Charles Lloyd/Don Was

30:00At which point my mother said, no, he's not. And my stepfather also worked on the railroad, Pullman for the stuff. So he put me in a first-class drawing room A on the train and took me cross-country. That's how you ended up in L.A.? I got there in the summer. I was supposed to start in the fall. But when I got there, I'd had a lot of solicitations from fraternities offering me to take residence there for summer. because they would collect bread. They'd have some tenants in the house until the boys get back. And then I told some guys in the dorm that all those fraternities had been trying to send me solicitations.

30:55They laughed. I didn't quite understand. When I checked into the dorm, it was summertime. There were no people of color there. So what they did was they put me with a Hawaiian. You dig? Ken Pirtle. And his mother was Hawaiian. His father was a Howley from England or something. You know, this guy later committed suicide. He joined one of those fraternities. But what happened was it backfired on him because he couldn't go fully with the program. And so when you... You couldn't shake not being fully white. You couldn't shake not being fully white. Somewhere in there, because it was a very racist time in the 50s, and it still is, but it was so overt.

31:40Getting back to von Kleinschmidt, Rufus von Kleinschmidt, whenever I've told people about him, so you have to be careful because there's some stuff out there protecting him. No one has ever taken that in an interview for me, and I've often wondered why. So I said, I'm going to look up, I don't know why I didn't do it earlier. Milton Oldham was in a club called the Squires and they're going to have a parade for the alumni and so the alumni, Rufus Uncladdon has to preview the parade to see how it's going and when he saw Milton in the parade he said no, can't happen so the alumni, we don't and then I came to find out that he was a Nazi and he had gone over there and fraternized with Hitler and all those guys and stuff.

32:32And he denied it and kind of like that. And so somehow somebody would bring it up and he would say, yeah, we're going to do something about that. Never did anything about anything. And so the reason I'm telling you this now, you don't have to use this for the interview, but somebody has to know what's going on. And so I'm studying all this stuff. And then lo and behold, I read, I did a lot of research, that they've taken his name. After he was the president for those 10, 20 years, he became, what do you call it, in lawyering, they call it, of counsel. He's upstairs. He's controlling the dance, you know.

33:18So he wouldn't let Milton. He said, no, Milton can't march, you know, with the squires. And that was very hurtful because Milton was a pure soul. And he wasn't even tainted by, I don't think he even, growing up in Asbury Park, that's different than growing up in Memphis. I don't think he was, I don't think he even knew that he was black. You know, he was so well modulated. So what I'm getting at is that he was a special guy, man. And we used to hang out in a dorm in these rooms and stuff, you know. And we would always end up in Milton's room because he was like a magnet, you know. He was keeping the Dharma, upholding the Dharma like prayers and bird and train and all of that, you know.

34:11So they just said, I keep looking and I find out just recently USC has taken his name off of a building. and they put a Native American guy's name on there. Too late, but anyway, pardon that, but stuff has been bothering me lately. I'm seconding out. But then here I am trying to sing a song about tenderness. I am a tender warrior. I'm not going to lie to anybody, you know, but tenderness, you know, that takes me back to prayers because, and then Perez was messed up in the army, DB blues, Detention Barracks blues and stuff, you know, and it's like, when will it end? When will it quit? The beautiful thing I'm trying to say to you, Dawn, is that I went away, I left Atlantic, they blackballed me, I couldn't record with anyone else before anyone else because they said I still owed them records, and anyway.

35:14But I came out here, I made my getaway, beginners change, nothing serious. But I did buy a home in Malibu Colony, which was interesting, in 69 when I left. You left Atlantic. I left New York in the music industry because I had blown too many fuses, and I had left Atlantic. I wouldn't give them any more records. They went from giving... At one point, I wanted to move up to Woodstock. Bob Dylan was a neighbor in the village, and he moved up to Woodstock, and Robbie Robinson, the band, those guys were friends and fans and all of that. And so I'd go up and hang out with Robbie and stay at his house, and he'd take me over to Dylan's place.

36:06And the thing is that, so Dylan comes up to me. We were hanging out at Grossman's house. Dylan comes up to me and said, Robbie say you're moving out to the West Coast. And I said, well, yeah. And he said, well, don't do that. That place is going to fall into the ocean. And I said, well, Bob, you've written some nice lyrics, but so be it. I've got to do it my way. Then one day I'm at my house on the beach, and I look out there, and there's the band standing almost near my house taking a photo. So I went out and saw Levon and Robbie and all the guys and Rick and stuff. So I said, what's going on, guys?

36:50And they said, well, Bob just brought us out here. I said, oh, the same guy who told me don't move out here because it's too far out of the village? No, that's a different story. So I always follow my own bells. And that leads me to what I just slipped to when I moved to where Dorothy and I live now. In Montecito, I said to the guys, I said, I'm going to buy this piece of land out here, you know, in the sky. They said, you don't want to move out there. It's too far out of the village. I said, well, I used to play with Howlin' Wolf in Junior Park, and they used to sing, I'm going to move. We're on the outskirts of town.

37:31Don't want nobody coming out there messing around. So I knew what was good for me, the ice man, the mailman, you know. So anyway, now everybody wants to live out there. And the girl who serially swaps houses and stuff, and different people move, they all move near me. And Dorothy's made a beautiful world for me there. And I do want to be able to live in my lifetime with my creativity. And this music is 10 cents a dance. Don't get me wrong. It's shiny, but it doesn't. They just raised my insurance 30 % and this and that. You know, back in the, so the inflation or whatever, inflation blues or whatever.

38:17So I just thought, wow. But anyway, so what happened was a friend, Steve Cloud, who was managing Keith Jarrett, called me and said, man, ECM wants you to come over there. Because I was in Big Sur and I wasn't recording or even interested. and he said, man, ECM, Maffer really wants you. So I said, well, what does that mean? He said, it means that you'll get a straight count, but it'll be the slow burn. It won't be the big program. So I said, well, if it's honest and straight. So I went with that.

