I'm not always bitter. I'm not always happy.
I'm not always laughing. I'm no Tom.
I don't do a number for somebody.
Again, it's life. It's all and everything.
I mean, you don't...
Am I screaming sometimes? Am I bitter?
Hell, yes, I'm bitter.
I mean, I've got a insane amount of dues that I've paid.
If I could articulate it,
I guess, you know, I wouldn't have the need to play it.
I got off the bus. I became quiet.
It's high thinking. It's about elevation.
You can't shoot an arrow into infinity if you're always in motion, you know.
You have to pull the bow back, you know.
Then the arrow can ﬂy.
Well, I'm Pisces first, you know.
The water sign. I'm fish.
When I was born...
When my mother was pregnant, there was a big ﬂood in Memphis.
And this thing was set up for me to come.
Thus passed the great ﬂood of 1937.
In 20 days, enough rain to cover the 207,000 square miles
of the watershed with water a foot deep.
That's more than 176 billion tons.
I was born by the river
In a little tent
Oh, and just like the river, I've been running ever since
It's been a long
A long time coming
But I know a change gonna come
Oh, yes, it will
I come from this rich tradition,
and you stand on the shoulders of a lot of greats.
Phineas Newborn was our J.S. Bach and mentor.
He was coming out of Art Tatum and Bud Powell.
Duke Ellington's band, Count Basie,
and Billy Eckstine and Diana Washington...
all these people would come through my town of Memphis,
and my mother had a large house, and they would room with us
because there wasn't hotels for these great musicians
in abundance or suitable,
and I was a little kid, but I couldn't wait for them wake up
so I could pounce, you know.
I had some questions, you know.
I wanted to know about Bird.
But the thing about Charlie Parker
was that when I heard him at about nine or ten
and that whole tradition of deep swing,
but with such grace and such elegance...
They changed the harmonic landscape also.
Rhythmically, they freed the beat up.
These guys before would play...
You know, it was like covered wagon-style, you know.
And Charlie Parker and Max Roach, they freed that stuff up, man,
and it hasn't been the same since that,
and I'm in that tradition.
So you learned your licks and you were working as a side man
with people like Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King and Johnnie Ace.
Bobby "Blue" Bland, all those guys.
The thing about Howlin' Wolf... That's Chester Burnett.
He was a very big man,
and he would play these little schoolhouses in the South, you know.
And there would be a potbelly stove or something in the middle.
It's nighttime, you know, gambling in the backroom.
There's com-liquor fingers going on
and all kinds of gunshots going off outside and stuff like that,
and we were playing this music.
But Howlin' Wolf would shake, shake, shake those little schoolhouses,
he was so powerful.
First dollar I ever made was with Charles...
Charles Lloyd, bless him.
Charles called me. He said, “Hey, I got a gig for you.“
I said, 'All right.'
He said, "It's a picnic.“
I thought, “Okay, where is it?'
I said, "Who all is gonna go?'
He said, “Me and you.'
Just alto and trumpet?
I said, "Let's go.'
So Charles came and got me.
We went, played the picnic.
I think Charles gave me a little bit bigger portions of money.
How much more, I can't remember that part.
And I think some of the tunes we was playing back in that day
was a tune called “Red Top.“
My little red top
See how you got me spinnin'
Goin' round and round
We must have did pretty good
'cause we didn't have no trouble getting the taste of change, so...
See, I got a chance to catch the last, last tail end
of the old, old pioneers
to the beginning of the new, new era of music was coming through,
like Phineas and Charles Lloyd.
I was born on the river, and Memphis is on the Mississippi River.
Oh, I see.
And I live by the sea now, in New York.
When I was living in New York, there's the Hudson River.
When I first got to New York, I checked into the Alvin Hotel
where Prez, Lester Young, had lived.
I was in Mecca. I'm in Manhattan, you know.
And that first night I went down to Birdland,
which is a few doors from the Alvin Hotel,
and I saw my friend Booker Little from high school.
And Becker's first thing out of his mouth was,
"Where are you staying?"
Booker was working at Birdland that night,
and I said, "I'm staying across the street at the Alvin.'
He said, "No, you're not. Go pack your bags up.
You're coming home with me.“
So he would talk to me long hours into the night,
kind of tuning me up because I was ready to jump into the fast lane.
"I'm in New York, man,“ you know.
And he said, “No, it"s not about that. It's about character.“
And he was 22 years old.
He left a year later, and he was a realized soul,
and he just told me, he said, "Those days are over, man.
It's about character."
l joined Chico, recommended by a wonderful sage, Buddy Collette.
I knew that once Chico asked for somebody...
He said, "Who can play out there?'
And I'm thinking, "Who have I met?'
And I said, "There's one guy, Charles Lloyd.
He plays alto, but I think he'll do good for you
because you're the kind of guy that can have that lead spot.“
And he needed somebody like a Charles.
That's what I was looking for.
You can't find these kind of players.
I was heaven, man, you know. That was the big time, you know.
Well, see, it's all possible. That was the way I was.
If a person could play, then I would send them in.
- So you just put me on an airplane. - Yeah, and it all worked out.
When I was 17 and I got my fake ID from Tijuana,
I was in Shelly's Manhole, and I saw Chico, Chico Hamilton.
And there was this very eccentric sax player, brand-new.
And wow.
Captivated all of us.
Yeah, I was an alto player when I first joined Chico Hamilton,
but Coltrane and Sonny Rollins really inspired me to pick up the tenor
because I could play very high on the alto,
but if I moved to tenor, I would have some standard-bearers
in front of me that would make me step up more,
so it gave me more range.
I met Charles when he was playing with Chico Hamilton.
And Charles was a very serious guy.
I remember very distinctly that at a certain point,
we were talking about freedom
and what someone could play harmonically
if one heard something.
Charles said something to the effect that...
I don't remember which note he referred to,
but it was a note that would have totally conﬂicted
with a particular chord.
And he said, "Well, at SC, they would tell you
that you couldn't play that note on that chord.“
He said, "But I've come to learn that if you actually hear that,
that's the note you should play.'
The first thing that made an impression on me with Charles Lloyd
was his compositions.
