Hagar’s Song (ECM)
Charles Lloyd & Jason Moran
Released February 8, 2013
2016 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll Best Vocal Album
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Hagar’s Song, the newest release from longtime ECM luminary Charles Lloyd, is an interactive duo recording with Jason Moran, the pianist who has been a key member of Lloyd’s latter-day quartet, contributing to the albums Rabo de Nube (2008), Mirror (2010) and Athens Concert (2012). Hagar’s Song, a collection of intimacy and homage, features pieces especially dear to Lloyd, ranging from compositions by Billy Strayhorn (“Pretty Girl” a/k/a “Star-Crossed Lovers”), Duke Ellington (“Mood Indigo”) and George Gershwin (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”) to a standard strongly associated with Billie Holiday (“You’ve Changed”), Brian Wilson’s most famous Beach Boys ballad (“God Only Knows”) and a Bob Dylan song definitively interpreted by the Band (“I Shall Be Released”). 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 aslave-owner in Tennessee.
The release of Hagar’s Song comes in time to help mark Lloyd’s 75th birthday, on March 15, 2013. About the pieces that constitute Hagar’s Song, the saxophonist says: “Music has always been my inspiration and consolation – I hope to give the same. The songs we chose for the recording are part of the continuous thread of music that is my life.”
When Lloyd was in the south of France at the Antibes Festival in 1966, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn were there, too – and they took the younger jazz man “under the wide span of their wings and gave me great encouragement,” Lloyd recalls. “They are two of our greatest composers, and I have a particular affinity for Strayhorn’s lyricism and melancholy.” Lloyd has previously recorded the Strayhorn compositions “Lotus Blossom,” “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing” and “Bloodcount.” On Hagar’s Song, the album opener is another example of Strayhorn’s lyrical art par excellence: “Pretty Girl” (a/k/a “Star-Crossed Lovers,” which appeared as part of Ellington’s Shakespearean suite, Such Sweet Thunder). Lloyd limns the sweet-spot melody on his tenor saxophone as if whispering into a lover’s ear. The album also features Ellington’s deathless classic “Mood Indigo,” which Lloyd and Moran reanimate with the warmest and most convivial of spirits. Moran, a much-lauded modernist who never loses touch with the roots of jazz, shows his feeling for the blues.
“Everything I appreciate about Jason can be heard in his playing,” Lloyd says. “He is deeply rooted in the tradition, with his own branches reaching up toward the sky in new directions. Jason is very sensitive and adept on subtle levels. If I take three right turns instead of a left, he is there beside me without any need for verbal directions.”
Moran had not yet been born when Lloyd had his breakthrough with the 1967 album Forest Flower. But Moran recalls that his father encouraged him to listen to Forest Flower when he was just starting to check out jazz, and the album was part of the soundtrack of his childhood. Having collaborated with the elder musician on four albums now, the pianist says: “Charles approaches the music with such openness. I like playing with leaders who let you bring what you’ve got to the table and interpret the music however you’d like. Charles is a great promoter of free-thinking music, and letting it develop on the spot.”
The bluesy lyricism of Hagar’s Song continues with Gershwin’s “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” from Porgy and Bess – given a treatment that is sweetly plaintive, the melody rarely sounding as intimate as it does here, like something confided. Lloyd and Moran channel the song’s emotion in a way that is at once as old as the hills and as contemporary as this morning’s sunrise. A lesser-known melody – but one every bit as beautiful, particularly in this transcendent reading by Lloyd – is that of “All About Ronnie,” written by Joe Greer and most notably recorded in the early 1950s by vocalist Chris Connor. Lloyd voices another affecting jazz ballad here: “You’ve Changed,” a song closely associated with Billie Holiday late in her career but also given great instrumental interpretations over the years by Dexter Gordon. “Rosetta” by Earl “Fatha” Hines was first recorded by the jazz piano icon in 1933 but covered later by everyone from Django Reinhardt and Nat King Cole to Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys. The version here is abstracted and elliptical – and utterly hypnotic.
Those new to Lloyd’s music might think that his version of Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows” here is anomaly; but the saxophonist was a featured guest on several Beach Boys albums in the 1970s, including Holland and Surf’s Up. Lloyd previously covered the Wilson highlight “Caroline, No” on the 2010 album Mirror, the second, with his quartet featuring Moran, bassist Rueben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland. Referencing the album on which “God Only Knows” first appeared, Lloyd says: “Pet Sounds is a great recording – the depth of Brian Wilson’s musical genius is in full glory. I have always loved Carl Wilson’s sweet, pure voice on `God Only Knows,’ and it is another song that has long been filed away in mind with the idea of recording. The version that Jason and I did is like haiku.”
Bob Dylan composed his gospel-influenced social-protest anthem “I Shall Be Released” in the late ’60s, but his own recording wasn’t released until the next decade. It was the Band that put the song on the map with the group’s moving rendition on its 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink, famously recorded in Woodstock, NY. Lloyd dedicates his recording of “I Shall Be Released” to Band vocalist-drummer Levon Helm. “Levon died a few days before we went into the studio,” the saxophonist recalls. “He was a very soulful man, and I used to visit the Band and Dylan up in Woodstock. Robbie Robertson, the guitarist and songwriter in the Band, played on my Of Course, Of Course recording session in the ’60s, too.”
Just a few years ago, Ornette Coleman said: “Charles is playing really beautiful. He’s expressing the qualities of what we experience. Trying to make a contribution to the quality of life, to do with knowledge.” Lloyd’s original “Pictogram” has a classic Ornette feel, as he opens alone on alto saxophone (à la Coleman) before Moran joins in. Lloyd shadowboxes and sings out by turns, the pianist adding his own funky modernism as the ideal counterpoint.
