Ahead of his show at the National Concert Hall on November 18, jazz legend Charles Lloyd tells Harry Guerin about his life in music.
Harry Guerin: As a child in the South, did you feel music was your calling from the first time you picked up an instrument?
Charles Lloyd: I first heard the saxophone in a parade when I was three-years-old and a light went off. I said, 'That is what I want to do'. I had to wait until I was nine to actually get a saxophone and start playing. My mother had a hard time taking it away from me - I even tried to play it in the bathtub.
What memories from your early years playing are you drawn back to again and again?
There are many volumes of memories. Transformative ones start from my early days with Chico [Hamilton, drummer and bandleader] and Cannonball [Adderley, alto saxophonist and bandleader] - I came through San Francisco a lot performing at the Jazz Workshop and the El Matador. After the 1966 [Charles Lloyd] quartet concert in Monterey, we had a gig for a week at the El Matador. There was a theatrical group The Committee - very outside, zany guys like [John] Belushi and Second City in Chicago - they had their own theatre up the street on Broadway. They would stop in each night after their performance had closed. One of the members, Morgan Upton, came to me and said, 'We're not jazz buffs but we sure like coming to hear you guys play every night'.
He suggested that I should be playing at the Fillmore where there were lots of young people. I asked him who played there and he said, 'Muddy Waters'. I said, 'McKinley Morganfield, I know him'. He introduced me to [promoter] Bill Graham who invited me to his emporium. Word began to spread about us in non traditional jazz quarters and rock groups wanted to be on bills with us because they loved the freedom we had with improvised music.
There was a disc jockey, Tom Donohue, who used to play our music a lot on FM radio. Barriers were coming down and you could hear our music along with Ravi Shankar, The Grateful Dead, Paul Butterfield, Quicksilver Messenger [Service], Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, the Cream, Howlin' Wolf…
Santana told me that he used to go hear me at the Fillmore as a teenager and sit in the front row and shout 'Free the people Charles, free the people!'. This was a time when people's attitudes began to change and the music was becoming more open - the social scene was becoming freer and we were seeking to realise very high ideals.
One day I drove from my loft in Greenwich Village up to Woodstock to visit Robbie Robertson and Bob Dylan - this was during the time of Big Pink [The Band's debut album]. There was a group of Bengali Baul musicians who were staying with Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. They were mystic minstrel musicians from India and when Grossman put out a bushel of apples, they ate the whole thing because they weren't sure if they were going to get any more food.
Earlier that day, I had been at Bob's house where he was working on [the album] John Wesley Harding. He played it for me on a little phonograph player. I asked him where his hi-fi equipment was. In those days we were all audiophiles and had state-of-the-art sound systems. He said there were too many wires and preferred the little box. When I heard it, I told him it was fine as it was and they didn't need me to record on it. We were standing around Grossman's pool, which was empty and had cracks - it was winter. Robbie told Bob I was going to move to California. He said to me, 'Don't go out there, that place going to fall into the ocean!'. I said, 'So be it!'.
A while after I had moved to Malibu, I looked out from my beach house and I saw The Band right in front of my house taking an album photo! They didn't know I lived there! I went out to say hello and they said, 'Here we are!'. I was good friends [with The Band's] Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Emmanuel, Garth Hudson and especially, Robbie and I were very close. I had even invited him to record Of Course, Of Course.
Jimi [Hendrix] and I were friends in Greenwich Village - before he went to England he often played down the street from my apartment on 3rd Street at Café Wha. After I had left NYC, I recorded Moon Man which he loved and understood. We planned to record together, but time ran out.
In the late 1960s I was being told by people that the Beach Boys were trying to get in touch with me. Apparently they were fans. Mike Love and I share the same birthday - the Ides of March. They heard that I was meditating and they had just started, so they were also attracted to my spiritual quest. I didn't know their music but a friend played Pet Sounds for me and I dug it. Brian Wilson was a visionary, [he] has an amazing gift for beautiful harmonies.
Brian had a large estate in Bel Air which used to belong to Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan. He had a big sand box in the middle of his living room and was trying to work out some things from his childhood. He had a great state-of-the-art studio in his home and a resident engineer, Steve Desper. At a time when I had been blackballed from the record companies - plantation system mentality - they gave me total access to the studio. Sometimes, Brian would hear the music I was making and come down. He and the Beach Boys sang back up harmonies on Warm Waters.
Music was a lot more 'Wild West' back then - did you find yourself in any scary/dangerous situations?
Crossing the road can be a scary event. When you are young and on a mission, all you can think of is the mission. The conditions were secondary.
You retreated from the music business at the end of the 1960s - did you feel you had experienced too much too soon and do you feel you would not be still be playing today if you hadn't?
I was burned out from the excesses of success. My mother died when I was 28 and my best friend Booker Little had died earlier when I was 23. I recognised that my music was beginning to suffer and I had lost my spiritual compass. I needed to withdraw and heal. I had no idea how long that would take or where the process would take me.
Which of your recordings are your own favourites?
That is like asking which of your children do you love the most…
Given that you shared a lot of bills with rock artists in the 1960s, whose performances moved you the be most?
I especially loved Jimi. We were friends and had planned to do something together, but he left too soon.
Of today's younger artists, who would you really like to work with?
I am working right now with the younger artists I would like to work with. The sensitive, young poet and genius of piano, Gerald Clayton; modernist of sound on bass, Joe Sanders; and drum master Eric Harland.
What have you planned for your Dublin setlist?
When I walk on stage is when the set list takes form, so it is near to impossible to tell you three weeks out.
A lot of people would like to know more about jazz but, album-wise, don't know where to start. Which records would you suggest to them?
This is too broad of question for me to answer. There is too much great music to make a shortlist.
What is the best advice you have ever received for music - and for life?
Whatever you do in life, do it because you love it. The same is true for music - do it because it is your passion and you love it.
Master saxophonist Charles Lloyd performs at the National Concert Hall on Tuesday November 18 at 8.00pm with special guest Olivia Trummer. For more, see: www.nch.ie.