And that group was the group with Gabor Szabo and Albert Stinson.
Everything good that happened in my life happened because of Albert.
He was a genius, and we didn't know it, you know.
He was just Albert at the time.
Then when I would go to the Dragonwick
and I would see him playing with Charles,
it was awesome.
In 1962, '63, they made a string of albums.
You know, it was just like one of those combinations that was made in heaven.
He and Gabor... I mean, the way they meshed
and the way Gabor brought his compositions to life
was just extraordinary.
We were playing a club in Toronto, and we heard Cannonball was playing,
and we thought, “Oh, Al, we got to go catch that.“
So, in between sets where we were playing,
we went over to the Friar's Club,
and that's where they were playing,
and it was Cannonball and Nat, Joe Zawinul,
and they had this new guy, Charles Lloyd.
Charles had such a powerful presence,
not only a sound and a style and everything,
but just standing there, he had a presence.
There was something in him really set apart from everybody else.
Cannon and the Quintet were all dressed in black mohair gig suits
and the thin ties that were the style of the time and white shirts,
and here was this guy dressed in a gray three-piece Italian suit
with this ﬂourishing silk tie and these wire-rimmed glasses,
and he looked like a professor from Dartmouth.
It's a mental image that I'll never forget...
this guy standing there in the middle of these other people
looking like they're from Venus and he's from Mars,
and when he played, he played Charles Lloyd.
To all those people in Wichita, we'd like to remind you
that this is happening live in the Far East.
And for the first number, we'd like to bring Charles Lloyd out
on a big round of applause to play a piece
that was composed specially for Slugs' called 'Slugs' Blues.“
Let's give him a big hand for 'Slugs' Blues.“
The most vivid memory I have with Charles
is playing at a club called Slugs' in New York.
It was fantastic. It was kind of like, you know, the Wild West.
It wasn't an upscale club in any sense.
It was, 'This is like a hard-core jazz club.“
Painters and writers would go there because it was easy access,
plenty of music,
You didn't have to pay very much for it, and you met a lot of friends.
Jackie McLean was always running in and out,
causing a lot of action and friction and diction.
He was close with Bob Thompson.
I played there... I think it was for a week.
Although it may have just been for a few days,
because his new piano player was coming in,
and his new piano player was Keith Jarrett.
And Charles...
He seemed to have a different angle on it.
He didn't seem to come from the same hidden shadows
and street corner messages as...
Traditionally New York musicians
would sort of scurry out of file shadows and dark places, et cetera.
And he seemed to have his creases in place.
First of all, he had his own sound.
Nobody ever sounded like Charles Lloyd.
He just captured a certain element
that was ﬂowing almost like a ﬂowing river,
cascades of sound that almost had kind of an environmental aspect to it.
And Charles also doesn't have a lot of the boundaries
that other jazz artists had, that they were like,
"This is our club.
All these rock and roll people or hippies or whoever,
they're over here, we're over there.“
And his thing...
he had a much more open mind and an open imagination.
Charles could get audiences that others didn't seem to have access to.
There was a lot of things.
I think people talked about things they didn't understand or know,
and fundamentally nobody really knew where Charles was coming from
or what he was into.
Oh, he's like he's bougie or...
It was that element,
and it"s like, you know, I'd say,
"Well, what the fuck is the matter with you motherfuckers?
You want to be on a street corner and in the garbage can all the time?
I mean, that's not where it"s at. That's not where the music is at.“
Charles stood up with his creases and continued to go forward,
you know, even though, you know, he wondered
whether or not this was cool.
He's looking for something that I don't know if anybody else had that vision.
And then he gets this guitar player, Gabor Szabo.
When Charles left Cannonball Adderley,
he made two albums on his own for Columbia,
and the second one was “Of Course, Of Course,“
and it was a reunion with Gabor,
and that's what really attracted me to that album.
They were this one plus one makes infinity.
He used to say all the time back then...
When he would agree with you, he would say, “Of course.“
You're talking. “Of course.“
It was like his expression.
And then he said to me,
"I'm going into the studio to make a new record.
Why don't you come and play on some things?"
So I was like, “No, I can't come and play,“ you know.
You guys do what you do and...“
And he said, "No, no, no, no. We're gonna do some blues kind of things
and some funky things and stuff.“
He said, "No, no, no, no, really, you know, come and play.“
And I asked Charles, "Was that just a mess what we did?'
He said, "No, no, no, you know, we got some things.“
I said, “So what are you gonna call this record?"
He said, 'Of Course.'
I said, "You're gonna...“
He said, "I'm gonna call it 'Of Course, Of Course."
I was like, “As you should.'
Charles' next phase was something
that I still shake my head about in disbelief,
which was the group with Keith Jarrett and Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette.
To pick Jack DeJohnette and Keith together,
that was a very wise choice
because this was one of the best and inﬂuential rhythm
and the melodic kind of wavering sounds that I've heard.
The fact that they were playing Winterland and Fillmore
and all these rock festivals as well as jazz tours
without changing one iota of who they were and what they wanted to do,
it still remains a mystery to me.
Things started to really take off for us
when we did the “Dream Weaver' recording.
And, you know, that was a great session.
And we recorded “Sombrero Sam,' which was amazing,
which put the Charles Lloyd Quartet on the map.
The Grateful Dead, they were really impressed with the Quartet.
They heard us improvise, and they loved it so much.
They were, like, a folk-blues band.
They loved "Dream Weaver," my record on Atlantic,
and they would carry it around everywhere,
and they started playing longer vamps and, you know, like that.
Oh, yeah, we were on bills in that circuit with The Grateful Dead,
which had Pigpen and Jerry Garcia, and Jefferson Airplane.
All of these bands, Steve Miller, the bands in San Francisco,
they wanted to be on the same bills with us.
Bill Graham invited me to come over and play,
and so I played, and there was a big explosion.
There were unpredictable scenes in the Fillmore Auditorium.
I mean, I was surprised that I found Charles in that situation,
playing music, and that there was an audience there
that was absolutely enraptured with Charles' playing.
But Charles also had this great ability
to appeal to a younger, broader audience
than the typical hard-core jazz audience.
