quartet with a young pianist named Keith Jarrett, along with bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Jack DeJohnette. The quartet’s first album Dream Weaver for Atlantic was followed by Forest Flower: Live at Monterey in 1967, a wildly successful album that became one of the first million-sellers in jazz and catapulted Lloyd to international fame.
The quartet went on to perform at rock festivals and venues like the Fillmore in San Francisco where they co-headlined bills with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, while Lloyd also collaborated with the likes of the Beach Boys, Grateful Dead, and The Doors. Then at the peak of his popularity he unexpectedly and voluntarily decided to leave the music world and disappeared to a Big Sur retreat for most of the 1970s. He stopped touring and would play saxophone for the trees and occasionally collaborate with poets and authors like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Ken Kesey.
Lloyd re-emerged briefly in the early 1980s to help the French pianist Michel Petrucciani begin his career, releasing a single album for Blue Note featuring Petrucciani (A Night In Copenhagen) before disappearing again until 1989 when he began a fruitful 25-year relationship with ECM Records. Lloyd’s 16 albums for ECM re-established the saxophonist as one of the leading creative voices in jazz, and found him collaborating with artists including Bobo Stenson, John Abercrombie, Billy Higgins, Brad Mehldau, Geri Allen, and Zakir Hussain, and forming his acclaimed New Quartet with Jason Moran, Reuben Rogers, and Eric Harland.
Lloyd talked about why, with ever-changing musical tastes, jazz has endured.
“It is our indigenous art form and you go exploring. You don’t just sing a trite song and leave it at that. You get to explore the harmony, the rhythms of it.”
Lloyd said he is constantly inspired to create new work.
“I go hiking in the mountains (or) I can be in bed asleep and something will come to me,” said the musician, adding:
“I’ll get up in the morning and go to the piano and try to work it out. It’s like finding these holy grails and lost worlds.”
Even though he has been performing for seven decades, Lloyd admitted he still gets a few pre-show flutters.
“I am always nervous before I play. I never got over that. I have a case of the nerves. Then once I get on stage, it seems like I get met by the creator. I go into this zone, or this world, and when I go in there, I am found,” he says.
Lloyd said he feels lucky to be living in such a wonderful place and still making music.