# Charles Lloyd: A Wild, Blatant Truth

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2017/08/25/charles-lloyd-wild-blatant-truth/
- Published: 2017-08-25T19:26:59+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Josef Woodard’s _Charles Lloyd: A Wild, Blatant Truth_ is an unauthorized biography.
But it’s hard to imagine any authorized volume providing richer perspectives on 
one of jazz’s living visionaries.**

A longtime contributor to a broad range of publications (including _JazzBluesNews.
Space_), Woodard grew up and lives in Santa Barbara, Calif. This brought him into
the orbit of tenor saxophonist Lloyd, who settled in the city with his wife and 
manager, Dorothy Darr, following a self-imposed “hermitage” in the state’s Big Sur
wilderness region. The proximity led to a two-decades-and-counting association, 
Woodard frequently interviewing Lloyd about a life that saw him recede from the 
heights of commercial success in the late ’60s and then re-emerge during the ’80s
as one of the music’s most exploratory elder statesmen.

It’s a fascinating tale, and Woodard tells it in an equally fascinating style. Lloyd
is forthright about his checkered early relations with his family, admitting that
his mother didn’t want him. Performing publicly from the age of 10, Lloyd’s wandering
spirit eventually brought him to Los Angeles, where he hooked up with Eric Dolphy,
Ornette Coleman and other notables then in coastal residence. Gigs with Chico Hamilton
and Cannonball Adderley led to the formation of a seminal quartet, featuring pianist
Keith Jarrett and drummer Jack DeJohnette, that exploded into prominence thanks 
to _Forest Flower_, the 1967 release of a performance at the previous year’s Monterey
Jazz Festival.

Then, just as he was getting about as famous as jazz musicians ever get, Lloyd walked
away. Woodard calls the motivation for Lloyd’s self-imposed exile “a complicated
cocktail of rationales and demons that even he can’t exactly articulate,” but one
gets the impression that the saxophonist simply was searching for something higher.
This quest remains a constant throughout both his life and _A Wild, Blatant Truth_.
Lloyd frequently speaks of music as a “Holy Grail,” a form of “service” one performs.
He comments on several occasions that he is merely a vessel from which the music
emerges, and twice quotes a comment from the late drummer Billy Higgins about how
he no longer played on the physical plane; his music had become purely spiritual.

It was during Lloyd’s Big Sur sojourn that he solidified two key relationships, 
with the self-realization-focused Vedanta spiritual system, and with Darr, who first
saw him perform in Montreal in 1967 and with whom he has forged an unbreakable personal
and professional bond. (In addition to managing Lloyd, Darr has helped make documentaries
about him, including _Arrows Into Infinity_, released on DVD by the ECM label last
year, and her artwork is showcased on several Lloyd album covers.)

Lloyd speaks with warmth and generosity about a number of collaborators with whom
he has worked since his re-emergence. But his deepest approbations are for Higgins,“
the nuance master,” to whom Lloyd seems to owe near-ineffable gratitude. He speaks
with reverence of the balance of his Vedantic beliefs with Higgins’ Muslim faith,
and talks at length about the 2001 recording, just months before the drummer’s death,
of their double-disc duet album _Which Way Is East_.

Some readers may be turned off by the overtly spiritual nature of Lloyd’s commentary;
this is a man who has embraced, as the title of his 1979 album puts it, a pathless
path, and those with little tolerance for mysticism, sutras and the _Rig Veda_ could
find their patience tested. Also, the timespan over which these interviews took 
place sometimes leads to sameness in Lloyd’s characterization of people and events.
Though years may have passed between chats where he described himself as “blessed”
or “drunk with the music,” it all comes together in one flow on the page, and creates
an occasional sense of not-really-there redundancy.

But to borrow one of Lloyd’s own favorite phrases, Woodard has performed a service
here, distilling not just Lloyd’s story but his vision. The feelings one takes from
the slightly ironically titled _A Wild, Blatant Truth_ are of peace, persistence
and deep regard for the never-ending nature of self-actualization, through music,
prayer or simply finding how to be. “I hope,” says Lloyd, “that, in the music, there
is this awakening factor that will touch that part in people’s beings that is vibrant
with kindredness of that oneness. Because there’s only one life here.”

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