He was almost like the jazz rock star.
He could mix in with rock groups, and he was accepted.
He was the first jazz guy to play at the Fillmore.
That's a very big deal. Those shows were incredible.
Again, he had an amazing band, you know, with Keith Jarrett
and Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette.
It was just fantastic.
It showed me the possibilities that I...
I didn't know I wanted that possibility,
but I knew it when I heard it.
I said, “Okay, yeah, you can do that,“
And so, you know, he laid the blueprint, I think,
for a ot of bands at that time.
It was a very exciting time, you know, to be experimental.
The audiences were really wide open.
I saw them in Central Park
when Keith was plucking the strings inside the piano.
Oh, it was just fantastic.
There was a freedom once again.
I mean, Jack has these, like, bells hanging off his ride cymbal,
and he'd sort of take them off and crash them around,
and Keith would play with his head.
When musicians are that high quality, then when they go outside,
it's fabulous.
It could be, you know, faking it, but they weren't, and I knew it.
We were starting to listening to the music in a different way
because it was something unheard of,
what this group as a quartet produced in live performances.
And I realized that there was something alternatively to what I heard
from Coltrane and other groups,
and it sounded like a young and dynamite, beautiful, dancing group.
Growing up in Houston, my parents listened to a lot of jazz,
and, of course, they had “Forest Flower.'
So, when I was looking through records
looking for Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey,
then I was also seeing “Forest Flower,“
and my fathers like, “Oh, you need to listen to that.
You should listen to that. You should listen to that.'
You know, and so I started to listening to it as a kid.
And then just another day in the Marine Corps.
You know, the Monterey Jazz Festival was going on,
and somebody came through, had some tickets.
So that night it was cold.
Ooh, it was cold in Monterey,
and then the first note of "Sunrise"...
“Forest Flower - Sunrise“...
it was just like somebody stung me.
“Forest Flower' is integrated with a certain time frame
when a lot of us changed.
I was really, definitely very deep into Bob Dylan
and rock music of the time,
and, you know, those days we listened to radio a lot,
and one day I heard "Forest Flower' actually on the same station
that I would hear Bob Dylan or The Beatles.
But it made me go out and buy the album, and when I put that album on,
it struck a new note in me that I'd never felt before.
As things begin to move on,
my whole...
psyche changed.
Everything changed.
They was looking at me and said, “Man, what are you doing?
It's cold out here.'
"Yeah, well, I'm not.'
I took my jacket off
and stood up and intensely listened.
The vibe was really special there that day, you know,
and we could feel it, and it comes across in the record, you know.
My recording of "Forest Flower“ at Monterey in 1966,
I did not know that it was being recorded.
We played our set, and that was that.
It was sort of like something coming together
at a time when barriers are down.
So it slipped through, maybe you could say.
It's not that I stopped listening to Bob Dylan right away or anything else,
but I started to play that album a little bit and then more,
and then it became my morning ritual for probably several years.
That record, rock and roll 14-year-olds own that record.
It's been a long time since a jazz record has become an icon record...
and certainly beyond a jazz listenership,
and “Forest Flower' was such an illustration.
That was the key that opened up my heart and my spirit to jazz.
I said, "They're not playing notes.'
Looking at Calvin.
He said, “What do you mean they're not playing notes?"
I said, “No, that's not notes.'
I saw light and compassion.
It stayed with me until today.
I'll never forget it.
And I consider myself to be a...
not a ﬂower child but a “Forest Flower' child.
I think Charles Lloyd's probably gonna be the next great influence on jazz.
- If I may, just one story... - I have nothing else to tell you.
- Just one story... - I've got nothing else to tell you.
...from that historic trip to the Soviet Union.
The first jazz group to go behind the Iron Curtain
and play Tallinn, Leningrad, and Moscow.
not true.
Benny Goodman had gone over before us,
but he was on some kind of State Department tour.
We were invited by the people.
We were the first wild guys.
We went with no pay.
You know, we went to do it because the Tallinn Jazz Festival
was giving us even more international exposure.
Each day they'd say, “You can play. No, you can't play.“
And we were getting, like, you know, antsy.
KGB would follow us everywhere.
You'd see the cars.
It was pretty obvious, and actually our hotel rooms...
We'd purposely leave our things a certain way.
When we come back, they would be moved.
He was the first one to go to the Soviet Union
independently of any government program.
- Yeah. - So he was invited by people
who then were sent to Siberia.
It was heartbreaking.
- This is Vladimir. - Yeah.
Hi, Charles. I'm not sure whether you remember me,
but if you get back...
for 43 years back,
to Leningrad after Tallinn Jazz Festival...
After Tallinn?
After Tallinn, and remember that adventure that they...
- Oh, man... - They closed...
Yeah, closed down. You took us to another venue.
- Yeah, remember? - Yeah, I remember.
I'll never forget that, man.
- They locked the people in. - Yeah.
Wouldn't let us in, and then you took us to another venue.
Remember the wild race through the city?
Only 43 years passed.
Now I'm on a very short visit to the States.
- Thank you. I'm glad you got in here. - No, no. Glad to see you.
In the face of adversity, they felt that was...
“We have to do this." And they did it.
When we finally did to get play, the response was overwhelming.
You could hear our pent-up energy coming through that recording.
When we finished, you know, that energy went out,
and that audience gave it back to us, like, by applauding
for 10, 15 minutes afterwards
and to the point where the authorities came out
and reprimanded the audience, saying, "Stop! Stop! Stop that!
You're acting like children!“
In Russia, if not all of the Soviet Union,
the saxophone was banned
because the people had reacted so expressively towards Charles.
- And it scared them. - That scared them.
And they thought, "Uh-oh, the saxophone is responsible for human uprising.“
They thought it was a gun.
You should have told them, "Yeah, it was a gun.“
And we always thought it was like a folkloric myth.
I love those stories, 'cause those are the stories that make
our own mythology.
Why is Charles Lloyd and this unique record
able to crush boundary lines
in a very tumultuous time?
Success in the '60s for a jazz performer...
this is a very small quantity,
and Charles Lloyd is as large-scale to that as anyone I could name.
