The saxophonist/flutist and composer Charles Lloyd is one of our iconic elders, who as a matured young visionary keeps evolving with new music to intoxicate us. The NEA jazz master will celebrate his 80th birthday in a special concert event, Charles Lloyd & The Marvels: 80th Birthday Celebration, featuring guitarist Bill Frisell and special guest vocalist Lucinda Williams, Dec. 14-Dec.15 (8 p.m.), in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater.
Lloyd’s longtime trusted rhythm section of bassist Reuben Rodgers and drummer Eric Harland, plus pedal steel guitar master Greg Leisz, will join Lloyd, featuring guitarist Bill Frisell and special guest vocalist Lucinda Williams for this landmark birthday event.
His repertoire will include a cross section of surreal music from a force of unique collaborative expressions. There are many paths to take with vocalist Williams, who is a noted rock, folk, blues and country singer.
Lloyd left his hometown of Memphis in 1956 to earn a music degree at the University of Southern California. He attended classes and studied during the day while at night playing in jazz clubs with West Coast rising comets like Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins.
In 1960, Lloyd became music director of Chico Hamilton’s group when Eric Dolphy left to join Charles Mingus’s band. In 1964, he signed with CBS Records as a band leader recording “Discovery!” and “Of Course, Of Course” (1965) was reissued in 2006 on Mosaic Records. The group included drummer Tony Williams, bassist Ron Carter, guitarist Gabor Szabo and pianist Don Friedman.
In 1965, Lloyd formed his own quartet that included pianist Keith Jarrett, bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Jack DeJohnette. Their first Atlantic Records release was the studio recording “Dream Weaver,” followed by “Forest Flower: Live at Monterey” (1966). “Forest Flower” was one of the first jazz recordings to sell more than a million copies.
One of Lloyd’s most significant releases was the two-CD set “Manhattan Stories” (Resonance 2014). The double set was two unreleased 1965 live performances of Lloyd with his quartet of guitarist Gabor Szabo, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Pete La Roca, recorded at the now-defunct venues Judson Hall and the East Village jazz mecca, Slugs’.
Lloyd will likely cover a few tunes from his current CD, “Vanished Gardens” (Blue Note 2018) that includes this cast of the Marvels, with guest vocalist Williams.
“Forces of nature brought us together,” said Lloyd on meeting and collaborating with Williams.
“There were no expectations. It was all trust.”
For additional information and to purchase tickets, visit jazz.org.
Dec. 15, the Harlem Stage Gatehouse (150 Convent Ave. at West 135th Street) will present Uptown Nights, featuring master West African drummer Weedie Braimah, and The Hands of Time, with special guests trumpeter, composer Christin Scott aTunde Adjuah and Cuban conguero Pedro “Pedrito” Martinez. Together these music explorers will marry their sounds from around the world, whose roots blossomed from mother Africa (7:30 p.m.).
Braimah exemplifies tradition, evolution and soul, bringing his vision of building a reverence for folkloric West African music to life by anchoring the concert with percussion as the driver. His percussive orchestra, The Hands of Time, will awaken the rhythmic senses and soul through his unique folkloric-fusion utilizing instruments such as kora, ngoni, balafon, djembe, dundun, tama, sabar, bass and electric guitar creates new sounds reaching musical boundaries like none before.
Braimah grew up in both Ghana and East St. Louis, Ill., and is driven by the desire to see the day when African instruments such as the “djembe and kora get the same respect as the piano and saxophone.”
Grammy-nominated Adjuah continues his joyful journey to stretch (music) the parameters of jazz with rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass a range of cultural influences from his native New Orleans to West Africa and the Caribbean. Martinez will add the final ingredient to this unique configuration that will brighten the spirit and fill the soul with fiery melodic rhythms.
For ticket information, call 212-281-9240 ext. 19 or visit the website www.HarlemStage.org.
A Night of Inspiration will be presented on Dec. 15 at Carnegie Hall (Stern Auditorium/ Perelman Stage).
Composer, music director and producer Ray Chew, along with his wife and co-producer Vivian Scott Chew, will bring uplifting music from diverse traditions with soloists, an instrumental ensemble and a lineup that includes Regina Belle, Shirley Caesar, Jessie Downs, Jenna Downs, Travis Greene, J.J. Hairston, Koryn Hawthorne, Adrienne Bailon Houghton, Israel Houghton, Kenny Lattimore, Ledisi, Patricio Molina, Cantor Azi Schwartz, Richard Smallwood, Iyanla Vanzant, Bishop Hezekiah Walker, BeBe Winans, and The String Queens.
“We are so blessed and excited to be presenting our third Night of Inspiration concert at the illustrious Carnegie Hall,” said Ray and Vivian Chew. “This year’s show is going to be our best yet!” For tickets, call 212-247-7800.
website, carnegiehall.org.
The current film “Green Book,” starring Viggo Mortensen as Tony “Tony Lip” Vallelonga and Mahershala Ali as classical pianist Dr. Don Shirley, is one of the few Hollywood films about a Black musician who didn’t suffer from drug or alcohol addiction or have some type of psychological problem.
Donald Walbridge Shirley was born in Pensacola, Fla., Jan. 29, 1927. As a musical prodigy he played much of the standard concert repertory by age 10 and made his professional debut with the Boston Pops at 18, performing Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor.”
“Green Book” takes place in 1962, focusing on its primary two characters “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, a tough bouncer who is hired by pianist Don Shirley to be his driver and security for a concert tour through the Deep South. Their performances are pure reality in the moment.
The film’s title is derived from “The Negro Motorist Green Book” (published by New York City mailman Victor Hugo Green), an annual guidebook that advised Blacks where they could stay, from 1936 to 1966, during the height of lynching and strict Jim Crow laws. The book served as Shirley’s bible during the tour.
Shirley, who spoke eight languages fluently and earned a doctorate of music, psychology, and liturgical arts after temporarily giving up the piano, had nothing in common with Vallelonga. Although the bouncer felt working for a Black man was beneath him, he needed the money.
As the tour progressed and racism became more apparent as the pair witnessed and endured America’s appalling injustices on the road, they find a new respect for each other’s talents as they nurtured a friendship and understanding that changed both their lives.
The film, co-written by Tony Lip’s son Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie and Peter Farrelly (also director of film), kept close to the real-life story.
“Whenever I spoke with Don Shirley, it was a seminar that included music, theology and history,” said Kenneth Ramseur, personal attorney for many noted musicians and writers. “Although he disliked the term jazz musician, he was friends with Duke Ellington, Leontyne Price and composer Coleridge Taylor Perkinson.” He became friends with his neighbor, the singer/pianist Bobby Short, who lived in the same luxury apartment complex over Carnegie Hall.
Shirley had a distinctive tone encompassed by showering crescendos that infused the blues, the work song, the Negro spiritual, show tunes and pop standards. His intensity and compassionate style of playing was so extraordinary it sounded like two pianists or one with three hands.
“He never performed or recorded with a drummer because his technique was so profound and percussive,” said Ramseur. To comprehend his talent, listen to “Don Shirley Piano Perspectives” (Cadence, 1955).
During a 1962 New York Times interview Shirley noted, “I am not an entertainer. But I’m running the risk of being considered an entertainer by going into a nightclub because that’s what they have in there. I don’t want anybody to know me well enough to slap me on the back and say, ‘Hey, baby.’ The Black experience through music, with a sense of dignity, that’s all I have ever tried to do.”