What, I ask, is the tragic magic? “Some powder that you take in you. You know, I got all these demands on me: ‘Sign this, do that, be over here …’ Around ’68 things started getting bad: my marriage and the tragic magic.” Fame and fortune were why I was miserable. So, I came to realise the fame and fortune were why I was miserable. “You must understand, fame and fortune, it’s like a hog plum – looks real juicy and you bite into it and you break your teeth off because it’s all pit and skin. Lloyd might have been famous, but he was desperately unhappy. He’s extremely talented but he wants all the girls and all the money.” But the friction meant “we can’t get along. “Miles is very creative, a very special guy – he changed music a bunch of times,” Lloyd says, talking about the trumpeter as if he were still alive. The quartet imploded acrimoniously in early 1969, with Miles Davis – long envious of Lloyd’s success – hiring DeJohnette and Jarrett for his adventures in fusion. He usually sounds like a kind of show-biz John Coltrane.” The New York Times critic, Martin Williams, waspishly noted: “With wildly bushy hair, military jacket, and garishly striped bell bottoms, he looks like a kind of show-biz hippie. His 1967 live album Love-In – with its psychedelic title and sleeve and performance of a Beatles song – was aimed directly at his youthful fanbase and led to detractors. Other firsts: playing the Fillmore, often alongside the new psychedelic bands (“those guys and gals in San Francisco, they said: ‘The only thing happening is us and Charles Lloyd’”), and taking modern jazz to the Soviet Union. 1967’s Forest Flower: Charles Lloyd at Monterey was the first modern jazz album to sell more than a million copies in the US and helped establish the new crossover between jazz and rock. Recruiting drummer Jack DeJohnette, bassist Cecil McBee and 21-year-old pianist Keith Jarrett, with jazz industry magus George Avakian as manager, the Charles Lloyd Quartet’s 1966 album Dream Weaver would be a hinge that modern jazz swung upon, winning airplay on the nascent FM rock radio stations. Here Lloyd wrote much of Hamilton’s material before joining Cannonball Adderley he released his debut solo album, Discovery!, then formed his own quartet in late 1965. While working as a school teacher in 1960 he received an offer to join Chico Hamilton’s band in New York. Photograph: Ben Martin/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images View image in fullscreen The Charles Lloyd Quartet – complete with psychedelic light show – at the Fillmore, San Francisco, in 1967. ![]() It was a rich community in California, so I got blessed again.” We became friends, played and practised a lot together. I got up to play and, afterwards, Ornette came up and said: ‘Man, you sure can play the saxophone but that don’t have a lot to do with music.’ He was about eight years older than me and, essentially, was saying that I could play but I didn’t have it together yet. “Billy Higgins, Ornette, Dexter Gordon, a lot of guys were there. Their leader, Ornette Coleman, became Lloyd’s mentor. ![]() Lloyd left Memphis for Los Angeles, to study Bartók at the University of Southern California: “I think because of his work with his folk themes and folk melodies, it touched us, there was some some kind of simpatico.” A classical student by day, a jazz musician by night in an LA scene dominated by a group of players who would pioneer free jazz. And the ladies, throwing their panties up on the stage and pulling on his pants!” Plus the fact he would shake those buildings when he played. Howlin’ Wolf would come to town and say: ‘You play with me, you eat pork chops – you play in other bands, you eat neck bones!’ He could pay about $5 more, $10 more, than the other bands. We were bit by the cobra of Bird and Prez, so it was no turning back, but the blues is part of our ethos and those were the gigs that were available to us. And yet he says of Memphis: “We were in Mecca, you know? The music was just so powerful. This was the American south, where “that world of man’s inhumanity to man – racism, segregation – was a game somebody had set up, a botheration”. And the ladies were throwing their panties up on the stage! Howlin’ Wolf would shake the building when he played. ![]() Born in Memphis, Tennessee, he grew up in a hotbed of jazz, blues and country music: Phineas Newborn and Booker Little, two Memphis jazz prodigies, were his closest teenage associates, but young Charles found playing blues paid best. ![]() What Lloyd “does” is work alongside more giants of contemporary music than possibly anyone else alive.
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