Charles Lloyd Quartet – Mirror (2010)

 01 - I Fall in Love Too Easily (Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne) 5:00
 02 - Go Down Moses (Traditional) 5:59
 03 - Desolation Sound (Charles Lloyd) 7:03
 04 - La Llorona (Traditional) 5:35
 05 - Caroline, No (Brian Wilson, Tony Asher) 4:02								play
 06 - Monk's Mood (Thelonious Monk) 5:01
 07 - Mirror (Charles Lloyd) 6:42
 08 - Ruby, My Dear (Thelonious Monk) 5:25
 09 - The Water Is Wide (Traditional) 7:19
 10 - Lift Every Voice and Sing (James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson) 4:29	play
 11 - Being and Becoming (Charles Lloyd) 7:02
 12 - Tagi (Charles Lloyd) 9:17

Personel:
 Charles Lloyd: tenor and alto saxophones, voice;
 Jason Moran: piano;
 Reuben Rogers: bass;
 Eric Harland: drums.

Restraint can be more powerful than flexed muscles. This has long been the credo of saxophonist Charles Lloyd. At 72, he’s mellower than ever, yet his music manages to reach deeper. His jazz is meditative, spiritual, and in his new quartet he has found a group of like-minded individuals — pianist Jason Moran, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Eric Harland. “Mirror’’ is this group’s second album but its first studio effort. For the session, Lloyd gathered a diverse group of tunes — standards, hymns, originals, and even a pop song — and made them cohere. Sometimes, as with “I Fall in Love Too Easily,’’ Lloyd feels no obligation to state the melody overtly. But sometimes, as with the Thelonious Monk ballads “Monk’s Mood’’ and “Ruby, My Dear,’’ the melody is crucial to the performance. Even when the group gets slightly funky, during “The Water Is Wide,’’ Lloyd’s tone remains soft and rounded; Moran, however, lets loose with a seriously bluesy solo. The set’s most surprising number is a cover of the Beach Boys hit “Caroline, No.’’ Lloyd and Moran alternately carry the melody, and then improvise way off it, while Harland plays skittering polyrhythms and Rogers keeps it all anchored. What’s not surprising is that a Lloyd-led group can make the song sound like a jazz standard. ---Steve Greenlee, The Boston Globe

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, guardian.co.uk

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