John Bungey for THE TIMES: Charles Lloyd, a musician who has lived many lives, fixes me with his wise-owl gaze and says quietly: “I am one of the last of the Mohicans. There aren’t too many of us left.”
Mohicans? Lloyd, still busy performing as he reaches his 80th birthday on March 15, is referring to that band of jazz elder statesman — Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders — whose life journey has been as much spiritual as musical: sax man meets shaman.
“I come from the source,” continues Lloyd. “When I was growing up in Memphis, Duke Ellington and Count Basie used to stay in my mother’s house, so I’ve always been around this music . . . I have been drunk on this music since I was a little boy.”
While Lloyd has never enjoyed the profile here of Miles Davis or Rollins, the saxophonist and flautist has journeyed through one of the most remarkable musical careers of the postwar years. His first band as leader, with the young Keith Jarrett on piano, swiftly made a million-selling album — almost unheard of then for instrumental jazz. In flower-power San Francisco, he shared bills with the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin. But then Lloyd crashed and burnt. He quit the business, reluctant to play stadiums or become “a commodity”, and retired to the woods in Big Sur, California, to pursue “a simple life with high thinking” and find a cave for transcendental meditation.