38:58But I was always, I wrote a lot of music, and I needed to have my children. my master, so to say. And we could never work that out with Manfred. And although it was supposed to have been an enlightened situation, it didn't get enlightened enough for me, and so we had problems. And also, I got to the point where with Higgins and the records I was, Dorothy and I were producing all the records after the first ones. And we made a record, Fish Out of Water was the first one with Manfred. And they told me he was a strange guy. So I said, well, I'm just going to do my music. And I played about five pieces.

39:45And he pushed the talk button and said, don't you want to come in and hear something? So I went into the studio, and I had tears because what I had heard in my mind's ear, it was on the tape. and there was a guy named Jan-Erik Kungshag, I think was his name, a Norwegian guy. And he had captured it because before it was always, you know, engineers were, I wasn't getting close enough to the music. So that touched me very much. And if you ever listen to that record, Fish Out of Water, you can hear every instrument clearly and the whole thing is what I'm trying to get at. It's all a union. You know, it's an amalgam of spirits on a human journey, and that's what we were doing.

40:36But we could get only so far. Then here you come along, and you... I have a friend in New York, Nate Chenin. He's a journalist, and he said, But, you know, Don Walsh told me, you could bust this story. He said, Don Walsh told me that when he takes over Blue Note, the first artist he wants to sign is Charles Lloyd. And then you came up with flowers and sweets and stuff, you know, and a pure heart. But by this time, I was fragile. and it's hard to believe what anyone says, you know, because we live in our own world and we don't bother people and make sure you leave us alone, you know. Finally, what didn't work in America finally works with you because you have this big ears and appreciation and big heart and you didn't do me wrong and you came and you let me keep my children and you were in it for the music and you wanted to see the best of that.

41:53And that's why we drive down here because I'm at a different stage where I'm not ready to go anywhere now because now they got me in the medical clinics and I got medical problems and I didn't have that stuff before, never. And I haven't done non-prescription drugs in many, many decades. So I didn't know why me, but I guess chronology is some strange stuff. I haven't seen anybody get out of here live yet. It's something that I'm interested in, but I haven't seen anybody pull it off. I did learn to swim underwater. I was a junior lifeguard. Ahmed Jamal was really touched by that because Jamil Nasser played bass with him, and he's from Memphis, and he told him, and he grew up with Phineas, and he told them all about my junior lifeguard stuff.

42:49But I would practice swimming underwater, and I'm trying to learn how to breathe. It's a concept, but it's not a reality. But I keep working on it, and I almost pulled it off sometimes where I thought I was staying under for a long, long time. And I went to Toledo in Ohio, and I won diving contests and stuff like that. I told you about E-Zail. There was this guy in my neighborhood. We could only go to the swimming pool two or three months in the summer because they said, we've got to give them that at least, you know, that stuff. And they had their pools all year round, and we'd go to Mississippi out of Memphis, and there was clear water, you know, and grand stuff for the other tribe.

43:44And so I thought this was pretty out there. But so we couldn't wait for the pool to open, and my mother was very wise. That was earlier property when I was eight or nine. She bought a house. She bought some lots across the street from the Orange Mound playground. So I had access, you know. And it was beautiful. I had almost a little whirl. My grandfather was the wise guy, and he had 1 ,600 acres in Mississippi. And so he knew Faulkner and all that stuff. And I would go through his orchards and all of that. But what I'm getting at that's really touching is that we couldn't wait for the pool to open.

44:28So somebody knew how to get up under the wire fence in the back. And so we would go and we would swim at night, you know, because they got the water in there, but they're not going to open it for a week or two. So we would go every night and swim. But Ezell went up on the diving board, the high board, and one night we just couldn't wait, and he wanted to do a two and a half, you know. And so he could do a one and a half, but he wanted to make sure he could do a two and a half. And he went up on the board, and there was no water in the pool. And so Ezell didn't come back the same. He stayed with us, but he was always kind of laughing and grinning like he knew what was happening in another way.

45:12And I'd walk the school past his house through a field every day, but he'd just be out there grinning at us all the time. That kind of hurt me a lot, you know. If the facilities had been as they should have been available, we wouldn't have had to be such wild guys, you know. One last thing I'd tell you about Higgins and Ornette, because they were at this session, and at this jam session I told you about. Higgins told me that he and Don Cherry were in Watts playing stickball out in the street. Did I ever tell you this? Don. No. So this is really good to know. And they were young musicians, you know.

45:58and they grew up in L.A. and they heard this wild sound coming from several blocks away and they dropped their sticks and balls and started running to the sound and they didn't know what it was but it was compelling and when they got there it was Ornette and the music store trying out a reed. Wow. So that was the start of them because Ornette, And it was the call. They heard it, you know, and they ran to it. Clearing on call. And so Ornette told me once, he said, man, if you get four guys and they can believe in an ideal, he said, you can, he didn't say change the world, but he said, you can achieve a lot.

46:49I don't know how he put it, because he and I would have all these discussions and such. but I've always loved that story that Higgins told me about that it's fantastic what was it like to play with him? play with Ornette? Ornette or Higgins? Ornette it was great man see as he said to me you can really play the saxophone but that doesn't have a lot to do with music he had his own cosmology he could do the traditional thing he had heard Bird he had gone through that but he was from Texas Fort Worth and he'd play with those rhythm and blues bands too and the guys take his horn and break it and beat him up and stuff on the road but he never stopped either you know he just kept kept going and Finney's newborn was our J.S.