So Charles Lloyd is a very important beacon
of jazz expansion and commercial success
in the worst decade to date.
Monk was dropped by Columbia. Duke Ellington was dropped by Columbia.
Birdland closed, reopened, closed, reopened, closed.
It was a hard time. It was a very hard time.
We knew that the hippies
were trying to transform their conscious
and trying to get out of their white-skin privileges
and trying to grow.
And we saw that they were just trying to grow listening to Charles, you know,
and move past Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Even being a teenager and not having a real grasp
of the underpinnings and the nuances of what was going on there,
you could tell that something very different was happening.
We saw he knew how to speak to black folks.
He knew how to speak to the young hippies.
He was moving in all these different circles and so forth.
There was a feeling of change, real change.
We were organizing in Watts.
We were in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
and then the Black Panther party and the Black Student Movement,
on 103rd and Watts
I'm terribly frustrated about the world condition,
about the dues, especially the whole black ghetto shot
that I've had to go through here in America,
and the life that any black person has to go through,
but if I let those negatives take me out, you see,
I'm just...
you know, I'm kind of a...
I have to be positive.
The youngsters was listening to these brothers,
'cause these brothers...
we saw them as par with Trane, you know, with Pharoah.
The jali was carrying a spirit.
And helping us understand how the world works.
What I heard was, “We hope that Taj, Jimmy, and Charles,
who are the most prominent brothers,
we hope that they were giving some light and enlighten white folks
so they transform their consciousness.'
They were definitely viewed as part of the forward thrust
of the Black Liberation Movement.
Yeah, it was a new period, you know.
The Vietnam War was going on. Protesting...
There was a big social-consciousness change.
People trying to make a revolution,
the Black Panthers doing one thing, the SLA doing another thing,
Patty Hearst,
all wrapped up in all of this jumble of confusion.
You should put one dollar in that basket.
Don't you think you should?
Sure. These are freedom dollars, brothers.
It was really pioneers and rebels like Charles,
who was willing to take the heat for playing whatever came into his head
and breaking these rules,
that taught me about that, that instilled that aesthetic in me.
That period of Charles, with “Moon Man“ and "Warm Waters,“
it's revolutionary thinking, but he's not advocating war in the streets.
And I couldn't wait to get home,
and I put it on, and...
you know, first song, there's like this funky groove.
It was clearly sophisticated.
He was singing.
Like, he sounded like Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan,
and it was kind of mind-blowing.
It was from a different side of life than...
You know, he might have evoked Beach Boys harmonies,
but he was not singing about surf and sand, you know.
It was a gritty, street reality...
which gets us to the next album, "Warm Waters,“
and now he's actually got the Beach Boys singing with him on the side,
and that solidified the thing for me, that all life is one.
There you go. Here's my psychedelic guru
telling me everything I'm learning on these trips.
I think the most important thing about it
is that "Moon Man" was a total courageous departure on one level
and yet totally connected to who Charles is.
We've always had, in our tradition, people who tell the stories,
keep the spirit, but who are not caught up with the day-to-day life,
which will slow you down from being open to listen.
What we call in Africa the jalis and the griots or the avatars or so forth,
and Charles is one of those people that for whatever reason,
he has been brought on the planet
to transmit that energy and that joy,
'cause, you know, there's a duality in the world.
There's pain. If you don't know joy, you won't know pain.
You got to know both.
He is a person that reﬂects that light and reﬂects that energy
that gives you a sense of wholeness of the world
and the completeness for a while
and gives you some energy to go on.
What you get in church is what I get when I go to Charles Lloyd.
The industry people, they see it as entertainment,
but be that as it may, it"s something much deeper than that.
Through conscious intention and the music we play
as we improvise and we write compositions,
we're planting seeds in the earth and in the environment,
not just in the space that we play in, but it goes everywhere.
You need the jali or the griot to be open enough to let that come through
and then fight their own ego to don't say, "It's me,“
as opposed to, "It's coming through me, but it has to be me too,
because if I wasn't doing what I'm doing, it couldn't come through.“
And that's a real delicate balance of ego.
He's constantly in a battle of death.
Although I believe in love and understanding
and I hope for a kind of joyous communication
amongst us all...
I've often found during my life...
a kind of lonesomeness, I guess.
I guess seeking a kind of ideal world that doesn't exist.
It sort of always brought me to be, I guess, a lonesome child.
So, while I have a great deal of optimism,
I also realize that there is a great deal of sadness sometimes.
I had had some success with “Forest Flower'
in Monterey and all of that,
with the group of Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette and Cecil McBee,
but the problem was that the business wanted me to become a product,
and to become a product,
I would have to give a repeatable...
boring retelling of the truth.
I wasn't looking for fame and fortune.
I was looking for the zone, the Holy Grail in the music,
because that was my salvation,
because i had heard it.
I knew what it was.
It was my savior.
It was the light,
So I didn't focus on the attention that was going on around me.
I began to pull back with nonprescription drugs.
I started to medicate myself.
It slips up on you.
You don't know that this tragic magic is indeed tragic.
You know, drugs, it"s roulette.
KR?!
You don't know what heroin's gonna do to you.
It might allow somebody like Gabi to go for many, many, many years doing that.
For you, you know, it might kill you right away.
And it seems, though, in the beginning, the drugs were fueling the creativity,
but after a while, they were impeding the creativity.
You know, I couldn't see that,
but the musicians around me could see it.
I thought I was sailing.
I thought everything was great.
To us, it seemed like Charles had lost his focus.
At that point, you know...
you know, his intonation was starting to suffer.
It was really getting bad.
It felt like it was time for me to move on.
It wasn't easy to do that 'cause we'd been through so much,
a lot together.
You know, I had to...
I really went through changes about it.
I hit a wall. I hit a wall, and I couldn't really function,
and the music business was very disenchanting to me at that time.
It was like 'Ten Cents A Dance,'
“Gosh, how they hurt my toes, fat guys and sailors.“
The artist was coming up on the short end of the stick,
and there was no way of...
You know, it's not like we're soap suds, that they make us this product.
My record company had blackballed me.
