Charles Lloyd - Trios: Ocean - Vinyl LP

2022 release

The Ocean Trio was recorded in the 150-year-old Lobero Theater in Lloyd’s hometown of Santa Barbara, California. It was live streamed without an audience on September 9, 2020, during the first year of the global pandemic. Lloyd was joined by Gerald Clayton on piano and Anthony Wilson on guitar, both sons of famous musician fathers — Gerald is the son of West Coast bass legend John Clayton, while Anthony is the son of celebrated bandleader, trumpeter, and composer Gerald Wilson, in whose big band Lloyd once played when he moved from Memphis to study at the University of Southern California when in his teens.

The blues have always been woven into Lloyd’s musical vocabulary, its influence sometimes overt and sometimes covert, both occurring in “Jaramillo Blues.” The piece—which is dedicated to the painter Virginia Jaramillo and her husband, sculptor Daniel Johnson—can be traced back through a timeline that leads back to Lloyd’s teens when he played alongside such blues masters as Howlin’ Wolf, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and B. B. King. This is a blues of an optimistic hue with Clayton’s bright, rootless chords providing an introduction to Lloyd’s flute, who sets mood and tone of the performance.

Lloyd has long been a free spirit, master musician, and visionary. For more than 6 decades the saxophonist and composer has loomed large over the music world, and at 84 years old he remains at the height of his powers and as prolific as ever. Early on Lloyd saw how placing the improvised solo in interesting and original contexts could provoke greater freedom of expression and inspire creativity, and throughout his remarkable career he has searched for alternative ways to frame his improvisational skills.