47:40Bach in Memphis and he had me to learn all the standards and the changes and the harmonic modulations and and and how do you call it play Cherokee and B flat now let's play in an A let's play it in E. And George Coleman was like a Santini kind of guy, you know, Sergeant Major on your case, you know. So we had a serious school there in Memphis. And Booker Little was my best friend in high school, and he's the one when I first got to New York. I did tell you that he said, where are you staying? I told you that, right? Tell us again. So anyway, Ornette's basics weren't the tightest, But he had his cosmology, and as I said, he was playing the etymology of what is this thing called love.

48:27He wasn't playing the changes, you know. And so he had moved into harm melodics, as he called it. And he was playing the sound of the music, you know. And so we would argue, you know. And he said, well, you know, you're not telling the story, you know, singing the song. And I said, well, but you can't read or something. and he was a little shaky there. And he said, well, I'll fix him. He walked over to my house. He had a Studebaker car. I don't know if you ever remember. They were made in the 50s, where the front and the back, you can't tell which is which. And I remember that we were at a jam session at the La Cris Club over by Wrigley Field here in L.A.

49:11in Watts. And we would go to these jam sessions, and we would come out. We'd be so high from the music that Ornette was taking us home in his car. But because you can't tell which is the front and which is the back, he backed up and backed over his horn. And because we were high from the music and the relative kind of recedes and it's no longer what you think it is. It's not solid. You know, the relative is not like the absolute. You know, the absolute is we're all spirits on a human journey. And when you play this indigenous art form, something happens that takes you to another place where you don't have any limitations like the relative.

50:00And so that's what draws us to this music. It's a music of freedom and wonder. So by him backing over his alto, and he was working day job down at Bullock's or something, driving an elevator. Bullock's Wilshire, like the department store? One of them, downtown, yeah. It wasn't Wilson, then it was downtown, main part of downtown. But he would go down and park the freight elevator in the basement and practice, you know. So he, you know, what you have to do because you love the music so much, you know. And I'm drunk with that. You know, it's like Duke Ellington told my mother, you know, she said he wants to be a musician so bad, you know, and Johnny Hodges said, well.

50:43And Duke said, well, no, no, no, no, no. They both said no when my mother said he wants to be a musician. And they said no. And so my mother said, why? He said, this life is too hard. Make that boy be a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief. None of this stuff, you know. And so, but by this time I'm bit by the cobra, so there's nothing I could do but play the music. Years later, I was nine or ten or something like that. Years later in my mid-20s with the band with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeGanette and Cecil McBee, we were in Antibes, and we kind of tore the place up. And Duke said, well, if that guy keeps stirring this soup, one day he's going to have something.

51:30But what he didn't understand, I was the guy he was trying to save from doing this, you know. But I was beyond saving, you know. Now, had I been a doctor or a lawyer in the chief, I wouldn't have met Dorothy, and we wouldn't be on our path together. So it's like, who are you going to serve? So we would practice and play and all that stuff. I always loved his cosmology, though. He could write these tunes, and they're beautiful, man. And so one day we had a particular argument. he always was trying to tell me the chord can't resolve and stuff like that. So we had five-hour phone conversations, and we were just so deep off into the...

52:18He said the chord can't resolve? Yeah, he didn't believe in that. So anyway, he was trying to explain to me why a chord can't resolve. Anyway, so he'd just take... Stanley Crouch would laugh, and he'd say to me, man, you know, Ornette talks all that stuff. He said, but when he starts playing that music, he said, it makes you cry and you can hear children on a playground playing. You know, he can take you right to a state, you know, lonely woman and all that stuff. And so this particular day, he walks over to my house and he takes out his horn. We must have serious arguments or something around that period.

53:02he takes out his horn and he plays the lowest note b flat on on the horn and the next note he played was the highest note on the horn f and he chromatically brought them together like that but it's like like what happened to to cherry and billy higgins he squashed the whole of the molecule molecular structure so at that point you understand what i say he did lowest note highest note and then you come up the next lowest note the next lowest high note and he did it all in a nanosecond and i never heard anyone do that in my life at which point i bowed down and we never had another argument because i wasn't about to argue with somebody who can uh it's kind of like bird discovered the atom and train smashed it it was kind of we had a conversation like that you know yeah did you spend time with eric dolphy i did now eric dolphy is an interesting guy he uh And he mastered the saxophone and flute and all the clarinets and stuff.

54:05There's a guy named Buddy Collette who was the mentor to first Charlie Mingus, Eric Dolphy, myself, James Newton. A lot of people I don't even know. And so he helped us all. And Buddy Collette was, he was a mentor. he told Mingus used to play cello and the little bowlegged kid would be walking by his house he said if you get a bass I'll put you in the band he said yeah okay so he gets the bass and then with Eric he began to teach Eric and get him up because see Buddy Collette is the first guy who got in the studios because he could play all the flutes and clarinets and woodwind and so the white guys in the studio in those days, some of them wanted to be fair, and they wanted to have some brothers in there.

54:59You know, it was kind of lonely in there because they had heard, that's the young and bird and lady day and all that. So they got Buddy in there. But the thing is that Eric, he would send Eric to different teachers, and Eric got so off into the etymology of the thing, of the mechanics of mastering the instruments, the buddy told him one day, okay, no more. That's it. No more studying with all these esoteric masters. That's it. And so, you know, we played in Gerald Wilson's big band together. Two altos, Harold Land, Walter Benton. I don't remember who was playing baritone. Elmo Hope was out here for a time.

55:43He played in that group with us. Wow. And he came out to L.A. from New York. that's what Ornette said to me he said man you know I'm tired of just playing these gigs he said I write all this music he said I could be like Beethoven I could be home with my woman you know having a good time and down at the symphony hall they could be playing my music and sure enough one time he was playing at the five spot and Leonard Bernstein jumped up on the stage and hugged him told him how beautiful his music was now you think about that If Ornette had jumped up on the stage at Philharmonic Hall or somewhere and told Lenny he didn't play Wagner that well tonight or told him he did a good job, he'd probably been arrested.

