Dorothy Darr and Charles Lloyd Photo credit: Dorothy Darr
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Photo credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
For the FIRST time since 1974,
THE saxophonist Charles Lloyd,
http://www.charleslloyd.com/news.htm
playing with the pianist Jason Moran,
the bassist Reuben Rogers
and
Eric Harland on drums
( Charles Lloyd New Quartet)
appeared at the Village Vanguard
Sunday, 15 March 2015.
Charles’ 77th birthday as well…
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Music
Review: Charles Lloyd Returns to the Village Vanguard
By NATE CHINEN
MARCH 16, 2015
Charles Lloyd seemed perfectly at home onstage at the Village Vanguard on Sunday night, working with standard equipment: his tenor saxophone, his quartet, his tunes. Awash in the dimensions of his sound in the room, it was almost possible to imagine that this was a regular visit, a piece of the usual bounty for jazz lovers in New York.Here’s how much it wasn’t. Mr. Lloyd, who turned 77 on Sunday — a fact that went unspoken during the first set, as if not to draw undue attention — is the rare jazz artist whose every appearance qualifies as an event. He doesn’t really play small rooms anymore. (His next concert, on April 18, is at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he has memorably performed before.) According to club records he last worked the Village Vanguard in mid-July of 1974, not long before his conscious uncoupling from the scene, and his mythic, self-exile to the rocky California coast.What brought him back to the Vanguard was the invitation of his longtime pianist, Jason Moran, who presided over the club’s 80th anniversary celebration last week. True to form, Mr. Moran had varied things nightly, bringing in comedians and poets as well as musicians. Concluding with Mr. Lloyd’s quartet was both a no-brainer and a coup. “Sometimes you do things to realize your dreams,” was how Mr. Moran put it, at the top of the set.
The quartet, with Reuben Rogers on bass and Eric Harland on drums, has been a going concern for the better part of the last decade, developing an extraordinary intuition, a sort of radical empathy. Mr. Lloyd sets the pace, and this performance conveyed much of what you’d need to know about his values as an artist: soulfulness, mindfulness, generosity, balance. Yet there was nothing precious or gauzy about it. In the best possible sense, the band settled in and got to work.
Mr. Lloyd has preserved the cry in his tone, an imploring, vocal quality that moves through even his more burbling turns of phrase. On a pliable piece called “Nu Blues” he began succinctly, leaving gulps of space between phrases, before opening some unseen pressure valve. His improvisations, then and at the peak of two adjacent highlights — “Abide With Me” and “Requiem” — carried the hallmarks of a language steeped in history: bebop, softened with a slouch; midperiod Coltrane, filtered through a personal lens; down-home blues, translated into worldly spirit talk.
Somewhere past the set’s midpoint he switched to alto flute for a funk extrapolation of his song “Little Peace.” Then, after some bracing tumult from Mr. Harland and the others, he played a scrap of “Ramanujan” on tarogato, a Hungarian reed instrument.
Mr. Lloyd’s playing, in whatever form it took, was all but inseparable from his band. There was slippery variability in its foundation, but also granite authority — and ultramodernity — each time Mr. Moran turned a melodic motif into a recombinant loop, or Mr. Harland locked in to a behind-the-beat pocket.
Those slanted rhythmic strategies, indebted to progressive hip-hop production, didn’t throw off Mr. Lloyd any more than the rolling, continuous energies of the set, which left few breaks for applause. During the finale, a variation on his “Hymn to the Mother,” Mr. Lloyd projected his tenor in a strong, clear beam, against a churn that fused elements of an Indian raga and a clackety New Orleans second line. His composure in that moment felt at once universal and highly specific, a point in space and time.
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CHARLES LLOYD
SIGNS TO BLUE NOTE;
RELEASES “WILD MAN DANCE”
& RECEIVES NEA JAZZ MASTER AWARD IN APRIL
The jazz master still has many miles to traverse in his “call of the wild.” In the midst of celebrating his astounding new recording, Wild Man Dance, Lloyd continues to look to the horizon. “I am still searching to find the sound,” he says. “It is my path. I call myself a ‘sound seeker’…the deeper I dive into the ocean of sound, I find there is still deeper and further to go.”
January 27 2015
http://www.bluenote.com/news/charles-lloyd-signs-to-blue-note
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Charles Lloyd performs
WILD MAN DANCE SUITE
18 April 2015 @ 8 pm
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur;
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.
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Charles Lloyd – Wild Man Dance Suite
North American Premiere
Charles Lloyd, tenor saxophone, flute, tarogato
Jason Moran, piano
Joe Sanders, bass
Eric Harland, drums
Sokratis Sinopoulos, lyra
Miklós Lukács, cimbalom
“Mr. Lloyd has come up with a strange and beautiful distillation of the American experience, part abandoned and wild, part immensely controlled and sophisticated.”—New York Times
Wild Man Dance Suite is a sweeping new masterpiece from Charles Lloyd. Blending traditional jazz elements with visceral sounds and textures from antiquity, Lloyd has created something altogether new and exciting. Composed for a quartet of piano, bass, and drums, with the addition of Greek lyra and the Hungarian gypsy cimbalom, the ensemble performs the six movements of the suite like a flowing orchestral unit.
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Charles Lloyd and the late Billy Higgins
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Charles Lloyd– Arrows into Infinity
Dorothy Darr, Lloyd’s wife, manager and co-producer/director with Jeffrey Morse, has created a beautifully made and edited film that allows Lloyd’s character and story to shine through, setting that final statement in a context that makes perfect sense.
https://vimeo.com/68448948
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3gCW0NtGIQ
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2570390/
CATHERINE L. JOHNSON 
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