In the winter of 1999, tenorist Charles Lloyd drew upon the personnel of his acclaimed Voice In The Night, retaining from that session guitarist John Abercrombie and drummer Billy Higgins, adding to them for the first and only time pianist Brad Mehldau and bassist Larry Grenadier, the latter of Mehldau’s eponymous trio. Recorded in Los Angeles, the tunes were split and released in 2000 and 2001 as The Water Is Wide and Hyperion With Higgins, respectively. And while the latter’s cover art is a negative image of the former’s, they are moved to action by the same invisible heart.

Charles Lloyd
The Water Is Wide

Charles Lloyd tenor saxophone
Brad Mehldau piano
John Abercrombie guitar
Larry Grenadier double-bass
Darek Oles double-bass
Billy Higgins drums
Recorded December 1999, Cello Studios, Los Angeles
Engineer: Michael C. Ross
Produced by Charles Lloyd and Dorothy Darr

Listeners are guaranteed to have Georgia and more on their minds when Hoagy Carmichael’s classic song—made famous by Ray Charles and stripped down here to pure melody—leads off The Water Is Wide with its sweet molasses undercurrents and soulful glow. Lloyd’s signature pop, periodic and delicate, adds punctuation to every phrase in this beautiful trio setting. Half of the album, in fact, pays tribute to songs that have moved Lloyd at one point or another in his long career, as well as to those that have burrowed into his heart. Of the latter is the title track, a Scottish folk tune, which in Lloyd’s arrangement posits Abercrombie inside Higgins’s steam-powered brushwork. Other stops along this migratory journey of things past include a bluesy take on Duke Ellington’s “Black Butterfly,” Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom,” a piano-driven “Song Of Her” (Cecil McBee), and the polished bronze of “Heaven” (from Ellington’s Second Sacred Concert). Yet nowhere is the feeling so intimate as in “There Is A Balm In Gilead,” which pairs only the bandleader and Higgins in the cleft of a parting sea. It is the album’s zenith and sign of things to come in Which Way is East.

A variety of Lloyd’s own tunes rounds out the set. “Ballade And Allegro,” written as incidental ballet music, is a veritable supernova regressing to its planetary state and showcases his penchant for emotional directness. Mehldau balances light and dark in perfect proportion, as he does also in “The Monk And The Mermaid,” the album’s other, decidedly aquatic, duet. Together, he and Lloyd mend broken fins and make them swim, iridescent and thirsting for brine. Lloyd re-stretches the canvas in “Lady Day,” a smooth tribute to Billie Holiday, before Abercrombie returns for “Figure In Blue,” swapping constellations with Lloyd in a laid-back vibe. The guitarist joins also in a “Prayer” to Higgins, who had a few years before this recording survived life-threatening health problems. Bassist Darek Oles also guests in this piece of suspension and separation.

<< Annette Peacock: an acrobat’s heart (ECM 1733)
>> Luciano Berio: Voci (ECM 1735 NS)

Charles Lloyd
Hyperion With Higgins

Charles Lloyd tenor saxophone, taragato, maracas
Brad Mehldau piano
John Abercrombie guitar
Larry Grenadier double-bass
Billy Higgins drums
Recorded December 1999, Cello Studios, Los Angeles
Engineer: Michael C. Ross
Produced by Charles Lloyd and Dorothy Darr

“The idea is like with the old Southern preacher,” says Lloyd of Hyperion with Higgins. “You go low and you get high and then you catch fire.” Which is perhaps why his originals comprise the entire program of this second installment—in them is a hearth of coals.

Higgins continues to shine this time around, lifting Lloyd to brighter evocation in the title track and lighting not a few fireworks with his sticks. That unbreakable dialogue continues in “Secret Life Of The Forbidden City,” in which Abercrombie also broadens his wingspan. The guitarist moves with even more pleasure in “Dancing Waters, Big Sur To Bahia” and goes classic in “Miss Jessye,” mixing just enough sugar and spice to keep everything nice. Marvelous also is the geometric pianism. On that note, there’s no mistaking the synergy of Mehldau and Grenadier in “Darkness On The Delta Suite,” a return to roots that works on every level. Their creeping, marshmallow texture, combined with Lloyd’s campfire crisp, clothes the suite with ragged style. Grenadier kicks off a solid groove in “Bharati.” In this one, Lloyd flirts with captivation over Mehldau’s fertile ground, lifting themes like a morning fog, before “The Caravan Moves On” opens the mind in a plains-drifting rite with Higgins. The introduction of guitar and bass adds figures to this desert in slow and steady progress. Abercrombie lobs his characteristic catcalls into an azure sky, Lloyd’s tárogató echoing all the while like a dream held on to just long enough to taste.

Hyperion with Higgins is brimming with warm spirit. Lloyd has honed his lyricism like a blade so fine it cuts hatred until only the shape of love is left. This spirit possesses the melodic inventiveness of his improvisers. Their vocabularies are the fresh to his familiar. Sadly, these sessions further represent one of Higgins’s last recordings before his death in May of 2001. And in that sense, they will forever hold vigil in his name.

