Lloyd, 75, still sounds as fresh as ever

Young people, according to Aristotle, “are in a state of permanent intoxication because youth is sweet and they are growing”.

Somebody else said “old age is just a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form”. American saxophonist Charles Lloyd is a busy man.

Earlier this year he was in Tokyo with his quartet; last month he was in Germany; and last week he started a tour of the US in Minneapolis before going on to New York, where on Mar 15 he celebrated his 75th birthday playing with his New Quartet — Jason Moran, Reuben Rogers, and Eric Harland — at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He heads to Europe in April, and that tour will be followed by another series of concerts back in the USA.

Lloyd, like some good barrels of the noble grape, gets better with age. He doesn’t find himself, like other musicians of a certain vintage, chasing the halcyon days of old as this fine recording with pianist Jason Moran demonstrates.

On the album, Lloyd, it seems, is immersed in and inebriated with the music of Duke Ellington (‘Mood Indigo’), Billy Strayhorn (‘Pretty Girl’), Gershwin (‘Bess, You Is My Woman Now’) and includes the Beach Boys’ ballad ‘God Only Knows’, as well as Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’. However, the centrepiece is composed and dedicated to Lloyd’s great-great-grandmother who was uprooted from her home in Mississippi and sold, at 10 years of age, to a slave owner in Tennessee before being re-sold (after she found herself pregnant at 14) to the slave owner’s son-in-law as a sex slave.

What is striking about the album is Lloyd at 75 seems to gel seamlessly with the outstanding Jason Moran (born in 1975). Even though Moran — who is no stranger to mining a myriad of musical styles in the soundscape beyond the tradition — is 40 years his junior, the former MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award winner can really strut his stuff: check out his piano prowess on ‘Pictogram’ where his playing is the perfect foil for Lloyd’s alto; his blues credentials on ‘Mood Indigo’ and his darker drone on ‘Journey Up The River’. Moran’s intro to ‘Dreams of a White Bluff’ is hauntingly beautiful and sets a sinister tone which continues into ‘Alone’ where Lloyd uses both flute and tenor as he adds more black to the canvas while Moran drives it along with a menacing ostinato mixture as the duo merge into ‘Bolivar Blues’.

The five-part Hagar’s suite, which forms the centrepiece of this wonderful collection is, says Lloyd, “all about his great, great grandmother’s loss of family, loneliness and the unknown, her dreams and sorrows and songs to her newborn children”. For all its sadness the music is a joy and while it seems as this may be music pared to the bone, don’t be tempted to discount it as some jazz ol’ timer leaning heavily on a young turk to deliver the goods: give it time and get busy listening for this emotionally-charged album is — to steal a phrase from Ellington — such sweet thunder.