Charles Lloyd is an American tenor saxophonist and flautist, born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1938. He moved to Los Angeles in 1956, worked with Chico Hamilton and Cannonball Adderley, and in 1966 formed a quartet with Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette and Cecil McBee. Its live album Forest Flower, recorded at the Monterey Jazz Festival, became one of the most successful jazz records of the decade. Lloyd largely withdrew from jazz in the 1970s and returned in 1981, touring with pianist Michel Petrucciani.
By the end of the 1960s, Charles Lloyd was one of the biggest names in jazz. His quartet with Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette reached far beyond the usual jazz audience, while Forest Flower became one of the first jazz recordings to sell a million copies. In 1970, at the height of his career, Lloyd disbanded the quartet and withdrew to Big Sur. He continued to make records from time to time, but largely disappeared from the jazz scene while following a more inward and spiritual pa…
Recorded over two December days in Copenhagen and shelved for nearly three years, Bjerge, Strand gathers Jakob Bro with Charles Lloyd, Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy, and arrives on Loveland Music as a limited double vinyl in gatefold sleeve with artwork by the painter Tal R.
Bro invited Lloyd to The Village Recording in Vanløse in December 2023, bringing along the rhythm section he had formed in 2019 with Grenadier and Rossy, the two players who spent two decades refining the piano trio alongs…
Charles Lloyd pays homage to his dear friend and longtime collaborator Zakir Hussain with the July 24 release of Sangam & Friends, an extraordinary document of the deep musical affinity between the legendary saxophonist/flutist and tabla master along with their Sangam trio mate drummer Eric Harland. The album is built around studio recordings made in Mumbai in 2009 for an album that was begun but never completed featuring an expanded ensemble with Carnatic singer Vijay Prakash, Rakesh Chaurasia …
*2024 stock* Charles Lloyd’s sixth ECM album is both a departure and a homecoming for the Memphis-born and California-based tenorist, introducing new music and revisiting archive favourites (including the epic "Forest Flower"), and featuring an all-star line-up. With his "Scandinavian" band currently on hold,this is Lloyd’s first all-American album in a long while – Dave Holland qualifies as an honorary American by now – with all the differences of cultural emphasis that this implies. ECM vetera…
Five decades after the event, Charles Lloyd's Love-In, recorded live at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium in 1967, endures as much as an archaeological artefact as a musical document. From sleeve designer Stanislaw Zagorski's treatment of Rolling Stone photographer Jim Marshall's cover shot, through the album title and some of the track titles ("Tribal Dance," "Temple Bells"), and the inclusion of Lennon & McCartney's "Here There and Everywhere," Love-In's semiology is a powerful reminder of t…
Charles Lloyd (tenor saxophone) with Brad Mehldau (piano), John Abercrombie (guitar), Larry Grenadier (double bass) and Billy Higgins (drums), recorded December 1999 at Cello Studios, Los Angeles. Ballads, spirituals and Lloyd originals. CD edition.
Documentary on saxophonist Charles Lloyd, directed by Dorothy Darr and Jeffery Morse, with archive footage, concerts and interviews with Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, Jack DeJohnette and others. 113 minutes, premiered 2013, ECM 2014.