Ray Comiskey profiles jazzman, philosopher and world music aficionado Charles Lloyd, who plays in Dublin next week.
Charles Lloyd has sometimes referred to himself as "this Irish tenor", but it's not the Mother Machree kind he has in mind when he does; in jazz his primary instrument is the tenor saxophone. The Irish part is the intriguing bit. His great-grandfather, Bud McComb, came from Dublin. He must have been an unusual man; barely 20 years after the American Civil War, he built the first school for black and Indian children in Red Bank, Mississippi.
McComb's great-grandson was born in 1938 in Memphis, Tennessee, home of Der Pelvis, Graceland and the Sun studio. Some of the area's blues-drenched environment rubbed off on both him and Presley, but as an African-American Lloyd's experience was different. He recalled "the sting and hurt of racism, a mother who didn't want me, oppressive humidity, haves and have nots" and made up his mind early to get away.
As with Elvis, music was his outlet. When Lloyd was growing up on his grandfather's farm there in the 1940s and 1950s, Memphis was a hotbed of jazz and blues, and he knew from the time he was three that he wanted to be a musician. He took up the alto saxophone at nine and as a teenager played with such blues legends as Howlin' Wolf, Johnny Ace, Bobby Blue Bland and BB King.
In Memphis, too, the virtuoso jazz pianist, Phineas Newborn, took him under his wing and, unimpressed, made him get lessons. And it was there he went to Manassas High School - where the great Swing Era bandleader Jimmy Lunceford once taught - with such future notable jazzmen as pianist Harold Mabern, saxophonists Frank Strozier and George Coleman and the brilliantly original trumpeter, Booker Little.
His mother kept a boarding house for musicians passing through; people such as the vibraphone player and bandleader, Lionel Hampton, and trumpeter Quincy Jones, later to forge a career as a composer, arranger and producer. As a child he used to listen to the great singer, Billie Holiday, on his radio, felt the pain in her singing and fantasised about going to New York and rescuing her.
If she was beyond rescue, he wasn't. He escaped to study at the University of Southern California with Halsey Stephens, an authority on Bartók, and emerged with a Masters in composition. He taught in LA for a while and played with the controversial avant gardist Ornette Coleman and his circle, before joining Chico Hamilton's unusual group - it included the cellist, Fred Katz, and the Hungarian guitarist, Gabor Szabo - where he gave the band a more robust thrust.
He was also one of the first jazz musicians to delve into what's now known as world music, introducing Szabo, in particular, to the work of the great sitar player, Ravi Shankar. And he was drawn to the openness and universality of Eastern philosophies.
But the 1960s were a bad time for jazz; audiences were alienated by the angry, "free" experiments of the avant garde, rock was ascendant and most jazzmen were struggling to make a living. It was astonishing, therefore, that Lloyd, a serious, multi-faceted man and musician, rose to superstar status when his quartet, which included the outstanding Keith Jarrett on piano and the remarkable drummer Jack DeJohnette, caught the moment and became a chart phenomenon.
Some critics were sniffy about his success, the hippy way the quartet dressed and the leader's status as a guru. And though this was a considerable jazz group in its own right, Lloyd never quite escaped the whiff of the flower-power, make-love-not-war 1960s, which in some eyes still clings to him.
After the quartet's heady days ended in some acrimony in 1969, he began to withdraw from regular performance, to such an extent that people spoke of it as his retirement. He has always been candid about it, saying that he had hit a brick wall and that his life "was falling apart from drugs and disillusionment with the music business". He moved to Malibu and then to Big Sur in California, retreating, as he said, "deeper into silence and introspection".
There things might have ended were it not for his encounter with the late Michel Petrucciani, a marvellous young French pianist severely handicapped by a brittle bone disease. The story is worth telling in Lloyd's own words.
"Michel came to my house in Big Sur in 1981. He had just turned 18 and could travel without his family's permission. I was away at the time, but I had been told about his bone disease and fragility and asked that he be made comfortable. During one point in his stay, my wife took him to the property where my Steinway was being stored, and while Michel was playing she called me on the telephone. The piano playing in the background piqued my curiosity enough to get in the car and drive four hours to hear him in person - and to take out my saxophone. I made a couple of calls and set up some initial concerts in California, and then we toured Europe in 1982 and 1983, until I felt Michel had gotten a foothold on the world stage."
Although the experience did awaken thoughts of public performance, Lloyd didn't plan to continue, and retreated to Big Sur again. But he nearly died of peritonitis in 1986 and, as he put it, "it was this pivotal experience that caused me to rededicate myself to this music and art form, jazz".
His return gained impetus and focus when a friend sent some of his tapes to ECM's Manfred Eicher, who has done so much for the music. Eicher was interested, but Lloyd didn't know if their chemistry would work. "I am from the south, where it is very warm and Manfred is northern," was how he described it. But they clicked when they met in Oslo in 1989 and Lloyd has acknowledged ECM as "a great home for me".
A series of quartet releases has emerged from the association more or less steadily since then. Most of the earlier ones were with the Scandinavians, pianist Bobo Stenson and bassist Anders Jormin, and in time including the American drummer, Billy Hart, who added considerably to the impact of the band.
But when Lloyd recorded the superb Voice In The Night CD in 1999 with what was essentially his first American band in almost 30 years, he hit a fresh peak. The group included guitarist John Abercrombie, bassist Dave Holland, and the drummer he always calls "Master Higgins, a great friend and fellow seeker".
Billy Higgins was part of the fine quartet with Abercrombie, pianist Brad Mehldau and bassist Larry Grenadier which made The Water Is Wide and Hyperion With Higgins at the end of 1999. As a duo, Lloyd and Higgins also made the very personal Which Way Is East four months before Higgins died in 2001.
Lloyd has always been a very emotional man, with something of the mystic about him, and these came together in Lift Every Voice, an acutely felt response to a watershed event in world terrorism made early in 2002.
"I was in New York to open at the Blue Note on 9/11. I saw the second tower go down. It was not easy to recover from this experience - to this day it still haunts me. We were on tour at the time and had to continue through October. When I got home I shut myself in for a while and then decided to go into the studio to record. Lift Every Voice was part of the healing process."
Back again for this recording were Abercrombie and Hart, while Grenadier and Marc Johnson shared the bassist's duties. The pianist was Geri Allen, who has worked with him ever since. Allen, with whom he had first played in 1996, is, he says, "conceptually open and very modern with her harmonic approach, but she also has the background of the church, which I also need sometimes in my songs".
She will be part of the quartet he brings to Vicar Street, along with bassist Reuben Rogers and an exceptional drummer, Eric Harland, of whom he says, "I am sure that Master Higgins sent him to me".
The journey from Memphis has seen quite a few ups and downs, but he has his own take on his particular rocky road to Dublin. More than somewhat tongue in cheek, he says, "this Irish tenor is coming home!"
The Charles Lloyd Quartet will perform at Vicar Street on Thurs, Apr 21, as part of The Improvised Music Company/Jazz Architects ECM season
