The Charles Lloyd Quartet, featuring Charles Lloyd on flute and tenor saxophone, Eric Harland on drums, Aaron Parks on piano and keyboards and Larry Grenadier on double bass, put on a long and musically magnificent concert Friday, October 25, 2024, at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, Chicago. With selections drawn from the Jazz Master’s 2024 album for Blue Note, The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, released on his 86th birthday, the set was a showcase of even-handed fluidity of tone, deeply emotional highs, and beautiful lyricism.
Each performer was given an opportunity to shine, and shine they did. Lloyd himself is a smooth operator, bending and dipping gracefully with the sax, moving about the stage with double hand-held percussive instruments, flowing through a ballad on alto flute, standing in silent sentry-like approval while his bandmates riff.
This year, Lloyd swept DownBeat magazines top Critics Poll awards for the first time in the magazine’s 90-year history. He won 4 major awards: Tenor Saxophone of the Year, Jazz Artist of the Year, induction into the DownBeat Hall of Fame, and The Sky Will Still be There Tomorrow took Album of The Year. This is an artist with a long, prodigious, varied and storied history, but the point here is that these awards were not retrospective: they were given now for new and penultimate work.
At the Symphony Center engagement, the stage surround banked with black bunting to enable the acoustics required for the 94th season Jazz Series concert sound, the quartet produced a rhythmically exploratory mystical bluesy/sexy mix of enticing yet spiritually stimulating sound. It’s new and original music, and each piece melded into the other with a distinctly upper-level joyous beat. As the artist noted in an extended interview with DownBeat, “I focus on the profundity of what we’re doing because that’s the real stuff. You can change the world with that”.
The Wayne Shorter Quartet, in homage to the eponymous soprano saxophone giant who passed away last year, comprised of Shorter’s bandmates from his Footprints Quartet– Danilo Pérez on piano, John Patitucci on bass, Brian Blade on drums, with special guest saxophonist/clarinet Mark Turner, opened the evening with an extremely mellow confluence of expansive tunes, a number taken from Shorter’s 2013 lauded release on Blue Note, Without a Net.
The musial signature for this event, The Legacy of Wayne Shorter, was ultra-sophisticated, producing an almost chamber-music quality; inspiring attentive listening yet deeply improvisational. The pieces seemed to wrap themselves around the entirety of Orchestra Hall. Chris Barton of The LA Times, reviewing the album, described it as “A sprawling inventive listen”. The music crept into one’s consciousness, crafting a steady line- no untoward peaks and valleys- between the historical roots of jazz and the future of this most eloquent, layered, percussive-infused soulfulness.
All photos by Todd Rosenberg Photography
For information and tickets to all the great programming of The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, go to www.cso.org
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Nicely done Debra! Small point of clarification, Mark Turner was playing the soprano saxophone not the clarinet.
Thx! In fact, what I said was that Turner is a saxophonist/clarinet(ist), which he is!
Debra