March 15, 2024
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 Spring 2023, around Lloyd’s 85th birthday concert in his hometown of Santa Barbara, California, the project at long last flowered with the creation of an expansive double album titled The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, released on his 86th birthday, a majestic body of work that presents a collection of Lloyd originals new, old, and reimagined.
Lloyd is one of the most significant musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries, a highest peak of the mountain range labelled “jazz,” that is in the end, human music. After having made his way through the Memphis, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco music scenes—becoming an historical figure in each—Lloyd released one of the most unique and never replicated albums in music history, Forest Flower, and over the course of a vast musical lifetime has consistently offered the world a gift of music that can rival any art of any era.
With The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, Lloyd’s first studio recording since the 2017 sessions that yielded his acclaimed Blue Note albums Vanished Gardens and Tone Poem, he continues his monumental music making, an apex in American art, as a band leader, a composer, a flutist, and a saxophonist. The album also gives us first-time recordings of six new Lloyd compositions including the title track, “The Water Is Rising,” “Late Bloom,” “The Ghost of Lady Day,” “Sky Valley, Spirit of the Forest,” and “When the Sun Comes Up, Darkness Is Gone.”
To Lloyd and Moran’s pursuit of symmetry, Blade offers asymmetry, guided by thinking on proportion and relation. To the ink brush beauty of Lloyd’s saxophone and flute, Grenadier offers a soul-lifting double bass, sensing phenomena, applying both heart and mathematics. The emotion of one is matched with the understanding of the other. Embodying that it is through heartfelt sense that we arrive at tender common sense. The intensity of Moran’s piano playing as confronting the stasis and rust of contemporary human beings accepted by all, each adding a bit of their understanding, and the emotions intrinsic to their understanding.
Listen to the use of both thought and sentiment on “Defiant, Tender Warrior,” and pay mind to the physicality required to play it. How each individual, as a quartet, articulates defiant, then warrior. Defiant warriors. Each instrument. Making shapes beyond any expectation.
“The Lonely One” and “The Water is Rising” have a whole lot to teach to the English language. Words are built like chords, their syllables being notes. Rhetorics of hate, deceit, manipulation, and indifference are the chord progressions or compositions that often dominate life in the English language. How chords are constructed and deconstructed to harmonize with other chords and notes, as a dynamic and peaceful use of language, is the lesson.
The tenderness to their flowing is the tradition all are in, imbued by the presence of “The Ghost of Lady Day.” In an age when intellectuality walks hand in hand with irony, few choose to be compassionate with others with such thoughts. In the age of the gadfly, this is an education in living.
Knowledge of music making, of music theory, of how to use the instrument, is not all there is to music. There is also intuition, from pure experience of this world. The music of knowing thyself is perhaps the grand music for which we have no words, in front of which we are floored.
The tradition—that of Prez, Bird, Lady Day, Booker, Coltrane, Shorter, Lloyd—will never accept a fate given to it by ballrooms, white shoes, red lips, however beautiful in a black dress. It seeks sound to match its spirit, to fulfill its potential. Shorter dreamed of landscapes of regeneration. Coltrane spoke of a creator’s presence within every centimeter of every musical scale. Lloyd dares to sing this culture, a culture enamored with the Brill Building, with minstrelsy, that had turned a love of Wagnerian tragedy into film soundtrack after soundtrack, that theatricality could never match spiritual existence, and people danced irreversibly.
Booker Little is a presence on this album because he is a cornerstone of the tradition. The tension heard in “Booker’s Garden” is its beauty; without tension, there can be no individual, and thus no artist. Little’s mind embraced the tension of being enlightened, and in Lloyd’s words, “left town as an enlightened Soul” at the age of 23.
Lloyd and the quartet offer us renewal in convening, renewal in music, for a true, joyous, reciprocity based on that we are One, and luminous when entangled. To us, the world that is in disarray. Each of us is often so far from freedom. The reciprocities that allow for collective human life, between government and governed, music maker and dancer, prophet and assembled inadequate. An offering to reciprocate, with which to remake a world.
