When Charles Lloyd showcased his quartet in a live setting on 2008's Rabo de Nube, it was one of the more exciting, free-flowing dates of that year. It was physical, full of intense engagement and fiery energy. On that date, he performed a number of tunes he'd recorded before, along with new compositions. Mirror, recorded with the same band -- drummer Eric Harland, pianist Jason Moran, and bassist Reuben Rogers -- in a Santa Barbara studio, is, as the title suggests, a mirror image of the previous outing. Here too, the saxophonist revisits some older material with, thanks in large part to his sidemen, new ears. The material is mostly gently swinging ballads and outré investigations showcasing an even more spiritual side to Lloyd's playing and arranging. But it also displays the great intuitive nuances this band is capable of. While the set opens with an elegant and gently swinging reading of the standard "I Fall in Love Too Easily," it's the follow-up, the spiritual "Go Down Moses," that showcases the group's persona with its modal, questioning concerns, while keeping the tune firmly in the church. The title track appeared on 1989's Canto, and is here performed with the kind of deep commitment and sense of interdependent energy only time and wisdom can impart. Another tune from that album, "Desolation Sound," while still a ballad, features a lot more engagement from the players here: Moran's solo looks in and through the changes to find a way outside and gets there. Harland's shimmering breaks add more crackle than on the original. Likewise, "The Water Is Wide" and "Lift Every Voice and Sing" are performed, in their restrained way, more energetically than they were on their respective albums. One of Mirror's great surprises is a tender reading of the Beach Boys'"Caroline, No." While the melody is inescapable, Lloyd very quickly transforms it into a jazz ballad of haunting, romantic beauty. On a pair of Monk tunes here -- "Ruby, My Dear" and "Monk's Mood" -- Moran's own musical personality is given free rein. He expresses it with his deft senses of rhythmic and harmonic intuition, underscoring unexpected phrases and elaborating on others. Ultimately, Mirror is another Lloyd triumph. It may not shake the rafters with its kinetics, but it does dazzle with the utterly symbiotic interplay between leader and sidemen. - Tom Jurek / All music.com
The rich, peripatetic new Charles Lloyd disc, Mirror, features three Lloyd originals, transformations of two Monk tunes, an unrecognizably complex version of the Beach Boys’ “Caroline, No” and Lloyd’s jazz treatments of the gospel staples “Go Down Moses” and “The Water Is Wide.” The band is fabulous in its understatement, no oxymoron intended: Jason Moran plays restrained, pointed piano, bassist Reuben Rogers anchors and pulsates, and drummer Eric Harland lays back, kindling the leader’s disarmingly low and expressive saxophone flame.
While the standards are impressive, Lloyd’s originals are at least as organic and more experimental. A clear highlight is the lovely, impressionistic “Being and Becoming.” Moran and Harland frame the piece brick by musical brick, paving the way for a hortatory Lloyd solo that joins the listener to the journey the tune aims to portray. (The back of the title is “Road to Dakshineswar With Sangeeta,” in reference to a temple in Bengal.) Another is “La Llorona,” Lloyd’s arrangement of a melody memorializing the sorrow of a woman who has killed her children to be with a man she loves. Lloyd’s tenor aches, Moran’s piano throbs with tremolo and the rhythm section is appropriately stately, underlining the sense of duende at the heart of the song.
Contemplative and melodic, Mirror finds Lloyd equally authoritative and open, nothing musical left to prove. Whether it’s his tenor on “La Llorona” or his alto on a sweetly ruminative interpretation of “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” Lloyd takes elegant, expert time. His bandmates, far younger than the saxophonist, match him in musical wisdom. - Carlo Wolff / jazztimes.com
The American saxophonist Charles Lloyd was once treated as an early-fusion lightweight by aficionados, but not any more. Lloyd came under ECM's wing in the 1990s, and is now known as a moving ballad player with a uniquely gauzy and vulnerable sound, but with rougher free-jazz diversions, as an open-handed bandleader (currently with his strongest quartet, including pianist Jason Moran) and a fine composer. On a beautiful account of I Fall in Love Too Easily, Lloyd's solo glows with hollow-toned, scurrying phrasing against Reuben Rogers's supportive bass. The gospel classics Go Down Moses and The Water Is Wide pulsate with absorbing detail, from Moran's ringing treble figures and drummer Eric Harland's rimshots to Lloyd's spiralling runs out of the tenor's bottom register. The leader's original Desolation Sound is a slow-swinging tenor ballad, hinting at the Coltrane of All Blues, and the band's majestic account of the traditional La Llorona seems to be awaiting a Godfather-like epic movie. There are two Monk tunes, with Ruby My Dear teasingly drifting between Latin grooves and swing in the hands of the gifted Harland. This album looks like one of 2010's major contenders. - John Fordham / the guardian.com
Tracks
01. I Fall In Love Too Easily (Sammy Cahn/Jule Styne)
02. Go Down Moses (Traditional/arr Charles Lloyd)
03. Desolation Sound (Charle Lloyd)
04. La Llorona (Traditional/arr Charles Lloyd)
05. Caroline No (Brian Wilson/Tony Asher)
06. Monk's Mood (Thelonious Monk)
07. Mirror (Charles Lloyd)
08. Ruby, My Dear (Thelonious monk)
09. The Water Is Wide (Traditional/arr Charles Mingus)
10. Lift Every Voice And Sing (James W. Johnson/John R. Johnson)
11. Being And Becoming, Road To Dakshineswar With Sangeeta (Charles Lloyd)
12. Tagi (Charles Lloyd)
REUBEN ROGERS double bass
ERIC HARLAND drums, voice
JASON MORAN piano
CHARLES LLOYD tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, voice
Recorded December 2009 at Santa Barbara Sound Design
ECM Records ECM 2176 / 274 0499