The Creator has a carrot on a stick. And He says. ‘Not yet, Charles.’ I’m trying to get there, you know, and I’m always falling short. That’s another reason I never stopped, because I never got good enough to quit.
-Charles Lloyd
When I was living in Carmel, California after my time in the service, I loved to drive down Highway 1 to Big Sur. That drive always included a stop at Nepenthe, a wonderful cliff-side restaurant built around a rustic cabin. The cabin was allegedly bought in 1944 by Orson Wells for his wife Rita Hayworth. They split up soon afterward and never lived in it. Bill and Madelaine "Lolly" Fassett bought the cabin and the surrounding 12 acres for $22,000 from Welles and Hayworth after their divorce in 1947. The Fassetts moved into the three-room cabin with their five children. They hired architect Rowan Maiden, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, to design the restaurant, which first opened in 1949.
At Nepenthe, in the middle of the patio, there’s a wood sculpture of a Phoenix.
When I think about Charles Lloyd’s recent resurgence, I think about this sculpture - a Phoenix rising from the ashes. It reminds me of strength, determination, passion, and resilience, qualities we all can rally around.
This summer, DownBeat magazine voted 85-year-old Charles Lloyd Jazz Artist of the Year. This is incredible not only because he is an octogenarian, but because he first won that award in 1957 - 66 years ago. However, at the height of his fame in 1970, he disappeared from the jazz scene, withdrawing for 20 years before reemerging even stronger.
His absence and later reemergence reminded me of the late Lee Bontecou, who passed away on November 8, 2022. Like Lloyd, at the height of her fame in 1970, she disappeared from the art scene only to remerge many years later. I learned about Bontecou from reading about Joseph Cornell, the famous collagist and premier assemblagist who elevated the box to a major art form.
Lee Bontecou was born in Providence, Rhode Island in January 1931. She attended the Art Students League in New York City from 1952 to 1955. In the summer of 1954, she went to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she learned and experimented with welding. After graduating, she received a Fulbright scholarship and studied in Rome, where she lived in a terra-cotta factory until 1958. It was during this time that she developed her distinctive and innovative style that in the 1960s morphed into her wall reliefs. She returned to New York City in 1958.
Early in her career, she was influenced by Cornell boxes like this one:
For comparison, here is one of Bontecou’s boxes from 1959:
In 1960, art dealer Leo Castelli introduced her to Cornell, and they developed a friendship. Here’s a photo of her from that timeframe taken by Cornell:
Cornell later turned the photo into a collage, which is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in D.C.:
Here are a couple of postcards Bontecou sent to Cornell. This one from Mallorca in 1962:
…and another in 1964 describing in a brief list her trip to California :
They both had a deep respect for each other’s art and its validity as a response to their times.
During the 1960s, Lee Bontecou achieved both critical and commercial success: she gave three successive exhibitions at the Leo Castelli Gallery; participated in the São Paolo Biennale (1961); exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (1963) and the documenta III in Kassel, Germany (1964); and published articles in Life and Newsweek. However, suddenly in 1970, she disappeared from the art scene, withdrawing for three decades to pursue an inner journey in rural Pennsylvania. Shockingly in 2003, the 72-year-old reemerged to open up a retrospective exhibition at the Hammer Museum in LA that also included inspiring new art.
In a similar fashion, Charles Lloyd’s disappearance also came after a massive success, shortly after his 1967 Forest Flower: Live at Monterey album went gold and even crossed over to rock audiences.
In 1989, Lloyd resurfaced again on Manfred Eicher’s ECM label. You can read more about ECM here:
His first ECM recording was Fish Out Of Water with Bobo Stenson, Palle Danielsson, and Jon Christensen. Eicher called it, “…the refined essence of what music should be. All the meat is gone, only the bones remain.” In 2013, ECM released the boxed set Quartets to document this period, comprising reissues of Fish Out of Water and the albums Notes from Big Sur, All My Relations, The Call and Canto – all produced by Eicher in Oslo between 1989 and 1996. These ECM recordings signaled a new beginning for Lloyd, whose first success was in 1960 when in joined Chico Hamilton’s band after Eric Dolphy left the West Coast for New York.
By the time Lloyd had recorded his third album with Hamilton, he was writing most of the compositions. Based on the strength of these albums, in 1962, Hamilton signed on with the Impulse! label. For Hamilton, the decision to join Impulse was easy to make. He recalled, “During that time, Impulse in a sense was [the] number one label for pure jazz. Blue Note had their thing. Columbia had their thing going. But Impulse had Trane and Max [Roach]. All the artists that came out on Impulse were hot artists. And they had Bob Thiele, who was to me the perfect producer, ‘cause all he would do was be in the booth smoking his pipe.”
Hamilton’s initial release on Impulse! was Passin’ Thru recorded in 1962. From that album, here’s the title track, a Lloyd composition:
Passin’ Thru was the first of six strong sellers for Hamilton that helped define a new alternative edge to 1960s jazz.
Then in 1966, Lloyd signed with Atlantic and recorded Dream Weaver with his classic quartet that included then-relatively unknown piano player Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums. The following year they recorded their big hit Forest Flower: Live at Monterey, and Lloyd was voted DownBeat’s Jazz Artist of the Year. However, by 1970, Lloyd walked away from the Jazz scene, moving to Big Sur to pursue an inner journey, before reemerging with ECM almost 20 years later.
Lloyd continued to record many fine albums with ECM into the 2000s. A highlight, and his final album with ECM before signing with Blue Note, is the 2013 Hagar’s Song. This is a nice duo album with Jason Moran and a collection of songs especially dear to Lloyd. About the album, Lloyd says: “Music has always been my inspiration and consolation – I hope to give the same.” The centerpiece of the album is the title suite composed by Lloyd and dedicated to his great-great-grandmother, who was taken from her home in south Mississippi at age 10 and sold to a slave owner in Tennessee. “When I learned the story of her life it moved me very deeply,” says Lloyd. “The suite mirrors the stages of her life; loss of family, loneliness and the unknown, dreams, sorrow, and songs to her newborn children.”
I think Lloyd’s 2017 Blue Note release Passin’ Time was a kind of circling back on his career and choosing the same title as that earlier Impulse album was a deliberate move. With his Blue Note contract and stellar young musicians, he had found his way back to the same level of success as his Forest Flower quartet.
Here’s one more for the road. From his 2021 Blue Note album Tone Poem, here is Prayer:
As I have shared before with references to Heather Leigh playing with Peter Brötzmann, I like pedal steel guitar with jazz, and Greg Leisz’s playing gives this album a special touch.
A few weeks ago a friend and I saw Charles Lloyd and his quartet play at the Dakota, a fine jazz club in Minneapolis. I have to say, he looked and played great - like he was feeling a million. Long live the Phoenix!
Next week, we’re back on that Big River called Jazz. We’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of the post-riot Jazz in Detroit.
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Until then, keep on walking….