<< Thomas Demenga: Hosokawa/Bach/Yun (ECM 1782/83 NS)
>> Robin Williamson: Skirting The River Road (ECM 1785)

Charles Lloyd
Jumping the Creek

Charles Lloyd tenor and alto saxphones, taragato
Geri Allen piano
Robert Hurst double-bass
Eric Harland drums, percussion
Recorded January 2004 at Cello Studios, Los Angeles
Engineer: Talley Sherwood
Produced by Dorothy Darr and Charles Lloyd

Jumping the Creek fronts Charles Lloyd in a marvelous quartet of Geri Allen (retained from the Lift Every Voice sessions) on piano, Robert Hurst on bass, and Eric Harland on drums. The Memphis-born reed man’s 11th album for ECM is filled with magical realism, fleshed out most vividly in Allen’s overtime at the keyboard. He and Hurst often play the part of rhythm section, detailing the stone-skipping exchanges between Lloyd and Harland of “Ken Katta Ma Om,” for which he hollows out a melodic cave for Lloyd to throw his torch into, and the briefer though no less verdant passage of “Angel Oak Revisited.” Whether painting a Jackson Pollock bramble of layers or framing the band in the open geometries of a Sol LeWitt cube, he is a vital presence on this date of hip triangulations.

None of this diminishes Hurst’s own contributions, which bear bushels of sonic fruit throughout. He integrates masterful subtleties into the weave of the title track, bridging Lloyd and Harland’s crosstalk into closure; solos persistently and evocatively in the marvelous “Georgia Bright Suite;” and duets sagely with Lloyd on tárogató in “The Sufi’s Tears.” For each he impacts miles of energy in few footsteps. Duo energies go deeper in the subdued glory of “Canon Perdido” and “Both Veils Must Go,” each an expansion of Lloyd’s improvisatory mission with Harland. There is a sense of belonging here.

Rounding out the set are a veiled take on Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” (one of only two not penned by the bandleader) and two epic tracks. “Song of the Inuit” ends with an elemental catalogue, which like the “Georgia Bright Suite” unpacks a fascinating attic of curios. An animated solo from Lloyd pains a night breeze and the leaf that trembles by its touch, with no other dream but to fall. Yet nothing here is so all-encompassing as the leadoff track by Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel. “Ne Me Quitte Pas” reduces Byzantine touches and less intimate cascades in a crucible of undulating development, shoring up the album’s levees with long and song.

Jumping the Creek sails oceans of memory as if they were the future, nakedly and freely. Throughout, Lloyd hangs by a thread that, while thin, tethers his playing to unseen spirit, moving as one might whisper—which is to say, with grace.

Charles Lloyd
Lift Every Voice

Charles Lloyd tenor saxophone, flute, taragato
Geri Allen piano
John Abercrombie guitar
Marc Johnson double-bass
Larry Grenadier double-bass
Billy Hart drums
Recorded January and February 2002 at Oceanway and Cello Studios, Los Angeles
Engineer: Michael C. Ross
Assistants: Robert Reid and Brian Vibettes
Sound: Joe Harley
Mastering: Bernie Grundman
Produced by Charles Lloyd and Dorothy Darr
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

“Truth is One, sages call it by various names.”
–Rig Veda

On the night of September 11, 2001, Charles Lloyd was scheduled to appear at New York’s Blue Note jazz club. In the wake of that morning’s unforgettable tragedy, he took the concert’s postponement as an opportunity to meditate on a response. Out of this impulse came Lift Every Voice, which in spite of the events that provoked it is more spiritual than political, opting for a message born in words yet conveyed without them.

Lloyd has been shepherding trusting flocks with the crook of his bell for many decades, yet perhaps none so solemn as the one gathered here. Joined by pianist Geri Allen, guitarist John Abercrombie, bassists Marc Johnson and Larry Grenadier, and drummer Billy Hart, he enacts a sonic prayer that only two CDs can contain: one for each hand in supplication. Looking at the final tracks of both discs, we find such balance achieved. Where “Hafez, Shattered Heart” ends the first disc with a profound tárogató solo, opening a dream of desert to reveal another of water, the second concludes on a high note with “Prayer, The Crossing.” The latter’s visceral energy is the key to all that moves between it and the opening “Hymn to the Mother,” another Lloyd original that expands the session’s reach to the stars and back.

Lloyd’s material is the strongest—or, more precisely, is of an altogether different strength than the standards, hymns, and spirituals with which it shares breath—for it is also his most selfless. Whether it’s the bluesy Abercrombie vehicle “East Virginia, West Memphis,” the autumnal colors of “Angel Oak,” or the Allen-focused nostalgia trips “Beyond Darkness” and “Nocturne,” Lloyd finds his voice through the attunement of his band. He finds it further in the darkened fields and pathways left behind by those—named and nameless—who are no longer with us. Marvin Gaye flickers between realms in a distinct arrangement of “What’s Going On,” smooth as a northern light. The intimate repose of “Amazing Grace” (Lloyd plays this as if for the first time) and “You Are So Beautiful” defies all associations, flowering behind closed eyes and open heart. The lyrical cartilage of his support system follows every step as he flutters through the changes, a moth courting the flame.

Noteworthy also are the Duke Ellington tune “I’m Afraid,” a quintessential display of Lloyd’s tonal prowess, and Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count,” by far one of the most touching five minutes Lloyd has ever recorded. Two pieces by Cuban protest singer Silvio Rodríguez, “Te Amaré” and “Rabo de Nube,” thicken the pot with some heartfelt craft, both highlights not to be missed. They quiver at slightest contact, cups filled to the brim. All of which infuses eternal flowers like “Go Gown Moses” and the title hymn with constellations galore.

Terror is the soil of togetherness, and in chaotic times the sunflowers are our singers. In their company and by their guidance we open our mouths to the sky. Lloyd is one such singer. Yet he does not lift his voice. Rather, he lets the high notes crack, lest they distract us from the healing taking place beneath them. Thus he gives attention to the impermanence of things. A philosophical move, perhaps, but an inevitable one that reminds us of music’s fragile architecture. He is neither leader nor follower, but a border without countries. He is an artist who stands before us, poised to weep as the world weeps around him.