As for the “Hagar’s Song” title suite – which sees Lloyd alternate evocatively between tenor and alto saxes and alto and bass flutes – the composer explains: “Hagar was my great, great grandmother. When I learned her story, it moved me very deeply. The suite reflects her life – from when she was taken from her parents at the age of 10 in the south of Mississippi up to Tennessee and sold to another slave owner, who impregnated her when she was 14. She was then sold to his daughter’s husband to be her personal slave. It is a convoluted and complicated story – the story of so many sold or traded into slavery. Slavery is horrific enough, but to snatch a tender child away from her parents, that hurts me to the core. I say `is’ in reference to slavery because the slave trade still exists in the far reaches of the world today. `HagarSuite’ mirrors the stages of my great-great-grandmother’s life: loss of family, loneliness and the unknown, her dreams and sorrows, and songs to her newborn children.”
Track Listing:
1. Pretty Girl (Billy Strayhorn / Duke Ellington) 04:48
2. Mood Indigo (Albany Bigard, Duke Ellington / Irving Mills) 05:13
3. Bess, You Is My Woman Now (George Gershwin / Du Bose Heyward / Ira Gershwin) 03:36
4. All About Ronnie (Joe Greene) 04:17
5. Pictogram (Charles Lloyd) 03:56
6. You’ve Changed (Carl Fischer / Bill Carey) 04:47
Hagar Suite (Charles Lloyd)
7. I. Journey Up River 06:20
8. II. Dreams Of White Bluff 09:45
9. III. Alone 02:30
10. IV. Bolivar Blues 04:16
11. V. Hagar’s Lullaby 05:41
12. Rosetta (Earl Hines / Henri Woode) 04:38
13. I Shall Be Released (Bob Dylan) 05:07
14. God Only Knows (Brian Wilson / Tony Asher) 03:31
Personnel:
Charles Lloyd: tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, bass flute, alto flute
Jason Moran: piano, tambourine
Recorded April 2012, at Santa Barbara Sound Design, by Dominic Camardella
Mastered by Bernie Grundman
Photos and Design by Dorothy Darr
Produced by Charles Lloyd & Dorothy Darr
Executive-Producer: Manfred Eicher
Review:
When jazz historians look back on this era, one of the things they’ll highlight is the transcendent role played by two young piano greats in support of two resurgent tenor legends: Danilo Pérez in Wayne Shorter’s quartet and Jason Moran in Charles Lloyd’s. It’s difficult to overestimate the imprint the pianists have made on these special bands while serving the sound and vision of the leaders.
The unique give-and-take between Lloyd and Moran comes into bold relief on Hagar’s Song, their first duo album following three with the quartet, the last of which also featured Greek singer Maria Farantouri. Lloyd, who turned 75 in March, and Moran, 38, couldn’t have more different artistic resolutions: The saxophonist thrives on a centered, spiritually driven, Zen-like approach, sticking close to melodies that he worries with slippery arpeggios and sudden thickenings of tone, while the pianist is a rhythmically driven innovator with an appetite for music from all eras and genres.
What Lloyd and Moran share is an unerring ability to get to the emotional heart of a song, and that’s where their contrasting attacks converge, whether plugging into the bluesy melancholy of the Billie Holiday staple “You’ve Changed” or stepping out freestyle on Earl Hines’ “Rosetta,” which Lloyd heats with streaming notes and Moran lifts with buoyant, Hines-like clusters.
Hagar’s Song is essentially two albums in one: a selection of smartly reworked jazz standards and pop classics, and a nearly 30-minute tone poem, Hagar Suite. From a programming standpoint, it might have made more sense to put the song treatments together rather than have them divided by the suite. Atmospherically and thematically, the five-part work inhabits a different sphere. In it, Lloyd reflects on a painful chapter in his family history: the sale of his great-great-grandmother from one Southern slave owner to another when she was 10. A cycle of anger, mourning, resilience and ultimate redemption, it draws upon African-American spirituals, Native-American folk and Eastern mysticism. Lloyd alternates between alto and bass flutes and alto and tenor saxophones, while Moran plays as much of a percussive role as a harmonic one, projecting dark emotion with hammered block chords and repeated bass notes.
But it’s difficult to resist an album that opens with two songs from the Ellington canon-a spare, caressing “Pretty Girl” (the Strayhorn gem better known as “The Star-Crossed Lovers”) and a stride-kissed, wide-open arrangement of “Mood Indigo”-and closes with heartfelt renditions of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” and Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows.” No artist is more qualified to bridge jazz standards and ’60s rock classics than Lloyd. The most popular jazz artist during the original psychedelic era, he played on recordings by the Beach Boys (as well as the Doors and Canned Heat) before disappearing in the ’70s. Since staging his remarkable comeback in the ’90s, he has refined his tenor sound to sometimes-ghostly effect, making up for his lack of lungpower with his luminous intensity.
The Dylan and Beach Boys covers draw power from their simplicity. With his gentle reading of the melodies, Lloyd turns “I Shall Be Released” into a heartfelt memorial for Levon Helm (who immortalized the song with the Band) and converts “God Only Knows” from a romantic ode to a spiritual one. On both pop classics, Moran plays a stripped-down supporting role, accenting the songs with taut, chiming notes and subtle gospel accents. But he has the last word: a perfect classical flourish at the end of “God Only Knows” that leaves artists and listeners alike in a state of grace.
Lloyd Sachs (JazzTimes)