56:31It's kind of like that stuff over in Israel or October 6th. If brothers had gone in there with some machetes and stuff, them brothers had all been mowed down. But instead, they switched the game around. So when you see too much stuff like that, it hurts and fair play or something, you know, it's not in the game. When I come out of the house, I wear my beanie cap and my jacket and stuff so I can be warm just in case Caesar sends the gendarmes down to mess with us, you know. And it's weird the things that a brother has to think about, you know. That's why I live like I do, you know. I live quiet.

57:19The wolf's at the door, you know, and you try to do the best you can for me. But I didn't know that my lifestyle would be so expensive. It's kind of expensive to live simply, you know, and that's the way we live, with no neighbors in acreage, you know. After this break, we'll be back with the rest of our conversation with Charles Lloyd. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network, according to the experts at Oocla Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

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1:00:47Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. Here's the rest of the conversation between Don Was, Charles Lloyd, and myself. Can you talk a little bit about your friendship with Booker Little? Yeah, Booker Little, he and I met at about 13 or 14. Booker, first of all, the creators, that's the other thing about God. There's something beautiful about taking care of his children. I wonder, though, why the game is still rigged. So I get to New York, and it's a Monday night, and Booker's playing down at Birdland. And I was staying across the street at the Alvin Hotel, and I went down, and I said, Booker, I'm here.

1:01:33He said, Where are you staying? I said, I'm staying at the Alvin. He said, No, you're not. you're coming home with me. So he was 22, and he took me home with him. And I was ready to jump into the fast lane because I'm in Mecca now, in Apple, you know. And he said, no, it's not about that. It's about character. What I came to find out was that he was a realized soul. He left a few months, several months later at 23, and he took me apart because in high school, We would go to the library and listen to Bartok string quartets and stuff and discuss music. The thing about Bartok is that he would take his folk themes, and he would put Fibonacci kind of numbers, stuff they had gotten from Egypt, and he would make these formulations, and it was very beautiful what he was doing.

1:02:26And that's what I do. I take my folk songs, you know, and if you listen to my new record, what's my new record called? I almost said Which Way is East, but that's not the new record. That's the one with Higgins. The Sky will still be there tomorrow. We may not be there tomorrow, but The Sky will be. And I'm trying to... So Booker, he straightened me out, and he told me about character, and he was an enlightened soul. And I have not met anyone in this music as advanced as he was spiritually. And he set me on the path. I had some detours. Booker left at 23. He came home at Christmastime. He was a year ahead of me in school, and he's two weeks younger than me.

1:03:14April 2nd would be his birthday. We make a tribute to him every year. So he came home from school at 18. We were both 18, and Clifford Brown had died. Clifford was his hero, and he was killed in a car accident playing with Max Roach on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. and Booker was crying. We were hanging out, and he said, you know, Cliff is gone, and Cliff was 25, and Booker said, why couldn't it have been me? He was 18, so you don't know no young people ready to sacrifice or to put themselves in harm's way like that. And sure enough, Booker left at 23, but the creator had prepared him. He was advanced.

1:04:00He had a sister, Vera Little, who was an opera singer. Dorothy and I have a picture from our world travels. We have a picture with Vera with the Pope. Wow. Yeah. I mean, so he comes from some deep stuff, and all of our stuff is very deep. The music, you know, the stuff. I'm talking about prayers and birds and all of that, you know. It's like I wanted to marry Lady Day and, you know, give her the long driveway and stuff, you know, because she was singing just to me. So I put my radio under the pillow, and I'd listen late at night. I could hear. Booker also had Coleman Hawkins. Coleman Hawkins, who was a master of modernity and the tenor saxophone, and he knew his harmonies.

1:04:46He also played cello. And he commissioned Booker to write music for an octet for him. The day they were in the recording studio, that was the day Booker left town. and everybody was looking for the music and looking for Booker. And I knew his lady, Mattel, and to this day, I saw the music on the piano, but the music has never been found, you know, but he did write it. He also wrote the music for trains, Africa Brass, and all that brass. And he did a beautiful thing, man. If you ever listen to Africa Brass, check it out. The brass said,

1:05:30Booker taught them how to do that. There was a guy named Bob Northern who was a French horn player, and he was on that too. So Booker, he was very modern, very special. He didn't have a big love for Ornette, though. And I was hoping that if he'd lived long enough that we could have bridged that gap. But Booker was, he was, I mean, you know, he took Eric on. Of course, Eric was very schooled, and Booker was very schooled. But Booker also was a wise man, and his music, that stuff he did out front on Candid with another friend of mine from California, Don Friedman, a great pianist, is on that record.

1:06:28I was so happy to see, and Eric Dolphy was on that record, I was happy to see Memphis and Cali all mixed up in there together. Did you get what he said when he said it's all about, it's about character? Did you get it right away? No, what happened was that I heard it, but when I moved out here, I started studying Vedanta, and that's Sri Ramakrishna, and he was one of the last guys who came through here with the goods and he was born in 1838. He lived 50 years, so he left town in 1888. But he made 12 guys. Swami Vivekananda was his main cat that he made. He made all these guys. And he was so-called illiterate in India, but he had the sacred tablets inside, so he'd start.

1:07:16We were living in Big Sur and I got deep off into Vedanta because I was studying the wisdom of the ancients because I'm not going to go in the public way anymore and play. And I was playing outside the nature, the giant red woods, and these beautiful clouds would come over and say hello to me, and the sun would break through. And I had all these birds and animals and mountain lions and deer and stuff would come around our property there. So I came down to Santa Barbara to the Vedanta bookstore, and I was asking some deep questions about the infinite.