I couldn't record for anyone else.
For my thinking, I just disbanded the group.
I had wonderful musicians,
but by that time...
I was falling apart.
You know, you're around these architects like Monk, who created this music.
I was around Duke Ellington and Strayhom.
So I'm so inspired by all of that,
that i had a debt to the tradition
that's been giving me so much, so rich,
to get it together.
I went to the west coast,
and I took a house at the Malibu Colony at the beach there.
I was driving my car in the rain coming from the airport one day.
There was a huge storm,
and I just said to myself,
“Boy, you sure have stepped out on a limb.“
You know, it was like no way back.
At a certain point, I began to suffer musically,
and I began to suffer personally,
and I was off my spiritual compass, and I could feel it,
and it disturbed me, and I had to go away.
I could tell.
When he actually decided he was gonna leave music, I was like,
“I've read that now,“ but I was like, "What?"
He was going all over the world.
He was in Russia, and he was this and that,
but when he basically said he wasn't happy with the circumstances
and he had had it, that was so shocking to me.
I had no comprehension of anybody,
except for Greta Garbo, who had achieved that level of success,
who was so disenchanted by what the success actually meant
that the person decided, "Well, I'll tell you what...
whatever you got for me, you now still have it.
If you have it, hold on to it because you'll get no more. I'm gone.'
Perhaps, in a way, maybe his heart was broken,
which may have been a catalyst in him maybe pulling back
and deciding to kind of work on himself at a certain period of time
when he moved to Big Sur.
And it's quite understandable that a musician like Charles Lloyd,
who was very much an idealist...
he was, like, brimming with love.
It's just constantly ﬂowing out of his body and out of his spirit.
Charles has, like, a huge, limitless heart.
So, you know, in show business, you always assume,
"Well, oh, yeah, he's saying that now,
but a few years from now he'll make his big return,
and all of his fans will just really go crazy.'
And so I was waiting for that.
I wasn't consciously waiting for it, but I expected it.
Then it didn't happen. I was like, "Wow. Charles Lloyd, gone.'
I met Charles in 1968.
When I first heard his music, I was in art school.
The music that he was making was my source of inspiration for my images.
I heard in him someone who had a deep sensitivity and an expression,
who was saying to the audience,
'Wake up. There's beauty outside of us, and there's beauty inside of us...
but we all must strive to become better and to not fall asleep
and to not mistreat our fellow human beings.'
He was married at the time,
so I decided that I didn't want to be the person
who was breaking up a marriage.
We clearly had a very strong connection.
So I left and lived in Italy for a while.
After I finished college, lived in Italy and France for a while,
and then I got news that he was separating from his wife
and moved to Big Sur,
and I decided I would come back, and followed him there.
I got to the place where I realized I needed more isolation
to build a fence around the purity
that I was beginning to feel from...
I was a vegetarian.
I had moved to becoming a fruitarian.
And I wanted to be a breathatarian.
So I thought, "if I live...
You can't do that in the midst of Toxemia's grandmother.“
So I decided to move to Big Sur and live in a cave
and drink lemon water.
I was determined to get my...
spiritual life back intact
and that original inspiration which had fueled me.
We had this property that we were custodians of.
The Chiefs Hill was 13 acres.
We ended up doing no construction up there.
The 11 acres where we did build, we cleared brush.
Planted gardens.
I pull weeds, literally and metaphorically,
and you sweep the dust away, and then a lot of dust ﬂies.
You sweep the room.
So the thing is not to pay attention to it but to just keep practicing,
just keep going forward.
It's like the banana-peel analogy, you know.
In life, you may fall down many times, but you have to continue to get up.
I wasn't thinking about coming back to music in a public way.
I played music outside, and it was so beautiful
because there would be these zen days
and these huge, giant redwoods would show up and say hello to me,
and I'd play, and I'd look up on these hills and look out to sea.
When I was in Malibu, I had become friends with Burgess Meredith.
He was a great actor,
you know, in that Shakespearean kind of thing,
and he was interested in consciousness,
and he came up to Big Sur looking for me,
which I found really touching.
He said, “You left, and you didn't leave any tracks.“
He wanted us to tour, and he would give readings,
and he wanted me to play music,
and we would do things together at Esalen and up and down the coast.
We would go back east to Harvard,
and various universities would invite us,
and there were these writers who would come down to get me
to come up to Santa Cruz, to these poetry readings,
and I would play my oboe.
There were people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
who lived up at Bixby Creek up the road,
and there was Gary Snyder.
There was Ken Kasey, Bob Kaufman, Charles Bukowslci.
So we would do these readings, and I would play with some of them.
I would play my music,
and I couldn't go on to the so-called jazz circuit
because I was uninvited,
and so an alternate door opened for me to play music.
We planted avocado trees.
We had fig trees and apples
and apricots and almonds.
I had a huge vegetable garden.
We would go for walks and hikes into the redwoods,
just marveling in the change of temperature
from one step to the next
or the change in the air, of the aromas.
It just was bathed in this state of perfection,
even though sometimes we never knew
where the next mortgage payment was going to come from.
It was very dicey a lot of the time, as far as finances went,
but otherwise the sheer beauty of living in that environment,
for both of us, it still remains encapsulated
in this kind of golden light.
Well, you know what Dorothy means, the name?
- No. - It's “gift from God.“
So, you know, I was blessed that she stopped off here,
and she saved my life many times, too, I must say,
and she's been there for me,
and she's, how to say, transcended all notions
Lu
She stood by me when I wasn't standing by me.
I don't know.
She makes it such that I can function.
In ways that I could never do without her,
because we share great love and great...
She's an artist.
She's a painter, you know, and renaissance woman,
filmmaker, all of that stuff, you know.
And she's a great inspiration,
and she keeps our ship aﬂoat.
I'm kind of like, you know, hanging out there in the wind, you know,
"vino to get the...
hear the sound.
When I was in my retreat period in Big Sur in the '70s
when I didn't tour anymore,
and then in early 1980,
Michel Petrucciani came to my place, my retreat.
He found me.
Of course...
“And, ladies and gentlemen, that was Michel Petrucciani
and the long-lost Charles Lloyd.
