Charles Lloyd: ‘My great-great-grandmother was raped for years by her slave owner’
Not so long ago, the jazz world was full of elder statesmen who could regale you with stories of the genre’s heroic age, when musicians such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie were household names. They’d learnt their craft from these legends, and eventually become “legendary” themselves – but now even these younger ones have mostly passed on to the great jam session in the sky.
One who is still with us is Charles Lloyd. This fantastically productive composer and saxophonist was formed in the school of hard knocks, growing up as a precociously brilliant young musician in the racist southern states of America. Although he vanished twice from the jazz scene owing to drug abuse and illness, Lloyd never stopped playing, and can look back on 70 years’ involvement with music. And yet he tells me: “I still have a beginner’s mind. I always feel like I’m starting over.”
“When I was young, Bird (Charlie Parker) and those other famous old guys told me all those fast notes I could play don’t mean anything if you don’t have a beautiful sound.”
Well, Lloyd does have a beautiful sound.
Today he turns 86, and he’s celebrating with the release of the sublime double album The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, part of a prolonged Indian summer of creativity with more than two dozen albums released in the last 30 years. It’s difficult to define Lloyd’s magic, because the young musicians he now surrounds himself with are often more ostentatiously brilliant than he. Yet the moment Lloyd starts playing, your ear is seized by his shapely line, pared of all showy excess.
We meet in the tiny studio set up on a canal-side narrowboat in King’s Cross for the London Jazz Festival. He is accompanied by Dorothy, his wife of 43 years, who, before we start, makes sure Lloyd’s neckerchief is adjusted just so, and sometimes gently corrects him. They live a quiet, rather bucolic-sounding life, growing all their own food, about which he tells me.
Charles Lloyd was born in Memphis in 1938, which, he says, was packed full of musicians. He started learning saxophone and was soon going to every gig in town. “My mom would give hospitality to visiting jazz musicians, who preferred that to the substandard accommodation offered to black musicians by promoters.
“I remember Duke Ellington stayed, and of course I was an eager youngster. I wanted to know everything from him. He told my mother that I shouldn’t be a musician, I should be a doctor, lawyer or Indian chief [Lloyd is partly descended from Choctaw Native American stock].”
Lloyd’s family history is soaked in the violence and racism of the Deep South. He tells me about Hagar, his great-great-grandmother: “It’s very painful and difficult. When she was a child in Mississippi, there was a racist slave owner who came and took her from her parents when she was 10 years old. He took her up to Bolivar, Tennessee, and proceeded to rape her for years, and this man impregnated her with my great-grandfather.”
This distressing part of Lloyd’s family history has a profound effect on everyone, the sound engineers and various others who are sitting in the room, and in fact, someone leaves the studio in tears at this point.
Lloyd goes on to explain that his wife, when looking through family records, discovered that “the son that was born as a result was given to the slave-owners’ white daughter as a wedding present”. In fact, the reality was even worse – Dorothy quietly corrects him. “My mistake. The son and the mother were both given to the daughter as wedding presents.” That boy, Ben, later married a Choctaw woman, Sally Sunflower Whitecloud, and their son (also called Ben) — Lloyd’s grandfather — became a successful farmer. He raised 21 children, was admired by local whites — including the novelist William Faulkner, whose story, Intruder in the Dust, was partly based on Ben junior — and his rugged independence was a deep influence on the young Lloyd, whose talent soon drew the attention of older musicians.
Among the big names Lloyd played with in his teens were Howlin’ Wolf and the free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. While immersed in a New York scene that included Bird and Billie Holiday, Parker was told by trumpeter and composer Booker Little: “Being a musician is about building character and your own style. You’re not ready yet, you’re coming home to Memphis with me.”
One gets an impression of Lloyd as a brash young man eager to buttonhole senior jazzmen to hustle for gigs, but whose virtuosity outran his imagination, and who needed to be reined in for his own good. Yet he was eager to learn. During his studies at the University of Southern California he fell in love with JS Bach, and with the number patterns in Bartók’s music. “I was fascinated by the way he combined folk songs with mathematical patterns like the Fibonacci series. But all the time I was thinking — this is only 300 years of European music, I want to know all about the rest.”
“The rest” would eventually come, after decades of omnivorous exploration and collaborations with “world musicians”, such as Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain and the Greek singer Maria Farantouri. But first would come years of fame in the 1960s, when he founded the Charles Lloyd Quartet with three front-rank musicians, including 21-year-old pianist Keith Jarrett. They recorded two enormously successful albums, including the first-ever million-selling jazz album Forest Flower. The bell-bottomed Lloyd became an icon of the massively popular — but critically scorned — jazz-rock fusion, and shared platforms with stadium rock bands such as the Grateful Dead, who came to represent the counter-culture of the west coast of America.
But trouble was brewing. The Quartet split up acrimoniously, with two members jumping ship to Miles Davis’s new band. “He was an enormously creative guy, but he was sort of hard to get along with,” says Lloyd. Then there were the dangers of after-gig parties, when Grateful Dead members would suddenly produce a “Peru” – a mountain – of cocaine. “I was in a bad place, self-medicating a lot,” says Lloyd. “It was giving me the wrong kind of high. I knew I had to leave New York and heal myself.”
He then moved to Malibu, where he encountered the Beach Boys and played on several of their albums, and in 1981 relaunched his quartet. But a severe illness subsequently silenced him for nearly a decade. When he re-emerged in the early 1990s, it was as a seasoned master. It seemed as if every great improvising musician on the planet was now beating a path to this musician who was both vastly experienced and eternally young.
“They want to play with me because I’ve had this very rich history in jazz,” says Lloyd, but that paints his special qualities too narrowly. Lloyd belongs to that wonderful tradition of African-American musicians like Sun Ra, Roscoe Mitchell and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, who were open to musical modernism but also fascinated by the idea that music was the door to a spiritual realm, steeped in black culture but also universal.
“I’ve imbibed the wisdom of the Ancients,” says Lloyd, “so instead of medicating myself I build musical stairs up to a realm where I experience the ecstasy of the aesthetic state. And it’s always a collaboration. I go exploring every night with these wonderful musicians, and we always return from our journey a little different. We are here for a moment, we sing our song, and then we pass on.”
Charles Lloyd’s The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow is out today on Blue Note Records featuring Jason Moran, Larry Grenadier and Brian Blade