1:07:54And this young nun said, well, I don't know about that. I don't know how to answer that. And then suddenly an old nun came out of the back of the bookstore and she said, do you meditate? And I said, yes, I've been meditating for 20, 30 years. She said, has it changed your character? And there was Booker. It hit me, man. So it all, Booker has been guiding me all this time. And when she says it changed your character, it was like playing this music. The lifestyle and how it's set up and the setup of the world and you playing in beer taverns, you know, it's kind of a different milieu, you know. And so I had to get off the bus, you know, and go into the woods and to refine myself because Booker had laid it on me.

1:08:55It's not about the fast lane. It's about character. Booker left at 23, and when I stayed with him, he was always cautioning me, you know. I was in a marriage at that time that didn't work out. and when it didn't work out, Dorothy and I had met, but she had moved to Europe because she didn't want to be a part of breaking up some family or something. And when she heard I had gotten a divorce, she came back and we've been together ever since, you know. So it's like, but she also knows more cosmology about all this stuff than me. She knows that we lived in other lives together, you know, And you can get her up here to talk about that stuff.

1:09:43She's wise, you know. And Booker, so what I'm getting at is it took me a long time to straighten up and fly right, you know. And I'm so thrilled that here's a really beautiful thing. A lot of guys can play a lot of stuff, you know. But what I'm trying to do is sing a song and tell a story. and when the alignment is right, the work on my character, it enhances the beauty of my sound because the old guys told me those notes don't mean anything unless you have a beautiful sound. So I'm all my life working on my sound. And then the beautiful thing about Buddy Collette, he said to me, I know you want to play.

1:10:27I started teaching school when I graduated from SC. I didn't have any bread or anything and all my friends had gone to New York, Warnett and Higgins and Scott LaFaro and Cherry and Charlie, and they had all left. So I was out here in California, and another pineapple would hit me on the head or something, and I wasn't into sleepwalking, so I couldn't wait to get back to New York. But the thing is that, lo and behold, you know, I go east, I come back west, you know, I go east. So I go all around the globe, you know. But I have a nest now, and I have a mate that's with me, and cares about what we're doing.

1:11:03And so we live spiritual life, and it's quiet and simple. And then I had a notion about three years ago, before COVID hit, that I still wanted to change the world with the beauty of music. And lo and behold, COVID came in. And so it took us three years to make this record. And we finally, I got the right people to make it the right. the response has been incredible have you read all the articles I try not to read all that stuff you know why because when you tell me it's gone triple platinum I'll believe you you know but right now it's still 10 cents a dance and you know that may not be the barometer of greatness I don't know well I know but I'm trying to tell you that the man is the wolf is knocking at the door and we love our simple retreat and I need you to pick up the tempo and find some way that I can get that thing through the under the see what happened to me in the 60s we had a breakthrough because I had played Monterey Jazz Festival and then I came into San Francisco to play a club called El Matador and then there was a group up the street called uh the committee which was like uh Belushi and those guys what were they called in Chicago City on second so they were like that and these guys said man we don't even listen to jazz.

1:12:27We don't even like it, but man, we come back to hear you guys every night after we close our theater down there at their own theater up on Broadway. And the club was on Broadway. And this, one of the guys, Morgan Upton, he said, you know, man, there's this place to Fillmore and there's 2 ,000 kids over there laying on the floor listening to music. I think you should go over there and play one Sunday. I said, well, who plays there? He said, Muddy Waters. And I said, oh, McKinley Morganfield. I know those guys, you know. And Chuck Berry and stuff, you know. And so he took me over there, and I was supposed to play for a half hour, hour and a half.

1:13:05They wouldn't let us off the stage. So Graham started booking us, Bill Graham. And, you know, then that circuit opened up for me. And it's kind of like FM radio became freeform. You know, they'd play Grateful Dead, and they'd play me. and Grateful Dead was walking around with Dreamweaver. They loved that record, you know. And then all those bands in San Francisco wanted to be on the same shows with us. Of course, all those guys are billionaires now, and I'm still out here trying to get the cart working, you know, get my car out of the shop. Did you want to lean into the success of Forest Flower and Dreamweaver?

1:13:47No, no, don't hold it. Success, that's dangerous stuff, you know. I love the music. I was told if I would play Forest Flower the same way with the same boring solo every night, they could get me over. But I like to go exploring every night because when you go exploring, you don't come back the same. You find things. You find not diamond mines or gold mines. You find sandalwood forests and stuff like that. So I'm not wired probably for being the mediocre man that's always at his best. I'm looking for something else. and what I'm looking for is looking for me. It's too late for me to change my stripes, you know.

1:14:29I mean, look what Quincy did. He found, you know, he was always on the path, you know, but, you know, Michael Jackson and all that stuff he produced, you know, and then he found, you know, some people, but I can only focus on nothing against what he's doing. And he's a wise man, you know, but he's seen it all, you know. I think if you stay over here too long, you might get burned or something. And I haven't seen anybody that say get out of here alive yet. And the way we live, it's very beautiful, but it's almost like my, what do you call it? It's attributed to my spiritual life. I'll just put it that way.

1:15:13And again, you asked me about Booker Little. Booker Little was the most evolved soul that's ever played this music. And he never, here's the thing. We come through here, we sing our song, nobody knows us, and we're gone. Is it, you know, I'm 72. I'm starting to see some of my friends splitting. You're a few years older. You're 86. Is it weird being like one of the last guys standing from your era? The Last of the Mohegans, yeah. I didn't plan on it. I never thought I'd be around this time, this long. But now, there are health issues that are hitting me now, and I haven't finished my work. Maybe this record that you have that you are so touched by, and it seems to be speaking to people, we played up there in the last festival we played.

1:16:20And the people went gaga, you know. So I don't know what to say about any of it, but I just told you what I've learned to live with. We come through here, we sing our song, nobody knows us and we're gone. I have to go down with the ship. I'm not prepared to pick up soap and do some funny stuff. It's not in my DNA. And I got all that mixed up genealogy in there too. And so there must be a reason the Creator brought me through here. And Dilly Higgins pulling my coat when I was getting ready to pull back in 2000. I realized that I must go down with the ship. And so be it, I suppose. You know, I suppose our blessing of living in paradise with Dorothy is a beautiful thing.

