You read a title like “The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow” and you wonder what feeling animated it. Fatalism? Hope? Quiet acceptance? To take into consideration who Charles Lloyd is, someone who in his youth hung out with the best bluesmen around and who played alongside the greatest jazz legends and who anticipated and integrated traditional music from all over the world since its first publications, the answer is that it is a serene attitude towards life, an acceptance not without a specific reflexivity, which the eighty-six-year-old saxophonist pours into a moving and passionate double album, the fruit of a life dedicated to music, which in recent years it has brought him various satisfactions.
Made together with a trio of highly experienced musician-friends (Jason Moran on piano, Larry Grenadier on double bass, Brian Blade on drums) the work reiterates all of Lloyd's taste for sound intense but with its own specifics soulfulnessin which original compositions and reworkings of songs from the past take turns with instinctive clarity, while highlighting the quartet's winning understanding.
In this desire for serenity, one cannot fail to take into account the conditions that influenced the creation of the album: already conceived four years ago, it sees its genesis in the re-emergence of violence and in the climate of absolute instability due to the pandemic, the album has then immediately suffered constant slowdowns and postponements, until the other friends were gathered together and the recording started. Turbulence and concern that come together in a record of resolute opposition, focused on exalting all the humanity of memory, all the strength of a musical gesture that pays homage to the greats of African-American music, and at the same time writes his own personal poetry.
It therefore finds a valuable outlet right from the start with “Defiant, Tender Warrior”, entirely concentrated on showing the elegance of the saxophone and the acute subtlety of Moran's piano (with whom Lloyd had already collaborated in the excellent “Hagar's Song” ), to then build on this same beginning a progression of majestic and instinctive expressiveness, which does not despise more contemplative parentheses (the suspended melodies of “The Lonely One”) but travels above all on the wave of a tenacious and quiet relaxation, which also finds the way to show his most amused soul (the compelling screeches of “Monk's Dance”).
In this parade of charming vignettes with touch coolas vivid as the brightest of autumns, memory comes and goes with unchanged strength, letting icons and friends emerge, now directly exploiting their repertoire (the requiem-homage “Booker's Garden”, in which Lloyd, with the flute in his hands, gives a sense of lively spirituality to the legacy of trumpeter Booker Little), now providing it with a totally different, current context, as if timeless evergreens of the past had been written in the twenties (the theme of “Strange Fruit” peeps out in the sparse arrangements of “The Garden Of Lady Day”). What matters is to always reveal the truth of one's being, to place oneself face to face with history, especially one's own, with all the naivety and errors that have characterized it.
In a second album that uses more “spiritual” languages (certainly much more reflective) the nature of a work that manipulates time with extreme dexterity is fully clarified, releasing youth and old age in the space of the same song (the fifteen minutes of “Sky Valley, Spirit Of The Forest”), making use of all theexpertise of an instrumental group that gives the best of itself by acting fine, describing with careful sensitivity the folds and mysteries of an existence lived to the fullest.
In its emotional peaks and in its dedications (no less important that to Nelson Mandela in the new, dreamlike arrangement of “Cape To Cairo”, already presented in “All My Relations” in 1995), in telling and continuing to dream, the sky by Charles Lloyd clearly speaks the language of boundless hope, not forgetting all the surrounding sadness, but precisely for this reason even more brilliant, perfectly responding to the placid experience of a very young eighty-six year old. Far from being an album of late maturity, “The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow” is the testimony of an extraordinarily active mind.
11/10/2024
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