Perhaps Charles is back on the scene now. We'll see.'
And I said, "What? Charles Lloyd?'
He had this beautiful gift,
and I realized that I was being thrown out of paradise.
The elders had always helped me.
So I took him around the world a couple years to get him started.
He had this glass bone disease.
But when he showed up, I was reading one of those ancient texts.
I think it was Ashtavakra Samhita,
which talks about a guy with a bent frame, you know.
And this little guy shows up.
He told me a funny story. He said when he was very small,
you know, he told his folks he wanted a piano.
They had brought him home a toy piano.
He got so mad, he grabbed a hammer and smashed that thing.
He said, "I said a piano.“
When he goes to make music, it"s as if you put wings on men,
and from the time that you start the music, you take off.
You ﬂy.
And, you know, I suppose the experience of life or that which comes through,
one is what one is,
and birds of a feather ﬂock together or something.
So I feel quite honored and touched
that we have this empathy and sharing that we do,
and I feel this is, for me...
what makes it sort of worth while.
The “Fish Out of Water' recording was made with Bobo Stenson
and Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen.
It was our first encounter working together in the studio.
I think it was a kind of a very innocent first meeting.
Charles was pulling out things often
that still remains to be actually very inspiring music experience.
So the Nordic Quartet... You played with Bobo for a long time.
That was a great, great group.
We did “Fish Out of Water.“ We did “Notes from Big Sur," "The Call.“
Even/body's soloing, but everybody's not soloing.
That's one of the most amazing things about that group.
I'd been in silence for many years in Big Sur.
It was the first time I'd gone into the studio,
and what I heard in my mind's ear we were able to capture.
So it brought tears to my soul.
Since we worked for such a long time together,
I'm always surprised with what kind of nuances and phrasings and ideas
he's coming up with.
So it"s a musician that is an artist in progress.
It's not sitting still and say, 'That"s what I'm saying.“
Well, Charles,
where did this tender
and unique sound came from?
I'd have to say Lester Young.
- Oh, Lester Young? - Yes.
That's kind of surprise to me.
Well, I play modern, but that sound that he had was tender,
and it was so beautiful to me.
I'm always feeling that the world can use more tenderness, you know.
I can play strong, but I like something about the balance
and the tenderness that Prez had, you know.
It affected me.
I would go down and visit Charles,
and sometimes I'd go to see him, and Omette would be there,
and they were, like, very close,
but they were from very different schools at the same time.
I could see this. I could feel this difference in them.
Ornette was a beautiful rule breaker...
and Charles didn't like any rules at all.
So you could see why they had a beautiful connection.
- So I got to the point. - Okay.
Are we here yet?
Well, I've known Omette Coleman
since I first went to California in 1956.
He was always a beautiful soul.
He had a very warm humanity, and he had his own music cosmology...
his language that he was developing,
and he came up, like I did, in rhythm and blues bands in the south,
and Omette and I had a warm, special relationship.
I liked that he can take you to a state.
It sounded like children on the playground playing, you know.
He can bring sadness into the room.
He's someone that's made an enormous contribution
because that language of Charlie Parker...
he expanded on it and took it to his own personal song.
What?
I think it"s a concept.
It can't get any better than that.
Remember when you brought Scotty with you?
Yeah.
Was it Higgins or Blackwell?
Man.
You can do a move like that? I mean, is that legal?
Yeah, you can do it.
It's not only legal, it won the game.
And what happened in '86? If you want to share that with us.
I had a near-death experience,
and they didn't think I was gonna live.
They thought I was 11 hours from being out of here.
I came out of that, and I rededicated myself to this beautiful tradition.
What I'm looking for is looking for me,
and so it"s like this guy.
This guy is a thief, you know, and he's running from the police, you know,
and he's in India, you know.
It's an old story... I mean fable.
So the guy's running from the police, and then he keeps seeing
these holy men sitting under the trees and stuff like that,
and he keeps running, and finally he stops to put a cloth around himself,
and he sits under the tree like he's meditating.
After a while, something starts to happen for this guy,
and then these people start bringing him food,
offerings and stuff like that, and he realizes that,
"Oh, I've been on the wrong path.“
So, in other words, behind every saint is a sinner,
and in front of every sinner is a saint.
So all creaton is about
is for us to realize that this is school and for us to rise above it.
But what I'm saying is that essentially what all religions teach
is be good and do good,
And this is a very religious country.
Spiritual I wouldn't say.
That's why I had to delve into mother India.
Something was calling me about the ancient Vedas.
Vedanta teaches that divinity is your birthright,
and you have to wake up to manifest that
because somehow Mahamaya hypnotizes us,
and, you know, you run through the maze or wheel of birth
and karma birth and death and all that stuff.
So you have to get off at some point.
Ramakrishna's the latest incarnation of the sages
from going back 5,000 years,
and I traced these guys,
and I found a lot of hideouts,
but Ramakrishna was the cat who got to me
because he was, like, Trane.
Trane was, you know, 24 hours a day of music, you know.
Ramakrishna was just all religion.
And what I mean by religion, I mean to realize, you know.
And he had these wild guys.
He made 12 guys also.
They were his disciples, and he taught them.
I was at the Vedanta Temple,
and I was in the bookstore, and I was looking for all sorts of...
like, the complete works of Swami Vivekananda
and other guys who Ramakrishna had taught.
This elderly nun me out, and she was asking me did I meditate,
and I said, “Yes, I've been meditating for 15 years.“
And she looked at me, and she said, “Has it changed your character?"
And there was Booker staring me in the face, you know.
And so I bowed down and rolled on the ﬂoor
and did my usual 'foaming at the mouth“ thing,
and she began to teach me.
I've always loved that Charles is willing to work in duo with a drummer
and is willing to work with more complex possibilities
that exist with someone like Zakir Hussein.
Zakir Hussain comes from a family of tabla players.
You know, he's the greatest living tabla player,
and they go back thousands of years.
I heard the deep blues.
I heard those guys I used to play with,
like Howlin' Wolf and Junior Parker and stuff like that,
and I realized that he was beefing these beats out on the drum,
but it was very soulful what he was doing.
