Charles Lloyd finds music is the path to spirituality

For many jazz musicians, especially those who look to John Coltrane as a primary mentor and inspiration, spirituality is an integral component of their musical concept. But few of those musicians can directly correlate their careers with major upheavals in their lives the way that

Charles Lloyd

can.

"Music is a powerful, healing force," the saxophonist said via e-mail, "and can speak more directly to states that are far deeper than any place words can go."

In Lloyd's case, however, his health and music in some ways threaten one another. "I've had two throat surgeries from breathing second-hand smoke," he explained, which is why he insisted on an e-mail rather than a phone interview in advance of his show tomorrow at Montgomery County Community College.

"The doctors told me that if they had to cut again, I probably wouldn't be able to play the saxophone."

This isn't the first time the two essential facets of Lloyd's life have been in opposition. Born in Memphis, Tenn., in 1938, Lloyd grew up in intimate contact with that city's rich musical heritage.

His earliest musical experiences were as a sideman for blues legends like Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland, before his life was changed when he heard Charlie Parker.

In 1956, Lloyd left Memphis for Los Angeles to earn his master's degree in music at University of Southern California. While there, he began playing in the city's jazz clubs with luminaries passing through town.

In 1960, he became musical director of drummer Chico Hamilton's group. Soon thereafter, he moved to New York and joined saxophonist Cannonball Adderley's Sextet. A year later, Lloyd formed his own quartet with three soon-to-be-legendary musicians - pianist Keith Jarrett, drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Cecil McBee - and toured the world.

At the height of that successful run, however, Lloyd experience his first brush with mortality and left it all behind. In 1961, his boyhood friend, trumpeter Booker Little, died, followed by Lloyd's mother in 1969. Besides that, Lloyd had succumbed to many of the temptations offered to a touring musician.

"When I was in my 20s, I thought I knew it all," Lloyd said. "This is probably why they say, 'Youth is wasted on the young.' After being on the road for 10 years nonstop, and having also achieved a relatively large slice of the success pie, I was on the fast track to self-destruction.

"I was staring my own mortality in the face and the condition of my inner life was not very healthy. All of the excesses of fame and life on the road had gotten to me and were also affecting the music. I knew I had to get off the bus."

In the early 1970s, Lloyd retreated to Big Sur, Calif., where he studied and, for a time, taught Transcendental Meditation. That interest led to a series of recordings with the Beach Boys, whose members Mike Love and Al Jardine were also TM practitioners.

Though Lloyd recorded sporadically as both leader and sideman throughout this period, he essentially remained in semi-retirement for the rest of the decade.

"This period of self-imposed exile kept stretching out longer and longer," Lloyd recalled. "If Michel Petrucciani had not come along when he did, I'm not sure if I ever would have come back. But I felt a responsibility to help him, as the elders had done for me."

Petrucciani was an 18-year-old piano prodigy from France when Lloyd heard him and felt compelled to return to the road to help introduce the young man to a wider audience. But this revival was short-lived, and Lloyd dropped out of sight again after less than two years.

"It was really after I healed from a near-death experience in 1986, that I rededicated myself to this beautiful indigenous art form, jazz," Lloyd explained. After his hospitalization for a nearly fatal medical condition, he began actively recording and performing again, resulting in a string of remarkable CDs on ECM Records.

"When I got to the studio in 1989" to resume recording after a seven-year hiatus, Lloyd said, "it was coming out of this intense period of silence and introspection. I feel those years in Big Sur to be among the most important years in my life, and they will forever be part of my music, just as the blues I grew up with in Memphis and Mississippi will always be reflected in my music."

Of his current trio with drummer Eric Harland and bassist Reuben Rogers (a live CD, which adds pianist Jason Moran, will be released next March), Lloyd says, "We try to set our sails high so the winds of grace might come and fill them."

That description illuminates the spiritual journey on which Lloyd's music inevitably takes him. He hesitated to define that concept, however, saying, "Spirituality is a loosely and widely used word these days.

"Each individual has to find their path. My path is in music. I feel it's in the music that I'm most free of my small self, and when I step out of the way, the spirit can take over and wonderful things can happen." *

Send e-mailto bradys@phillynews.com.

Montgomery County Community College, Blue Bell Campus, Science Center Theater, 340 De Kalb Pike, 8 p.m. tomorrow, $22, 215-641-6505, www.Mc3.edu.