November 18, 2022
Charles Lloyd has long been a free spirit, master musician, and visionary. For more than six decades the legendary saxophonist and composer has loomed large over the music world, and at 84 years old he remains both at the height of his powers and as prolific as ever. Early on Lloyd saw how placing the improvised solo in interesting and original contexts could provoke greater freedom of expression and inspire creativity.
As a sound seeker, Lloyd’s restless creativity has perhaps found no greater manifestation than on his latest masterwork, an expansive project that encompasses three individual albums each presenting him in a different trio setting—a Trio of Trios. The first, Trios: Chapel, features Lloyd with guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan. The second, Trios: Ocean, with guitarist Anthony Wilson and pianist Gerald Clayton. The third, Trios: Sacred Thread, with guitarist Julian Lage and percussionist Zakir Hussain.
As the late Joan Didion once pointed out, most individual voices, once heard, turn out to be voices of beauty and wisdom. Lloyd is a case in point. Since his critically acclaimed return to touring and recording in the 1980s, his playing has increasingly acquired what can only be called a spiritual component, an existential element that draws the listener into his music. Neither pretentious or over intellectualized, it honors the tradition of the great jazz elders who helped create what Lloyd calls “our indigenous art form,” pointing to figures like, “Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Prez, Lady Day and Bird, and the moderns: Tatum, Trane, Sonny, Ornette, Monk, Miles,” who have illuminated his path.
This aural tradition, passed down through the decades, values spontaneity of expression, warmth, meaning, and an ability to communicate, the latter a lesson he learned as a teenager from the great blues masters, “It goes back to my roots, my experiences when I played with those blues guys, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Roscoe Gordon — Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. King, Johnny Ace. A lot of guys can play, but their music doesn’t leave the bandstand, those guys reached the back of the hall all the time. That was a great lesson for me.”
Past experiences often illuminate the present in Lloyd’ music, for example, the provenance of The Sacred Thread — and the encounters that helped inform it — originated in the late fifties: “When I was studying at the University of Southern California, Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha used to come around,” he recalls. “That’s when I heard the call of Mother India — not only the music, but poets like Tagore and the saints such as Milarepa. Later, I found my way to Ramakrishna and Vedanta. I was also deeply moved by Ali Akbar Khan, the sarod player. His sons Ashish and Pranesh are on my album, Geeta.” Released in 1973, it was described by Billboard as, “Indian music blending cogently with free flowing modern jazz.”
Nearly five decades after first hearing Shankar, “John McLaughlin invited me to his concert at UCLA — he wanted me to come down to hear Shakti,” recalls Lloyd. “John sounded beautiful, I was so moved by the music they were making together. Hearing Zakir [Hussain] on the tabla took me back to Howlin’ Wolf, and I don’t know how you can make that analogy, or that jump, but when I played with Howlin’ Wolf as a young man I was shaken, and when I heard Zakir I had that same kind of internal shake, deep inside of me. Zakir and I played together in concert for the first time in 2001, and it was then I learned Alla Rakha was his father, whom I saw playing with Ravi Shankar at USC, so it has been like that… connections on a journey. You could call it Providence, I call it a Sacred Thread.”
On September 26, 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Lloyd streamed a concert for a virtual audience at The Paul Mahder Gallery in Healdsburg, in Sonoma County, California’s Wine Country. Joined by Hussain and guitarist Julian Lage, Lloyd observed, “While the energy and exchange between musicians and audience is gone, there is a concentration and focus that is not interrupted by applause. I first heard young Julian when he was 12 — he grew up not far from Healdsburg and was known to be a wunderkind — he had big ears and I heard his potential. Twenty years later I invited him to join me – he’s still a young man and his ears have only grown bigger. So — I keep being blessed by souls who find a way to me, it still inspires me to go out on the high wire and try to fly.”
In what is the final act of the Trio of Trios trilogy, Trios: Sacred Thread is the only album that uses percussion and vocals. Hussain’s tabla and voice immediately change the musical and emotional climate; like an exotic spice, he adds a strong musical flavor associated with the Indian sub-continent. “I love to hear Zakir’s voice,” says Lloyd, “It gives our music an entrancing resonance.” For his part, Lloyd does not play off Indian raga forms or scales, instead he seeks the commonalities between Indian music and American jazz through improvisation— just as he did on Geeta — the key element both musical cultures share. Relying more on alto flute than tenor sax, and briefly the tárogató — a woodwind instrument with a melancholy sound — Hussain mediates the ebb and flow of the music with his magisterial command of tabla — typically he uses four to five different size tabla as well as a kanjira.
On that September night, the trio played seven selections, some segueing into the next. Lloyd’s tenor saxophone sets mood, tempo and key on “Desolation Sound,” where Lage’s use of harmonics is perfectly judged, before Lloyd re-enters on alto flute, whose lighter timbre enhances the musical mood. Eliding into an episode that introduces Hussain’s voice, the dynamic of the group is transformed. “Guman,” a pranam to the “guru,” then moves seamlessly a tempo into “Nachekita’s Lament,” where voice finds echo in the timbre of the táragató. Hussain’s voice moderates the mood of “Saraswati,” a song of devotion to Saraswati, the goddess of music, art and wisdom, while “Kuti,” with Lloyd again on flute, encourages well-crafted interventions by Lage. “Tales of Rumi” is a feature for Hussain’s tabla and kanjira in extended solo. Known as the most expressive of all drum sounds, a tabla has a wide vocabulary of around thirty-two tones which Hussain exploits masterfully. Together with Lloyd — now on tenor — and Lage on guitar, unafraid of ‘playing’ musical silences, unite to create a moment that seems to capture the essence of Sacred Thread. Lloyd’s own “The Blessing,” first recorded with Michel Petrucciani on piano at the Montreux Jazz Festival in July 1983, provides an eloquent, yet understated, climax to an absorbing concert.
Reflecting on his playing throughout the trio trilogy, Lloyd provides this insight: “You get into the space of nowness, it’s very intoxicating, you want more of it, and you want to find it. In that search for the sound, our individuality merges with the universality and somehow we get met. That nowness is so powerful, it makes the world, as we know it, kind of pale, it’s not so easy to come back to the relative when you’ve been in the absolute.” Interestingly, Alan Bean, the Apollo 12 moonwalker, and a fellow traveler into the absolute, when speaking of his experiences said, “It doesn’t change you, it reveals who you are.” These observations, surely, evoke what great jazz improvisation can do, inspiring listeners to find emotional truths from within, and so find themselves. It’s what Charles Lloyd does.
