CHARLES LLOYD

At 74 when most individuals are thinking of ways to slow down and kick back, Charles Lloyd has shifted to a higher gear. His concerts and recordings are events of pristine beauty and elegance, full of intensely felt emotion and passion that touches deep inside the heart. This not entertainment, but the powerful uncorrupted expression of beauty through music. When music vibrates, the soul vibrates and touches the spirit within. "Charles Lloyd was the highlight of the Berlin Jazz Festival...Lloyd, tabla master Zakir Hussain and stunning young drummer, Eric Harland - shimmied with palpable synchronicity and flashes of mystical beauty," stated award winning writer, Joe Woodard in the Santa Barbara Independent. Credited by many musicians with anticipating the World Music movement by incorporating cadences of many cultures in his compositions as early as the late1950s, Charles Lloyd describes his music as having always "danced on many shores." As Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times, "Mr. Lloyd has come up with a strange and beautiful distillation of the American experience, part abandoned and wild, part immensely controlled and sophisticated." From the moment he first came to prominence as the young music director of the Chico Hamilton Quintet in 1960, Lloyd began to take audiences on journeys that traversed enormous distances. Over nearly four decades, his compositions have punctuated the post-bop period, embraced the traditional music of a host of world cultures and ciphered the psychedelic 1960s with avant-garde improvisation. Lloyd was one of the first jazz artists to sell a million copies of a recording ( 'Forest Flower') and then he surprised us by walking away from performing just at the point that he was dubbed a jazz superstar. Actually he was just following a trajectory that was taking him closer to the essence of the music he was hearing.