1:17:20So, and I'm thankful and I'm trying to prepare myself to go out. I remember we had a guru, our guru, Swami Ritajananda from Chennai. And he was leaving town, and he was in the hospital, and they had him hooked up to all these wires and stuff. And he was leaving, and he was going into Mahasamadhi. And all of a sudden, these doctors and stuff, they start pulling the wires and start doing stuff. And he came down to them, and he said, what are you doing? They said, well, we're trying to save you, keep you here. He said, can't you see that I'm trying to leave? You know, so a wise man, see, here's the thing.

1:18:08When you leave, make sure you go out awake, because if you go out conscious, you can make your matriculation to the other shore. As I understand it from the wisdom of the ancients, with modernity, you can go to the other shore without impediments. Hearing you mention all these great jazzmen from Los Angeles, I was thinking about a bass player from here who passed not long ago, Henry Grimes. I was curious if you... He wasn't from here. I know him in New York. We played together a lot. I met him in New York, and he had an apartment up on the west side, and we'd go up and jam and play all the time, and he played a lot of gigs with me in New York in the early days.

1:18:54There was a coterie of young musicians, Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Jack Pete LaRocca yeah I knew Grimes he was a sweetheart and I also knew him after he had had that he came back out here and was on Skid Row or something I ran into him later after he was being second coming and he was still very sweet but quiet something I want to tell you about Buddy Collette is that he was one of the guys for the Underground Railroad. He would take people to another kind of place, meaning that he was playing on Groucho Marx's show. Groucho liked him, and they would go to lunch and stuff together.

1:19:49And he said one day a guy came over to Groucho and said, Groucho, you know, big boy from studios and stuff, he said, Groucho, where do you keep your money? Groucho said, I keep it in treasuries. And Buddy told me this story. And he said, well, it doesn't pay very much, does it? Groucho says, it does if you have enough.

1:20:14So meaning that Buddy told me that. And I always wanted to, I tried to dabble in investing and stuff like that with the little chump change that I've had. And it never went so far. But I'm thinking about that now with my little pennies and nickels and dimes. I just put them in treasuries and see if I can get Dorothy's substrate now. But someday you need to talk to her because she did a film on me. Did you ever see it? I didn't see it. The Arrows into Infinity. Find it. Put it down in your phone. I will. Arrows into Infinity. It's very special. Booker's in there. Everybody's in there. Buddy Collette's in there.

1:21:03So people talk to me about writing a book all the time, but I watched her film at Big Ears in Knoxville. We played a concert with Jason Moran and Larry Grenadier and such and Eric Harlan, and they showed Dorothy's film. And I had tears all during the film throughout it, And it's two hours of, you can get it on Amazon or something, Errors into Infinity. It's worth seeing. That's great. A lot of history, yeah. There is a question I would like to ask, just because, you know, having grown up in South Los Angeles myself, and I always heard about Central Avenue. Yeah. Being as you're from Memphis, and you had Beale Street, and you were out here, and Central Avenue was still something of being alive.

1:21:51Towards the end of it, yeah. What was Central Avenue like? and how did that compare to a place like Beale Street? I would go play these sessions. There was still some remnants of it. I'll leave you with something really interesting. Nat Cole was playing over there. Coleman Hawkins would play over there too. Dig this. Coleman Hawkins was living over there. I don't know what that area's called now. It's over by SC, but it's a little loftier up in the Adams District over there by the little leafy over there. You know, I guess the white folks had moved further west or something. But Colburn was living in this, excuse me, in this rooming house.

1:22:36You know, it had these big old mansions. They'd turn them into rooms and stuff. And he would come home at night from playing on Central Avenue, and he had a Chrysler, and he'd leave his windows down in his car because, you know, it was hot in the summer and stuff. And he'd have his horn on the back seat. and he'd go upstairs and go to bed. So what do you think happened to his horn? Stolen. Never. Never? No, because that's Coleman Hawkins and he's fueling the universe and the pimps and the drug dealers know don't mess with that horn because he's a holy man. His horn was never tampered with. Wow.

1:23:14That's deep to me, man. People know some things you don't mess with. You know, it's like, don't put this stuff on the air because it's not presentable. And the stuff that I'm talking about, you know, it's my life and nobody's interested in it. But what I've seen. I'm fascinated by it. What I've seen and what I understand from the situation, I know what's going on. But I can't say what's going on. because those who know don't say, and those who say don't know. But I know what's happening. I know what time it is. That's why I live quietly away from the maddening crowd, and I don't bother nobody, and I expect the same.

1:24:04Can you talk about Gabor Szabo? You guys just worked together. I love it so much. He was a freedom fighter from Hungary, and he came over here, and I met him when I first joined Chico. Chico had him in the band for a couple of weeks, but Chico fired him and got some guy, journeyman guitar player from Philadelphia to come. And so when Chico started up again, I was going to leave because he was playing straight home. I had some good arrangement stuff, But I had this bee in my bonnet to light the thing up. I had to play this indigenous art form, how it was given to me. And he said, no, you can stay.

1:24:53Please stay. He said, let's organize the band around what you want to do. And we made those records passing through, Man from Two Worlds, different stuff. Anyway, and he said, who you want in the band? I said, the first guy we're going to get is that guitar player you fired. And I was Gabor. And I brought Albert Stinson in, who grew up with Bobby Hutcherson over in Pasadena. So I got those guys, and I brought a guy out from Memphis, Garnett Brown, a trombone player who played with us for a while. And, yeah, it was like that. What was your question? I just wanted to talk about Gabor. Yeah, I just wanted to talk about Gabor.

