At the JVC Jazz Festival, Charles Lloyd and Sangam Keep Things Loose

[7/4]

June 24, 2006

Music Review | Charles Lloyd and Sangram

At the JVC Jazz Festival, Charles Lloyd and Sangam Keep Things Loose

By BEN RATLIFF

Charles Lloyd's new trio, Sangam, takes cooperation to its limits. Its music is largely improvised. Jazz cooperates with Indian music, but that's a reductive description: it's really just improvised song over loose composition, in which rhythm is taken to its boundaries of speed and precision and in other places presented fairly sparsely.

At Zankel Hall on Thursday, in a JVC Jazz Festival concert, the band used drones, gauzy pop harmonies, fleeting funk, singing, and bells and shakers. There was a grand piano onstage for anyone who wanted to play it. None of the musicians is a pianist per se, but sometimes two band members played it at once.

This may seem like a mess, especially if you haven't heard the band's album ("Sangam," recently released on ECM and recorded in 2004 at the group's first performance). But it wasn't. The prime condenser, energizer and focuser in the band, apparently, is the Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain, who started the concert playing very slowly and singing a few tones, as the band elaborated on a major seventh chord Mr. Lloyd was playing on the piano. Eric Harland stood at Mr. Lloyd's side, tapping rhythmically on the strings inside the piano, and then took over at the keyboard, turning the chord minor, while Mr. Lloyd played flute.

This was benign throat-clearing, and it lasted 20 minutes or so. Then, at the start of "Dancing on One Foot," Mr. Lloyd played the tarogato, a kind of Hungarian version of the clarinet, and the rhythm began to gallop. Mr. Hussain, seated cross-legged on a platform behind his tablas, stared across the stage at Mr. Harland, seated behind his drum set, and they started the first of several blindingly rapid duets.

Tabla players, using all their fingers, can play much faster rhythms than a jazz drummer holding two sticks. The wonder is that Mr. Harland decided to play on Mr. Hussain's terms, and found a nearly matching articulation in his own fast patterns. Finding a place to stop, and mysteriously agreeing exactly where to do it, they brought the piece to an abrupt close. As if it had been holding its breath, the crowd erupted all together.

Mr. Lloyd, tall and aging and fashionably dressed in black, had a certain presence, but his playing — on tenor saxophone above all — contained its own charisma. His tone was often contemplative or balladlike, and the notes had an internal softness. But he played them at high intensity, sometimes recalling John Coltrane (in "Hymn to the Mother," a recurring set of intervals evoked "Chasin' the Trane"), using overtones and keening, babbling phrases.

[Guy Berger]

Any thoughts about the recent album? I've been somewhat hesitant to pick it up because of the instrumentation. Not sure I want to hear Lloyd's piano playing.

Guy

[sal]

Any thoughts about the recent album? I've been somewhat hesitant to pick it up because of the instrumentation. Not sure I want to hear Lloyd's piano playing.

Guy

I like the album, though not as much as I liked "Jumping the Creek" from last year.

If you enjoyed "Which Way is East", which was his duet recording with Billy Higgins, I think that you'll be more inclined to like this. The two albums aren't necessarily very similar musically, but have similar "vibes" to them, IMO. And Lloyd only plays piano on one track, if I remember correctly.

Edited June 28, 2006 by sal

[Guy Berger]

I avoided Which Way Is East for the same reasons and haven't picked it up. "Play every instrument" sessions make me wary of new-age noodlefests.

Guy