Charles Lloyd

that's pretty amazing

yeah but again it comes from being you know somewhat eclectic and having played traditional jazz and i played with horace silver and i played with charles lloyd and i played traditional jazz trumpet.

So I could understand exactly what Kenny was doing and I could do that.

And I knew enough about pedals and harmonizers and stuff that I could at least get into the world of John Hassell.

I'll take care of that.

So I hired, fortunately, Charles Lloyd, Willie Higgins, Jerry Allen, a young bass player, I forget his name, Sid Page, who's a great violinist, and Gary Burton.

and to do this score.

And it's all improvised.

what's new

so i think every week i say the same thing y'all are gonna really really like this album and i can't impress it upon you enough to listen to charles lloyd figure in blue was released in October of 2025, so it's basically brand new, Blue Note Records, and the length is one minute and 38 seconds.

One hour and 38 minutes.

Yeah, got that.

It's a new delta blues post-bop, and it has avant-garde textures in it.

Once you start listening to this album, you're going to want to hear the whole thing.

Charles Lloyd, I mean, here's a cat, 87 years old, and he's bringing new talent into the scene, relatively new talent.

And he's not overpowering like our Brian Blade.

The whole thing was staged as a marriage of two tribes who usually kept their distance, the political radicals and the dropouts, the people trying to change the country and the people trying to leave it.

for an afternoon the two sides pretended to be one movement it mostly worked because nobody was in charge and the sun was out and there was not much to argue about yet something did shift after this day the notion of free public rock played in the open as a way to loosen the mind and stitch a scene together took hold up and down the coast through that spring and into the summer the free concerts kept coming the park filled again and again sometimes on a schedule and far more often not for one long season an empty field and a flat bed of amplifiers was the entire event and it was enough here is the small strange thing on the tape charles lloyd the jazz saxophonist wandered up and sat in on flute during a fast churning instrumental he cuts loose with a jazzy aggressive stream of consciousness run chasing the band around the beat and never quite landing Dizzy Gillespie was somewhere in that crowd, and he pronounced the whole thing swinging, which is not a word people usually hand this band.

A parachutist dropped out of the sky and landed on the field, on purpose, in the middle of the afternoon.

Nobody on the tape sounds especially surprised.

His debut recording was taken off, and that was Freddie Hubbard at the trumpet, Dexter Gordon, tenor saxophone, Butch Warren, bass, Billy Higgins at the drums.

Now another classic from tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd. .

. . . . . . .

Thank you. . . . . . Na na na na na . . . . . ¶¶ Thank you.

pianist Ahmad Jamal from his Awakening album from 1970.

His trio then consisted of Jamil Nasser at the bass and Frank Gant at the drums, playing Antonio Carlos Jobim's Wave.

Before that, Charles Lloyd, tenor saxophone on his Forest Flower live at Monterey, and that one featured Jared at the piano, Cecil McBee bass, and Jack D. Jeanette drums.

How about one from vocalist Sarah Vaughan, Lullaby of Birdland, featuring Jimmy Jones piano, Joe Benjamin bass, and Roy Haynes drums.

Again, our singer was a couple years older than me, and he was a very hip guy.

Charles Lloyd was a flautist and saxophone player, and one summer, him and I, I had some like bongos or something, and he played flute.

And one summer, I must have been going into, by this time, was I going into 11th grade, 10th grade, 11th grade? And he, we would walk around, go to different parks, and just jam.

And I would play the bongos, and he would play flute.

And he had this record, Forest Flower, by Charles Lloyd.

And Charles Lloyd is still playing.

He's still out there.

He's beautiful.

And the British saxophonist Courtney Pine recorded this for his 1995 album, Modern Day Jazz Stories.

Charles Lloyd, with his 1989 album, Fish Out of Water.

It was recorded in Oslo.

It features the pianist Bobo Stenson here with Palle Deneuson.

And I'm like, dude, I'm like, there are white cat, brilliant white jazzers, but don't forever, don't, this was a black American art form that was co-opted by the white, corporate structure.

I mean, Charles Lloyd told me he'd go to...

He'd freaking go to...

He went to UCLA for a master's degree or USC.

Well, actually, I'm not sure, you know, they did, this is before, I don't know if you've ever seen the videos of them, but they had these, um, 76, 77, they had the poetic hoo-hahs out there.

And where you'd have like, you know, William Burroughs and you'd have these like prodigious poets who, you know, were Kesey's friends.

They were showing up and playing and riffing poetry with Charles Lloyd and Rosson Roland Kirk would show up.

I mean, it was just like, you want to talk about it? This was like when you were first.

You can also hear it on percussion like tabla, which lives in the mid-range.

For example, Sangam with Charles Lloyd and tabla master Zakir Hussain has an amazing wealth of skin tone.

A related gain, but one I didn't expect, is the subtle but important way that the Nazare improves string tone on some classical recordings like the Mahler Fifth with Nelsons and the Vienna Philharmonic.

I still think many of these are tipped up in the violin range, but the Nazare makes them more listenable with unpacking, not filtration.