1:25:30He was great. He was a freedom fighter. He was out there in the streets in Hungary. Came over here with a broken heart. They lived in a camp somewhere. where he told me he came around the corner and there was his fiancée in the mud with some other guy, and he never healed from that, and he was devoted to the music. But later on, Fast Lane got him out here. But the beautiful thing is we liked fast cars. We used to race Porsches and Ferraris and stuff. And we weren't no longer together, but he was living out here, and I'd move back to here when I moved to Malibu in 69. and there used to be a freight company called Flying Tiger and you could fly your car out from New York for$300.

1:26:12So I would take my car out to LaGuardia, Kennedy, wherever it was and they'd put my Ferrari on a thing and I'd fly out on TWA and I'd go to the freight and get my car and drive up the coast. But one day something happened to my car and I called Pietro Iruly who ran Hollywood Sports Cars. and he came to straighten and help me out. And Gabor came with him because we were in different camps by that time. And we had such a beautiful reunion. And we made a record together. I can't remember what record. Was that Waves? Yeah, he's on that. But the best music so far has been Don's latest record with me.

1:26:58So I'm happy that in my lifetime I've been able to grow in the music and not bore myself or others. From my ears, from my ears, the way I hear you and Gabo is the same as you and Jason Moran. You and Jason Moran sound incredible to me. I was playing a concert at Carnegie Hall with an Indian group I have with Zakir Hussain and Eric Harlan. And I didn't know Jason, but he came to that concert, and Jason came, and he said, and so he told Eric he wanted to play with me, and I didn't really know his music. But then Jerry Allen was playing with me, who's a wonderful pianist, and she got her bookings mixed up, and she could only do half of a long European tour.

1:27:52So I didn't want to do that because, as I said, we come back, go exploring, come back not the same, but I want to build on what we did, what we were doing, and keep going higher. And so Eric called me and said, Jason wants to play with you, because he'd already said that. And I didn't say anything, and he said, he understands. And when he said that, I said, welcome. So that's when Jason came in 2006. And he, yeah, we've had some wonderful moments together, you know, kind of like what I had with Higgins, you know. in that period, in the earlier period with the original quartet, you know, with Keith and Jack, that was special.

1:28:38Did you get to play with Scott LaFaro? Very much. Scott LaFaro and I were best friends. You know, he also was a clarinet player. Did you know that? I knew he came from a lyrical melodic. Yeah, he was fantastic. He set a standard that I haven't seen nobody surpass yet. And so, although I was in Memphis with all that rich community, Phineas Newborn and all of that, and then when I came out here, there was Ornette and Eric Dolphy and Gerald Wilson's big band with Harold Land and a lot of people. And then came these young guys, you know, Don Cherry and Charlie Hayden and Scotty. Scotty and I played together a lot, a lot of gigs.

1:29:25And then he got a call to come back to New York. That's how he left here. You won't believe this. He got a call to play with a singer, Dick Himes. Elvin was playing drums. Come on, with Dick Himes. Wow. So that was a trio back in Dick Himes. I don't know who was playing piano. But then later on, he morphed into Bill Evans. And then he came out here on a tour later with Ornette. you know so but we played just gigs around town and i i had a gig at a place called the dragon week in pasadena for many years when i was in college and uh scotty and i would play there yeah higgins you know was he playing that style yeah yeah he could do that yeah that's incredible you know what he did one day he came over to my house near sc because i'd moved off that campus because I couldn't deal with that.

1:30:18And he had written out Bird solo to Just Friends. Wow, on the bass. No, for Antelope. He wrote it out for me. He was like a gift to me. Because there's such a beautiful solo that Bird plays on Just Friends. But Scotty, he was like one of a kind, as Booker was, as so many of these great saints are. Saints and sages, that's what came through. here. And the country doesn't know its indigenous art form or appreciates it. And so sometimes it kind of blows me away. And so I live in the woods now and I don't take no prisoners. Did you meet the Beach Boys through meditation? No, Beach Boys were fans of mine.

1:31:08They had heard that I was a meditator. And Mike Love was born on my same birthday. He's three years younger than me, March 15. And they were seeking me out. And I didn't know their music. And then someone played Wild Honey for me, and I liked that. And then they played Pet Sounds, and that was it. And then Mike Love was always coming to Malibu with fruits and offerings and stuff, you know. And so we became close. But I had no, I left Malibu. I was hanging out with Peter Fonda when he made that film, Easy Rider and Larry Hagman, all that in the colony and Burgess Meredith. But when Peter made that film, we would go sailing.

1:31:59A guy named John Calley, who ran the studio, would give us his sailboat. And we would go sailing. So I left Malibu, and I didn't have any economics. So we were living in Big Sur, Dorothy and me, and we built a humble, simple house up there, Japanese country house. And Mike Love, they made Brian's studio available to me, and that's when I made some of those records that you may or may not know about. And the Beach Boys sang on some of those records with me, that record Wave. Is it Wave? I don't know what it was. But anyway. All life is one. All life is one. Warm water. Warm water, yeah. But they gave me their studio, an engineer, and Brian would be upstairs in his bed with his sandbox and stuff, and he'd come downstairs and start singing.

1:32:54He'd call the boys, and they'd all come over, and they sang on my record. So that was a beautiful thing. You know, I had an idea years ago when I used to play, what's that club called over there? Shelly's Manhole or something. But anyway, and around the back street, there was a little in the alley back there. There were some little clubs back there that were starting up in the Doors and Roger McGuinn. What was his group called? The Birds. So I liked The Birds. And so I was on Columbia, and they were on Columbia. So I told a guy named Billy James, who was a functionary of Columbia, and I said, man, I want to do a record with these guys, The Birds.

