San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
“The hour might be late, but I know I’m still drunk with music and that’s a beautiful thing.”
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A tireless artistic force, Charles Lloyd was barely out of grade school when he launched his musical career in the 1950s in his native Memphis, Tenn. He was mentored there by pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. and performed gigs with such then-rising blues stars as B.B. King, Johnny Ace and Bobby “Blue” Bland.
Lloyd earned his degree in music composition at the University of Southern California in 1960. He had spent the previous few years in Los Angeles playing with such fellow young visionaries as fellow saxophonist Ornette Coleman and drummer Billy Higgins, with whom Lloyd memorably performed here in 1998 at an Athenaeum Jazz at the Neurosciences Institute concert. Lloyd also worked in the L.A. big band led by Gerald Wilson, the father of Lloyd’s current guitarist, Anthony Wilson.
In the mid-1960s, Lloyd recorded two live albums at San Francisco’s Fillmore West, where he and his band shared stages with Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and other top rock acts of the day. His group featured two future jazz giants in pianist Keith Jarrett and drummer Jack Dejohnette.
In recent years, Lloyd has collaborated with American singer Lucinda Williams and top pedal-steel guitarist Greg Leisz. Now, as in the past, the saxophonist remains open to all music and wary of categorizations.
“The Airplane, the Dead, The Band and (Bob) Dylan had all heard the (blues and R&B) music I grew up playing,” Lloyd, an early friend of Dylan Dylan’s, said in his 2020 Union-tribune interview a 2020 interview with The San Diego Uniontribune.
“So, bonding with them wasn’t so much (aesthetic) Catholicism on my part as much as I had this experience of all this deep music, and genre didn’t get in the way.”
Lloyd stepped back from his career for much of the 1970s and part of the 1980s to focus on his physical and spiritual health. Since resuming his career four decades ago, he has gone from peak to peak. Like a Zen master, he knows that stillness is as important as motion and that musical propulsion can be achieved through careful contemplation as much as through execution.
“I’ve been blessed to have longevity, and that helps keep me on the prowl for elevation,” Lloyd said.
“The hour might be late, but I know I’m still drunk with music and that’s a beautiful thing.”