COMPOSERS: Charles Lloyd
LABELS: ECM
ALBUM TITLE: Charles Lloyd: Arrows Into Infinity
PERFORMER: Charles Lloyd
Saxophonist Charles Lloyd’s story is intriguing, even by jazz standards. As this totally absorbing bio-doc relates, he’s seen both popular acclaim and cult status, in that order, and now - at 76 his singularly alternative energy undiminished – he stands a benificent elder statesmen of the music.
Lloyd came out of the blues and jazz tradition; touring players roomed with his family in Memphis when he was a boy. After an apprenticeship with Chico Hamilton and later Cannonball Adderley he formed his own group in the mid-1960s that captured the imagination of the hippie generation. But by the mid-1970s he had burned out and retreated to Big Sur in California. Through lovely archive footage, and interviews with fellow travellers like Ornette Coleman as well as the man himself, Arrows Into Infinity paints a picture of an artist in search of spiritual truth and whose gift to us is music ‘that flows like a river’, as Herbie Hancock so aptly puts it. Garry Booth