CHARLES LLOYD’S, “HOW CAN I TELL YOU-LIVE”
Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
Charles Lloyd’s song “How Can I Tell You” (performed live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2016) was my Easter this year. In a season when worship was a little bit harder to come by, music stepped up to provide a glimpse into the Resurrection which felt both very distant and very necessary. I listened to this piece some 75x, mostly between February and April. It is the centerpiece of my “Spring, 2020” playlist, and was, in a lot of ways, the centerpiece of my engagement with God.
To back up, tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd shot into fame in the late 60s, taking up the expansive and spiritual sound of John Coltrane. For some, Lloyd’s masterwork is still Forest Flower—a live album with crossover appeal for both Jazz fans and Prog Rock fans. On this album, Lloyd’s playing is jam-packed, excited, abstract, and anxious (as is his band’s). As the narrative goes, however, this kind of transcendental playing wore him out in the 70s. After being the first quartet to play in the Soviet Union, being named “Jazzman of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine, and a number of “love-ins,” (1) Lloyd—tired and without inspiration—hung up the hat; he moved out to Big Sur, California and fell off the radar.
In the early 80s, after almost ten years without recording or playing publicly, he was approached by Italian pianist Michel Petrucciani to form a new quartet. The band was terrific, and Lloyd emerged with a relaxed sound—the spirituality of peace and assurance. From the 80s on, Lloyd has recorded in collaboration with a number of musicians, and has found a new, lilting understanding of the spirituality of music (though, not totally without excitement—hear his performance on the album Rabo De Nube from 2008).
All of this history comes to bear in the opening notes of “How Can I Tell You.” The song feels like an exhale, an “ah” when we see someone we love for the first time in a while. At 79, it feels like Charles Lloyd has been waiting a lifetime to play this song. The opening line floats out, for just a second unbacked by the rest of the quartet. When it lands, the whole sound feels like a delicate crush—it’s warm, inviting, relaxed.
This sound is due in large part to the work of pianist Jason Moran, whose rich chord voicings give a tremendous depth to the piece. Hear, in particular, the opening of his solo at about five minutes. Moran’s own playing seems to be in conversation with itself (one hand to another). In an upper register, there is an easy, linear melodic playing—the call. Beneath, as if to catch them, soft, full chords fill the gaps of the lines—the response. It’s never rushed, but slowly dynamic, such that by the time Lloyd returns toward the end of the seventh minute, you’ve almost forgotten you were listening to a performance at all.
Together, these two aspects (Lloyd’s floating lines, Moran’s movements) make the song a stunning work of art. It’s a song that seems content just to celebrate the possibilities of beauty itself.
In this way, “How Can I Tell You” became a critical piece of my Easter worship this past year (and likely will be for a long time). From the first listen, there was such a hope and love about the song, I couldn’t stop listening. For me, this piece opens up a future I crave, and helps me to understand what that first moment of the Resurrection might be like. We can’t know too much of that life after life (how can I tell you), but I would imagine with Charles Lloyd that it feels a lot like an exhale, the long-awaited “ah,” or, seeing someone we love for the first time in a while. The Resurrection is, among other things, a beautiful, long-awaited moment, and songs like this help us to keep the waiting alive.
Nate Chinen, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018), 9. “Love-ins” were social gatherings of the 60s and 70s—peaceful demonstrations of love and affection (often involving psychedelic drugs) in protest to foreign and domestic brutalization/dehumanization.
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