The melodic richness of Charles
and his tonal creative mind
is actually made for Indian music.
The way I see it, he's like the pundit or the guru of Indian music,
because I think more and more jazz musicians should look at that.
It started with Coltrane looking at it, you know,
working with the drum,
and not just a love supreme, but music supreme, I think.
Charlie Parker did it in a different manner,
playing through the chord changes,
but not restricting himself to the changes.
Charles already understands
and can already hear the harmonics in the drum.
He can already hear that when he hears a saw,
he can hear the third, he can hear the second, he can hear the fifth,
and he can hear it in the intervals differently each day,
To be able to tamper his notes.
Today he will play the D only so slightly ﬂat.
Tomorrow he will play the E only so slightly sharp.
It's because the way he will hear it,
and that makes the music so rich and so different every day.
I definitely have a richer approach to the drums from playing with Charles,
Of this group called Sangam we have with Zakir Hussain.
The two of them have shown me things that I have not seen in my lifetime,
and, you know, on one hand, you got the ultimate freedom with Charles,
and on the other hand, you have someone
that has the amount of technique
that would take many ten lifetimes to study, in Zakir,
and being onstage with both of them, it"s just like...
In the beginning, it was almost overwhelming
because Charles is giving all this freedom,
so I'm like, "I need something to grab on to.'
I'm, like, in between two tidal waves.
What am I supposed to do?
And the beauty of it is just...
I don't know. Something just happens.
Like, you allow yourself to get just beat up, you know,
'cause that's really what's happening.
It's just like, "Oh, this is like the waves are just hitting me.“
And it"s like being in the ocean.
If you want to live, you learn how to swim.
You know, if waves are just coming at you, coming at you, coming at you,
it"s like you're faced with,
“Okay, do you want to live, or do you want to die?"
And you have to answer the question,
and if it's you want to live, you learn how to swim.
It was all coming, and I was sitting there like,
“Okay, I can go down in history as the drummer
that was just sitting here afraid and never played a lick,
and it was just like he was sad," you know.
Or you could stand up and say something,
and that's what happened.
It was just like I was like, "Okay," you know.
"I hear you. I hear you. Now it"s time to find who I am.'
And I just started playing, like, whatever it was,
just from the core, from inside.
I was just like, "This is...
I don't know what it is, but this is just what's within me,
so I'm just gonna play.'
And so I would just play, and everything started to make sense, you know.
And you would hear those guys cheer.
Like, it was just the difference...
because, you know, I heard the difference
between when they wouldn't cheer
when I was sort of trying to figure it out,
and then when you would get to this pivotal moment.
And, you know, Zakir would be like, "Yeah!"
And Charles would be like, "Yeah!"
And I was like, “Oh, okayl That's some more!'
You know, and it was just an amazing moment.
If I hadn't had this experience with them two, it"s just...
Wow.
You know, it just wouldn't be, you know...
Wow.
Kind of emotional. I'm sorry about that.
One of the most extraordinary things about jazz, I think,
is that there are so many relationships
that are so deeply bonded musically and empathetic
that it's really extraordinary that guys cannot play together
for 10 or 15 years and come back together,
and without even a sound check,
that magic and that empathy and that understanding
and trust and generosity can come right back in and be alive.
It's like falling in love instantly all over again.
During that decade of the '90s...
one of the most beautiful things that happened
was when Charles and Billy Higgins
reconnected through a recording that was put out on Atlantic
called "Acoustic Master."
They hadn't played together probably since the late '50s,
but it was this immediate
and complete reconnection.
I was thinking about going back into the forest again
and not playing in a public way anymore.
I was seeing through some sort of vision
that I didn't have enough reckless disregard for my well-being
to continue to travel and to deal with playing this music.
Deconstruction was telling me to put it down,
and so here at our home,
he wouldn't let me stop,
and he gave me such a strong rebuke
that i had to recant that
and bow down to his wisdom because this music is not my music.
I'm a conduit. It comes through me.
I'm in service.
Billy always said we were in service, and he looked upon it like that.
We got the great jazz masters of our day and of all days and of all time,
Billy Higgins and Charles Lloyd, here in Healdsburg,
and, please, bring them on with a great, great Healdsburg welcome.
His spiritual practice was Islam, and mine is Vedanta,
but we only had a smile and wink for each other.
We never had disagreements like that.
The only thing he wanted to know whenever he was here
was which way is east,
therefore we named our collaborative effort here.
Billy had a liver transplant in '95.
He was an artist in residence at UCLA also when he wasn't traveling,
so he'd go there and bless the students,
and that was a beautiful thing that they had happening.
And then he was always free to tour with me.
Later on, Billy needed another transplant.
So, after four or five years, that liver was burning out,
so he needed another one, so...
And UCLA turned him down
because they said his age,
or he wasn't going along with their program totally,
but they had no respect or sensitivity for this great artist.
The thing about Higgins, when he left in 2001,
he's lying on his deathbed, so he says to me,
"We got to keep working on this music.'
I mean, he's really on my case, you know, and he says...
I said, "Well, are you gonna get off this bed?"
He's weighing, like, 90 pounds.
I said, “You gonna get off this bed and come back and play with me?"
And he said, "I didn't say I'd be there, but I'll always be with you.“
Charles and his soundscape is more about...
It's more global.
It's about the world.
Charles knows a lot of things about his history as man on Earth
and is into exploring that sound.
- Who's playing? - Pixinguinha.
We got to move to the jungle, honey.
We got to move back to the Amazon.
Ah, Brazill
N! ITFTI
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He's helping me to erase that,
to not have these definitions kind of confined to music.
His goes over the boundaries,
and those boundaries are supposed to be jumped over.
That's kind of how I think about his sound quest.
I had the thrill of playing with Charles the first time at The Knitting Factory.
I kind of morphed through maybe three or four bands.
Watching Charles as a leader
was really a great learning experience too.
He allows for everybody to speak how they want to speak
and creates this environment to do it within,
so everybody feels like they can do anything,
and it's kind of an obvious thing to try to create as a leader,
I would think, but it's very rare because of these preconceptions
about how people should play or what the music should be.
