For more than 60 years saxophonist Charles Lloyd has loomed large over the music world with both his presence and his occasional absence. Lloyd was born in in 1938 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he apprenticed with jazz and blues legends including Phineas Newborn, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King. While attending the University of Southern California in the late-1950s, Lloyd performed with prominent artists on the Los Angeles jazz scene including Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, and Gerald Wilson. In 1960, Lloyd became the music director in the Chico Hamilton Quintet, and later joined the Cannonball Adderley Sextet for a two-year stint before leaving to focus on his own career as a leader.
Lloyd signed with Columbia 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.
When Don Was became head of Blue Note in 2011, he invited Lloyd to record for the label. Lloyd ultimately accepted the invitation, with a mission in mind: “I want to stretch my wings wider and find new thermals to soar on. It is all a continuation of my search and service in sound.”
Lloyd’s 2015 Blue Note release Wild Man Dance was an album-length suite composed for a unique group comprised of pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Joe Sanders, drummer Gerald Cleaver, Greek lyra virtuoso Sokratis Sinopoulos, and Hungarian cimbalom maestro Miklós Lukács. For his 2016 album I Long to See You, Lloyd formed a new band called The Marvels featuring guitarist Bill Frisell and pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz along with Rogers and Harland. In 2017, Lloyd released Passin’ Thru, a passionate live recording that marked the 10th anniversary of the New Quartet and prompted the Los Angeles Times to declare him “an artist with a focus still firmly fixed forward. Lloyd sounds as if he’s just getting started.” In 2018, Lloyd reconvened The Marvels with the addition of singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams for Vanished Gardens, a transcendent collaboration that wove together several threads of American music (Jazz, Blues, Americana, Country, and Rock) into a thrilling and uplifting new musical hybrid. The 2020 album 8: Kindred Spirits (Live from The Lobero) documented his magnificent 80th birthday concert with Clayton, Rogers, Harland, guitarist Julian Lage, and special guests organist Booker T. Jones and bassist Don Was. Lloyd reconvened The Marvels for his 2021 album Tone Poem, the vinyl edition of which was the first new release to be featured as part of the Tone Poet Audiophile Vinyl Series.
Lloyd’s life story was powerfully told in the 2014 documentary Arrows Into Infinity. He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2015, and received an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music. In 2016, Lloyd was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, and The Atlantic published the profile “The Re-Flowering: Charles Lloyd’s Second Golden Age,” proffering that “The jazz saxophonist went from 1960s pop stardom to years of self-imposed exile, but he’s now producing some of the best music of his career.”
The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow - Charles Lloyd
Trios: Sacred Thread - Charles Lloyd
Trios: Ocean - Charles Lloyd
Charles Lloyd On “Broken Record” With Guest Host Don Was: Blue Note Records 85th Anniversary Series
CHARLES LLOYD “THE SKY WILL STILL BE THERE TOMORROW”
By Adolfo Alzuphar Unsettled by the state of the world in 2020, Charles Lloyd began conceiving of a musical offering in the form of a new studio recording featuring a new band, a quartet of unrepressed sensibility that would be a first-time convening of four distinctive voices with the legendary saxophonist joined by pianist Jason Moran, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Brian Blade. In... read more
CHARLES LLOYD SHARES “BOOKER’S GARDEN” FROM NEW STUDIO ALBUM FEATURING JASON MORAN, LARRY GRENADIER & BRIAN BLADE
Charles Lloyd has shared “Booker’s Garden,” an enchanting homage to Booker Little, the late great trumpeter and fellow Memphis native who was a childhood friend of Lloyd’s. The piece—which features Lloyd on flute, Jason Moran on piano, Larry Grenadier on bass, and Brian Blade on drums—appears on his... read more
CHARLES LLOYD SHARES NEW SINGLE “MONK’S DANCE” FROM FORTHCOMING DOUBLE ALBUM
Charles Lloyd has shared “Monk’s Dance,” a joyful new single from his latest musical offering The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow. The majestic double album will be released March 15 on the legendary saxophonist’s 86th birthday. One of the most significant musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries, Lloyd... read more
Mar 27
Charles Lloyd
Charles Lloyd Homage to Zakir, Knoxville United States
