Jazz Legend Charles Lloyd Still Hasn’t Found What He’s Listening For

This weekend’s Playboy Jazz Festival couldn’t have been timed more perfectly for saxophone legend Charles Lloyd. In three weeks time his new album, Vanished Gardens, which finds the 80-year-old with The Marvels (Bill Frisell, Stuart Mathis, Reuben Rogers, Eric Harland) and singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams, will be released. On Sunday night they will all be performing as part of the second night of the Festival at the Hollywood Bowl.

A quick glance at his career reveals an artist who has played with a who’s who of jazz and blues greats:  Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry Charlie Haden, Gerald Wilson, Cannonball Adderley and more. When he started his first quartet he introduced the world to Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette. He played and toured extensively with The Beach Boys. More recently he worked with Brad Mehldau, John Abercrombie and Jason Moran.

To have a conversation with Lloyd is like the best kind of improvisation. You go wherever his thoughts take you and you have to be on your toes: the references come fast and furious. His views of the world today are equal parts fire and compassion. And his views on music come from a deeply peaceful and humble place. In other words, it’s like jazz itself. I spoke with him by phone from his home in Montecito.

You told the PBS NewsHour that “the creator will let me get just so close” to “the beautiful sound in my mind’s ear.” If you actually ever got to it, instead of just close, would there be anything left to accomplish?

It’s true. I’m a late bloomer and I keep trying to get closer to it. There is a sound that I hear in my mind’s ear, but I’ve not yet gotten there. Fortunately the creator has kept me around for a while so I can keep working on it. It’s something that kind of stays with you. I always played music because I loved it and starting as a young child, it’s always been my refuge, my all. I’m blessed to have that connection with that music and it informs me of higher thinking. If I could find that sound of all sounds, the mysticism of sound, which I’ve been striving for all my life, I’d put on the loin cloth and go back into the forest.

When one looks at your discography and the people with whom you have collaborated, it seems that putting you in a box would be a foolish exercise.

Thank you kindly. I’m just doing what I’m doing and there are these coming togethers. Many of my heroes left town at early ages. I’m still around. I have a beginner’s mind to be candid with you. I’m always striving for that freshness and that situation where, as my friend Herbie Hancock says, uncertainty becomes your ally. I’m walking this path and I’m a sound seeker and I hear things and I hear things that never were. It’s a small world, yet it’s a large world, but if you have dreams and visions and connection with the creator, something can happen that’s a blessing in the music. I keep looking for, how to say, that freshness, that kind of sweet and sour sauce I crave. I need my salsa, too. I like it picante. I love the tender ballads and I like to go on the high wire and stretch out. Before I play I tend to be a little nervous and the next thing I know they are trying to take me off the stage. The newness, that’s a great word, to be in the now is a beautiful thing.

In the press information for Vanished Gardens you are quoted saying about Lucinda Williams that she “is a reporter of the human condition, of life on planet Earth.” How does her reportage blend with your view of the human condition today?

You haven’t heard the song yet. She wrote a new song “We’ve Come Too Far To Turn Around.” It’s all in there. She talks directly and her poet nature and mysticism that comes through. How she can imbibe the human condition and report it back. She loves that we’re so loose and free with what we do and it encourages her to feel a way she’s never felt before.

Billy Higgins, your close friend and collaborator, was concerned about the future. He said “Because the stuff they feed kids now, they’ll have a bunch of idiots in the next millennium as far as art and culture is concerned.” Was he right?

Of course. He was a wise man. He was always asking the creator for it. When I look at his visitation through here, he was always bringing it and had that natural beauty. That was a great blessing in my life to be around poeple like him. I was around when giants roamed the earth. That’s a great blessing for me. When young musicians play with me, they weren’t there. You bring it and you have it. Being around hearing Coltrane hold church or Sonny Rollins take over a room or Monk with that beautiful expressive thing. I played with those guys and so many guys. Buddy Collette was a mentor to Eric Dolphy. Buddy told Mingus when he was a little boy with a cello, “if you get a bass, I’ll put you in the band.” Buddy is the spiritual father to Dolphy, myself and many others. He was the underground railroad looking after us and sending us to New York.

There’s so much turmoil going on in the world, perhaps even more so than when you went to the Soviet Union, at the request of the people, not the government, during the Cold War. What role does music play in providing both commentary and balance in a world that seems to be spinning out of control?

I think it is just healing. I don’t imagine a world without music. The human condition is something that needs some nurture and food for the soul. When I went to Russia the Cold War thing was going on, but now it’s just gotten…It’s despicable now how the behavior of the scene is and how people profit off divisiveness. It’s so blatant. The game is more subtle, but it’s also more gross. The grossness of it needs some tenderness and the music touches the heart. Hopefully we’ll have more young people waking up to the condition of the condition. I was around in the 60s when Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin were around. Bob Dylan was a friend. We were idealists. We didn’t live in a world of bifurcation or lines of demarcation. That has to do with thievery and stepping on other people. I don’t know how we got to this situation. It baffles me. I’m very upset about it.

Beethoven said “don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the Divine.” Do you feel that your career has raised you to the Divine?

Anyone who knows don’t say and anyone who says don’t know. I’m not going to pat myself on the back. I’m still a beginner’s mind and the further I go I realize I’m knowing less and less. But the experience of living and loving truth and love, something happens for me that puts me in a way that I have to be from time to time.  Going back to what you asked me earlier, if I ever get to that place where I can play that one sound, I think it will heal the universe. It’s like my original groups where I thought I could change the world with my creativity. I’m naïve enough to think that.