I mean, he's a real kind of perfectionist,
but in a free...
free perfectionist.
I don't know how to put it, but it was a great combination
of a very high, strong work ethic,
but at the same time, this openness that would be something
that we all were trying to strive toward and that he was encouraging.
Today, with everything being so, you know, fast turnaround,
it's really, you know, just a wonderful thing
to see an audience willing to stay with the music,
and Charles commands that kind of commitment
from the musicians and audience as well.
The man has a knack for finding good musicians,
as all great musicians do,
but, I mean, I think that the current band,
with Jason Moran and Reuben Rogers and Eric Harland,
is every bit as good as anything he's ever put together.
"Mirror" is one of the most extraordinary albums...
ever made by a major musician,
and, you know, it reminded me immediately
of John Coltrane's "Crescent,"
in the sense that it was...
music that was always searching
but was really at peace with itself.
To be able to play like that is such a...
First of all, it's a gift that you have or you don't,
to be able to go there,
and then secondly, to be able to have the opportunity to go there is...
You know, you got to have both.
It's the first time I had had someone.
Put that kind of faith in me
that is the kind of faith I had seen put in Jason over and over again,
and i felt for the first time
like I didn't have to become anything to do that.
It was an invitation to just...
who you are, just put it there.
There's nowhere to hide.
It's your husband and his icon.
I mean, where are you gonna go?
There's nowhere to go but down or in a hole,
or come join the party.
Charles wanted to do "Go Down Moses"
and the "Black National Anthem"
in New York City
for a paying ticket audience,
and it was not a choral concert,
is unheard of.
It's unbelievable.
That he chose those songs...
Look, that's on a whole other level.
Alicia Hall Moran.
Talking about moving on and being contemporary...
I mean, and I've heard Charles say this, too,
about people who just only talk about “Forest Flower,“
and he's like, "Well, have you heard this orchestra?'
Like, 'This is where I am right now, today.“
Eric Harland.
On bass, Reuben Rogers.
On piano, Jason Moran.
And Charles Lloyd.
Lo and behold, I get a call from the illustrious Dorothy Darr,
and she grilled me, and she was like, "We about playing some music.
You about playing some music?
You come highly recommended from Eric, so we're going on a lot about that,
but are you serious about this?'
I was like...
Which was interesting to me
because I had been in a lot of musical situations
but never questioned in the seriousness I was about the music.
Everyone was coming with this frame of mind
that we're not just here to play a gig.
We're about here to make some serious music
and elevate it as best we could.
Once I heard Charles live with Sangam, with Eric, it was like, "Yeah."
Like, there was a point in my life, like, after my mom passed,
I felt not that I was distancing myself from music,
but I felt like I needed to reinsert my body
into what I was hearing and what I was playing.
And going to see that show...
I felt like, “Oh, here's a really great way to present music.'
I need people who can take the journey with me every night
because this is a music of, how do you say,
high-wire stuff, you know.
And if you're gonna do that, you need somebody you can trust with you
to catch you and operate with you.
We're helping each other every night when we play,
and we're listening intently,
and then these wonderful blessings occur
that open up other universes for us.
That real conversation that happens between the band
with each other and also through Charles is...
it"s a wonderful position to be in
just because it"s challenging each night.
I mean, Charles doesn't really tell you what he's gonna play.
He starts a song, and, you know,
either I'm gonna shuffle through music, or I'm just gonna say,
“Okay, I know this piece,“ you know.
Or I'm just gonna say, “Okay, well, let's go,“
and we're free to kind of create in the space.
So, it"s just, you know, whatever Charles will play.
You know, it's just kind of... you know where it"s coming from,
and so, you know, that's the trust.
It's just kind of like, “Okay, we know his music.“
Just get in there because the thing is, you know, you will adjust.
Everything will come together,
and the beauty is the transition of that.
It's not about just trying to state a point all the time
and say, "I just want to make sure I get to this point.“
It's like, “Oh, wow. Okay.
Well, I don't know where we gonna go, but let's go."
It's not just a gig, you know.
This is an experience.
It's a spiritual thing for us,
and, you know, that's why it"s important to have this unit
that we're gonna go out together and make this music,
because it's not just about just playing, you know, “Forest Flower'
and playing a couple blueses and going home.
It's about really trying to enlighten folks
and really getting a higher experience every night.
And what happens with the music is that it changes the molecules,
the molecular structure in the atmosphere that's going on.
This is a magic formation.
We get on this magic carpet, and we take off.
It's the wisdom of the ancients with modernity, you know.
It's arrows into infinity.
Charles represents a type of musician,
an era of musician that is almost extinct,
you know, sadly.
Like, you know, the cats pass away,
and when they go, as a young musician, then everything that they talk about,
everything that they put into their music goes with them,
unless you talk to them,
unless you, you know, exchange words or ideas, you know.
Or you get lucky enough and you actually play with them,
and then you converse on the bandstand.
Like, that is an extremely important part of how we grow.
There's some that say that the closer we are to the light,
the longer our shadow is behind us,
and we can't really lug that thing with us.
We have to know that it's there
and integrate it into our life and our work.
Shri Krishna said...
"He knows bliss in the Atman and wants nothing else.
Cravings torment the heart.
He renounces cravings.
I call him illumined."
"Not shaken by adversity, not hankering after happiness.
Free from fear, free from anger,
free from the things of desire.
I call him a seer and illumined"
"The bonds of his flesh are broken.
He is lucky and does not rejoice.
He is unlucky and does not weep.
I call him illumined."
it might not be fully understood by everyone all the time,
but people come to me and say they get something from it, you know,
or not, you know, and...
But for me, it's the last night of the play.
They can boo or applaud.
I have to sing my song in whatever manifestation.
However it's given to me is how it"s gonna come through.
We cry all the time.
We grown men. We cry all the time.
What can I tell you, man?
It's such a beautiful thing, man,
and to live in your lifetime with your creativity
is not so easy, you know.
And yet when you got a community of people
who are willing to go down with the ship...
q {I f: Tl j
The winds of grace are always blowing.
We must set our sails high.