Q&A with Charles Lloyd

Charles Lloyd was born in Memphis on March 15, 1938. In his formative years he played with B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and Johnny Ace, among many others. It was a time of mentoring under Phineas Newborn Jr. and with the strains of Willie Mitchell’s horn in his ears, Lloyd left for California and USC before making his way to New York. His 1966 album Forest Flower: Live at Monterey became a sensation and was one of the first jazz albums to sell a million copies. Along this meteoric rise, he was asked to play the Tallinn Jazz Festival in the Soviet Union in 1967 and his quartet was the first jazz group to play the storied Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. At the height of his career, in the early 1970s, he walked away from it all, retreating to Big Sur to lead a reclusive life. In the past years he’s come out of that self-imposed exile to again tour the country and the world. He is the subject of the 2012 documentary Arrows Into Infinity, was named an NEA Jazz Master earlier this year, and was invited last month to Rhodes College to work with students and to perform at the Levitt Shell. This interview about his early life in Memphis took place in his suite at the Madison Hotel with a view of the Mississippi River.READ MORE