Charles Lloyd: A Wild, Blatant Truth
Josef Woodard
229 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-935247-13-5
Silman-James Press
2016

A book on Charles Lloyd—one of the most celebrated and enigmatic jazz musicians of the past fifty years—has been a long time coming. It's been a while in the making too, for author Josef Woodard spent twenty five years doing the groundwork, repeatedly interviewing Lloyd, following his career for Downbeat/JazzTimes and other publications and even traveling on tour with the saxophonist. Few writers have enjoyed such sustained access to Lloyd or earned his trust to such an extent, and the result is a fascinating portrait of a singular figure.

Part biography, large part first person testimony, the picture that emerges of Lloyd is a complex mosaic: a musician nurtured by the love of music yet ill at ease with the business surrounding it; a man whose love of nature/meditative reclusion seems at odds with the demands of constantly touring the world; a man guided by spiritual concerns yet with an abiding interest in real estate.

Of course, no personality can be captured by such facile reductions, least of all Lloyd, who was that rarest of beasts while still in his twenties -a million-selling jazz artist. At the height of his 1960s success, Lloyd was seen by many as some kind of shamanistic guru, yet with the world at his feet Lloyd famously turned his back on jazz and the music industry for over a decade. His return to the stage in the 1980s has been well documented on record, in film and in the jazz media, but not until now has Lloyd's personal story—his inner cogs—been so thoroughly subjected to analysis within such a career-spanning narrative.

Raised in the racially conflictive Memphis of the 1930s in a family of mixed races, and with a mother largely absent from his life, Lloyd's early emotional topography seems to have sculpted his choices ever since. This part of the book is particularly revealing, for despite his challenging surroundings and personal circumstances, Lloyd was, by his own account, destined for a career in music. Enchanted by the music he heard on the radio as a kid, Lloyd wanted a saxophone from a very early age. "It took me until I was nine years old to convince my parents to get me one," he tells Woodard.

Remarkably, Lloyd was playing clubs across Memphis nightly from nine pm to four am, before he was ten years old, in a world, as he puts it, of gambling, gunshots and cotton warehouses by the Mississippi docks. "I was pretty much playing every night of my life and shedding every day."

Lloyd's grounding in the blues, R&B and rock 'n' roll of the day, playing in the bands of