Remaining True to His Beliefs

SANTA BARBARA —  To the nagging question “Where were you on Sept. 11?,” Charles Lloyd has a pointed answer. The veteran saxophonist was in Manhattan, perilously close to ground zero, when the planes hit. He would have opened a six-night run that very night at the Blue Note in Greenwich Village, in support of his then-recently released album, “Hyperion With Higgins.”

Of course, the Village was a ghost town for a few days after the attacks, and Lloyd didn’t play the Blue Note until that Friday. Lloyd and his wife-manager, Dorothy Darr, were staying in a townhouse on 11th Street in the Village but had been contemplating a move to the Marriott Hotel, next to the World Trade Center, to escape early-morning jackhammers in their neighborhood. Lloyd, long a Buddhist, remembers wanting to stay put, telling Darr, “When I lived in New York, it was jackhammers all the time. To me, I take it as a humility sutra.”

And maybe there was some karma at play for Lloyd--the Marriott was destroyed in the attack. Despite the circumstances, it was another homecoming gig of sorts for the saxophonist, who spent his dizzy decade of the ‘60s in New York and has returned many times, especially in the last decade.

Homecoming means many things to the alternately itinerant and reclusive musician. For instance, it could be summoned for the occasion of Lloyd bringing his current quartet--with pianist Geri Allen, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Billy Hart--to Catalina’s in Hollywood Jan. 11-13. He has performed variously in Los Angeles recently, including at the Playboy Jazz Festival in June and a benefit concert with his musical soul mate, the late drummer Billy Higgins, last January at Bones ‘n’ Blues.

This, though, is his first stretched-out club run here in four years. Like other recent performances, Lloyd will no doubt dedicate the run to Higgins. One of Los Angeles’ true jazz heroes, who died in May after a long bout with liver-related ailments, Higgins was both one of jazz’s greatest drummers and a visionary. His performance space/workshop, the World Stage in Leimert Park, was a manifestation of his generosity toward nurturing the future of jazz.

Though less actively engaged in the Southland jazz scene, Lloyd is one of the few internationally known and traveled jazz musicians who calls Southern California home, and has, in fact, lived in various parts of California for most of his 63 years. Born in Memphis, he came to Los Angeles in the ‘50s to attend USC, moved to Manhattan for the ‘60s, back to Malibu and then Big Sur during the ‘70s, and has mainly been settled in Santa Barbara for more than 20 years. But his spread there is more akin to an escape from the outside world.

“I’m a person who loves solitude,” Lloyd says. “I love humanity, too. But I have to try to come back to heal. I’ve found that, around here, I can have a rural setting, but I can still find cosmopolites around. From my sense of it, this has always been a progressive place and open to things. Outsiders and seekers can find some kind of way to function without being put away.”

One crisp day just before Christmas, Lloyd takes a reporter into his lavish hilltop spread, just outside Santa Barbara, where he originally moved to be close to the nearby Vedanta Temple. It’s late morning and the tall, lean musician is hunched over his grand piano, playing a series of pensive chords. He is disagreeable with a photographer. “How would you like it if I took your picture?” he asks, testily. But soon enough, Lloyd’s ready warm side wins out over the gruffness. Glowers invariably yield to tenderness.

As in his playing, Lloyd’s moods can be fluid: temperamental and fiery one minute, tranquil and philosophical the next. At the moment, Lloyd seems to be press shy--or press wary--in the aftermath of a fairly snide New York Times story in October. For one, writer Ben Waltzer painted Lloyd as someone whose unique, colorful rhetoric “sounds like Dennis Hopper imitating B.B. King reading Carlos Castaneda.” It’s nothing new, really: Lloyd has always ridden shifting tides of press affection.

A powerful and poetic saxophonist in the general tradition of John Coltrane, Lloyd is one of the more paradoxical characters in jazz, dating back to his first major gig with Chico Hamilton in the early ‘60s. Starting in 1966, Lloyd’s own quartet effectively introduced the world to pianist Keith Jarrett and drummer Jack DeJohnette, and quickly became one of the most popular and well-subsidized acts in all of jazz, partly because of its crossover appeal to the rock world.

The quartet met with great popular acclaim, and some grumbling from jazz critics, playing at the Fillmore Auditoriums East and West, and in a star-making set at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Lloyd himself played with the Beach Boys, and plotted with Jimi Hendrix about collaborating. The barrier between rock and jazz was melting at the edges.

Then came Lloyd’s famous pulling of the plug. Or, as Lloyd puts it, “I got off the bus in ’69 when they were getting ready to put me in stadiums, because I wanted to have peace inside, and I wasn’t peaceful. I was running around the world and was imbibing substances, and indulging in all kinds of excesses and ladies and all kinds of stuff. That wasn’t who I was.”

Lloyd began to search for who he was away from the jazz scene, per se, pursuing his interest in Buddhism and Eastern spiritual traditions. He hooked up with former Beach Boy Mike Love and his Santa Barbara-based Love Songs organization, built around a connection with transcendental meditation.

Lloyd was involved with TM, but he “wanted to go deeper.” In the ‘70s, he released albums verging on New Age sensibilities, which fueled suspicions that he had gotten off the bus more than temporarily.

Finally, Lloyd’s jazz credibility began to recover in the ‘80s when French pianist Michel Petrucciani sought him out in Big Sur, luring Lloyd back onto performing and recording stages. Lloyd’s real reemergence, though, has come with his last dozen years of work, captured on eight albums for the German ECM label and generally greeted with high critical regard. His quartet featuring Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson, through 1997’s “Canto,” was arguably his finest ever.