1:33:33And he took it upstairs, and they said, never. we're not going to let that happen you know I'm sure Crosby was a fan did you get to know him? David Crosby and as a friend he was big friends with Spencer Dryden who played drums with the airplane and Spencer and I used to play jazz gigs together before he was on the airplane too yeah before he was on the airplane and he went up there and they would always meet me whenever I came to town he and Grace had hooked up and they'd bring me offerings and stuff. Put Peru on the table, you know, and stuff like that. One thing I wanted to go back to is you mentioned the plantation in West Arkansas, West Memphis, Arkansas, excuse me.

1:34:19And is it true Elvis would come in? He would come in every night to hear his play because he loved Calvin. And Calvin was a showman too. He could play the guitar and he could jump real high in the sky and he'd shake his legs and stuff. And Elvis couldn't do that with the guitar, but he saw Calvin shaking his legs. So he copped that. And he was always at, there's a book called Quiet as His Cap. And I think Calvin wrote it about Finneas. But Elvis is in there. He would come over to their house for dinner. Elvis was a truck driver. He drove some kind of, he was an ice man or an electrician. He drove some kind of trucks.

1:35:04But he was over there every night to hear us play. He loved Calvin, yeah. Did it throw you when he became what he? Yeah, it did throw me. One day in Montecito, where we live, I ran into Priscilla at some big party the tennis buddy was having. He had a great Gatsby estate and stuff like that. George Washington Smith, big old Spanish place. Anyway, I ran into a lot of people there. but Bashkar Menon. Do you know about him? He ran, he ran, what was it called? It wasn't capital, it was the whole EMI. He ran EMI. I said, man, how did you do that? He's Indian from India. I said, man, how did you do that?

1:35:47He said, oh, Charles, I just failed up. It's cute that he could say that. Priscilla. So I said, so I saw Priscilla at this party, so I said, Priscilla, can I speak to you? And she looked at me and she, She said, this guy's hitting on me. I could see in her eyes what she was. She said, sure, yeah. So we went aside and talked. I said, I'm from Memphis. She said, you're from Memphis? She didn't believe it. I said, you know, I always had problems with this Elvis thing. He took another man's song, and he took it to the penthouse, and capital gains and all that stuff. I said, how did he feel about that?

1:36:29and she said to me he felt very inadequate and she said he would go around to the black churches on Sunday and put wives of$100 bills in the offering. So when she said that it kind of disarmed me because I didn't know him except I used to record a lot over at Sun Records because they'd have us horns come in and play behind stuff but I never played on his records but he would come to the Plantation Inn every night to check us out it was like looking behind the door Was it a rough scene like in the Memphis Club did you have to fight your way out sometimes? Well it was very rough in the sense that with Willie Mitchell I was playing his band and we had to come across the bridge at 120 miles an hour with the gendarmes or whatever you call those guys following us, you know, because the word had gotten out that we were socializing, you know, and they didn't like that, you know.

1:37:36Let me tell you something funny about Central Avenue. So Nat Cole was playing over there too. And one night the club he was playing in Cab Calloway came in. And so he ran over to his table. Oh, Mr. Calloway, oh, please, please, I'm so happy to meet you. and he was bowing down and stuff, you know. And he said, I'm playing piano. He said, I'm just starting to sing, you know. Can you give me any advice, anything to help me, you know. He said, yes. Enunciate. And that took that to the bank. The greatest. Mona Lisa. You know, he just took it. So he heard that. So that's what you have to do. Yeah, he did.

1:38:21Unbelievable. Yeah. Someone referred to Nat in my record. I was shocked, the new record. Dorothea Harley or something sent me. The guy said, this record, he said, I love Nat Cole. He said, this record is smooth like Nat Cole, but it's not lightweight. So that's good to pull off something that it's kind of like we did in the 60s. You get under the transom before it's illegal. Don, you could take this record a long way if you could find the right conduit in somebody like this brother here. Who cares? But there are people out there. There are sensitives. See, my notion is that there are still sensitives in this world.

1:39:08And that thing up on the board on the wall there on the screen says Macintosh. Well, when we were young kids, we loved Macintosh and Morantz. And we were trying to get the best equipment because we loved to play live. and what we heard live, you couldn't hear on these little speakers and stuff, you know. And J.B. Lansing, they had these big Paragon speakers and stuff, you know. And so, because all my life we were trying to, the pursuit was to get up so close to the music, you know. And this record that we just made, it gets pretty close, you know. And I'm really, I'll stand by it, yeah. Me too.

1:39:47It's a beautiful record. You heard it? Oh, yeah. It's a gorgeous record. Thank you. I mean, and you've made a lot of great music over the last decade, decade and a half, but this record is very... Big hat off to Don, because he heard it and he knew what it was, and he heard us when we were kids, you know, and he was a kid, and he likes truth and love, and that's a beautiful thing. Well, thank you so much for doing this, Charles. I mean, I don't even... That has to make difference. Well, do what you can do with it. Between you and Dorothy, it's an absolute history. Oh, you need to talk to Dorothy, man.

1:40:27You need to talk to her. You should watch the documentary. Oh, yeah, please get it. We're going to this weekend. Arrows into Infinity. Yeah, it's major. I just had tears the whole thing, man. And some of the comments from the people, they had a little Q &A after. Some of the comments were beyond, man. I didn't know anybody was listening. So I shouldn't complain or I should just be thankful. Yeah. Well, I guess the point is it's probably having a greater effect than you think what you're doing. Well, what does the guy say? Show me. Thanks so much to the great Charles Lloyd for opening up to Don Wuzz and myself about his time growing up in Tennessee, his experiences at USC and beyond.

1:41:19You can hear his new album, The Sky Will Be There Tomorrow, along with some of our other favorite tracks featuring or by Charles Lloyd at our playlist at brokenrecordpodcast.com or in the show notes for this episode. You can also listen to this interview and other recent episodes at youtube.com slash brokenrecordpodcast. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at thebrokenrecordpod. You can follow us on Twitter at brokenrecord. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tolanay. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries.

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