In the past few years, Lloyd’s musical world has hovered around a reunion with Higgins, whom Lloyd met while both were teenagers. Lloyd had come here to attend USC, with an eye toward life in music education. The Los Angeles-born Higgins was a young, unusually inspired drummer who would leap to generous acclaim as part of the Ornette Coleman Quartet when it hit New York in 1959.

What Lloyd found in Los Angeles was a thriving musical scene, if one off the artistic beaten path. He was part of a transitional, late ‘50s scene that included Coleman, alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy and Higgins. “We were what you call outsiders or something,” Lloyd recalls. “We weren’t relating to the scene of Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne, the whole thing of what was called ‘West Coast ‘ music.”

Lloyd falls into a reverie as he thinks back to those days.

“Scott LaFaro was out here, Charlie [Haden], Frank Butler. Elmo Hope and Don Friedman were out there. Walter Norris, Sonny Clarke ... Clifford Jordan came out for a while. When I first got there, there was a place called Stadium Club, off of campus. There were a lot of clubs everywhere, and sessions were going on around Western Avenue. There were all these places--the It Club, the Hillcrest, Alhambra, the California Club. There were Monday night jam sessions, with Frank Morgan and Larance Marable. It was this caldron. We were always getting together and playing at people’s houses.”

In an interview from August 2000, Higgins reflected on his early L.A. days, playing with Lloyd in a group that also included trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist LaFaro and pianist Terry Trotter. “We played a lot then,” Higgins said. “We were just kids growing up, trying to learn how to play this music.”

The two didn’t play together again until 1993, on an album called “Acoustic Masters,” and they didn’t play in earnest until several years later. Speaking about his link with Lloyd, Higgins commented, “We have understanding, that’s the best thing about playing music. It’s great to just play the music and be inside, locked in with people. When you’re playing music with someone, it’s deeper than just getting on the bandstand. It means so many different things, especially with the spirit. It’s always good to look forward to.”

Their collaboration resulted in three strong and well-received albums, beginning with “Voice in the Night,” with guitarist John Abercrombie and bassist Dave Holland. Next came a series of sessions at Cello Studios in Los Angeles in December 1999, also with pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Grenadier and Abercrombie. Those sessions yielded “The Water Is Wide,” released in 2000, and “Hyperion With Higgins,” released in August.

Reviewing the latter in The Times, Don Heckman wrote: “The partnership of saxophonist Lloyd and the late drummer Billy Higgins was one of jazz’s magical associations. Although the ever-driving rhythmic voltage so characteristic of Higgins’ playing might have seemed out of context for Lloyd’s floating freestyle, the two always came together in completely sympathetic fashion.”

For the ’99 sessions, Lloyd opted to record in Los Angeles for the first time in decades. In part, he wanted the recording environment to be comfortable for Higgins, whose medical support system would be nearby and who could play with his own drums for a change. Lloyd says, “He traveled all around the world and used what drums he could. Also, I wanted to get the best sound possible. I wanted to capture all of his nuances, because he’s a nuance master.”

Lloyd sums it up by saying that playing with Higgins “was my last finishing school.” In a way, the most unusual and ear-opening result of their late-breaking collaboration has yet to go public. Last January, as his health was quickly fading, Higgins lugged a bevy of his instruments--various percussion and also stringed instruments--to Lloyd’s large living room to record a series of improvised duets. Darr was the in-house engineer, capturing hours of unstructured interplay on tape.

On the day of this interview, Lloyd eagerly played about an hour of the taped results. The meditative, wide-ranging set of pieces alternately veered toward global musical traditions, the jazz avant-garde, ambiguous folk music-like sounds, and purely sonic experiments. Lloyd hopes to release an album of the music on ECM, sooner than later.

The pair’s emotional link also grew out of mutual respect for spiritual practice. “He comes out of Islam,” Lloyd says, “but we never had any arguments or disagreements. We’d be recording and take a break. I’d go meditate and he’d go in there and do his prayers on that prayer rug in there,” he recalls, pointing to an outer room. “The other thing was, he had never played music in the forest,” Lloyd says, referring to the close proximity of his home to the undeveloped mountain property behind.

“He was so thrilled to be here. For five years or more, we offered to have him up here. He’d say, ‘OK, I’m coming up, I’m coming up’ ... but he’d get deeper and deeper in the mud.” Lloyd shakes his head. “He was a beacon. I feel so blessed that we came together at the end. He had also worked on himself, like I had. Two years before he checked out, he said, ‘There’s nothing left. It’s all spirit now.’”

The music Lloyd makes today, a free-floating jazz style with touches of blues, gospel and Caribbean spices along the way, is essentially an extension of his ‘60s sound. Yet the current jazz scene--its live venues and radio formats--hardly supports him in a similar fashion.

Back when, Lloyd explains, “FM radio was free-form, and they were playing the stuff. Plus, there was the fact that there were those venues, the Fillmores and the colleges. But times have changed. People were looking for something. People [complain about] the ‘60s, but there was so much idealism going around. I mean, those people put the suits back on and went back to IBM, but nevertheless, some of us stayed with [the idealism]. I just know that I’m enjoying the music.”

Lloyd recognizes that the massive popularity of his ‘60s days is far behind him now, and seems resigned to focusing on music for music’s sake.

“I’d be wrong and crazy if I told you I was trying to be Kevin G,” he says, a sly reference to the smooth-jazz mogul. “That’s not my aspiration. I always did like the idea of playing something profound and beautiful and also connecting to people. I don’t want to just play in the garage: I like to share it with folks. I came up that way, see? I played with those rhythm and blues guys in Memphis--Howlin’ Wolf, Bobby Blue Bland. Those guys were communicators. They had an incredible gift.

“I have a blessing with that. I don’t know where it comes from, but I can communicate.”