Charles Lloyd is playing the Nobel Prize Ceremony
I just go this in from Charles Lloyd's office.

"The Nobel Committee has requested Charles Lloyd and SANGAM, with Zakir Hussain and Eric Harland to perform during the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on December 10th."

What a gig!

Brittle
While the compositions are inventive and Lloyd's band is superb, Lloyd's playing seems brittle much of the time. It is a painful experience hearing a musician loose his breathe control in the middle of a passage. I suspect many listeners will give him the benefit of the doubt and attribute this to artistic license. However, for me Lloyd does not sustain his power throughout much of this CD. For this reason, "Forest Flower" is the weakest link in my 1960s collection and warrants being dropped from the "Best of the 60s" list.

Overhyped?
Since I'm the first one to give this CD less than 5 stars, there's some chance that I'm completely missing the point. That said, I don't really understand the effusive praise that it gets; there are a bunch of jazz recordings made in the mid-60s that I would recommend over this one, including some by Charles Lloyd himself.

This CD actually contains two albums. The first, and more famous, is Forest Flower: Live at Monterey, which contains the Lloyd quartet's legendary performance at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival. Judging by the other reviews, the performance of "Forest Flower" seems to be very popular. To my ears, Lloyd's playing on this tune is somewhat rambling and aimless; Keith Jarrett's brilliant playing and the nice groove generated by Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette are the best things about it. There are better versions on Lloyd's Voice in the Night (on ECM) and Chico Hamilton's Man from Two Worlds (on Impulse).

The other track from the Monterey performance is "East of the Sun", which gets a brisk post-bop (with hints of free jazz) interpretation. The balance of the album was recorded in the studio; Jarrett's "Sorcery" is sort of avant-jazz-rock piece (Lloyd on flute) and McBee's "Song of Her" is a lovely ballad (though perhaps better performed on Lloyd's The Water Is Wide (on ECM)).

The second album on this CD, Soundtrack, is a live performance from 1968. Lloyd's tenor playing is even weaker than it was on the Forest Flower album. It opens with a smoking version of Lloyd's "Sombrero Sam", which has a much tighter, funkier groove than the original studio version. Fantastic. I think this version of "Voice in the Night" is not very good. The album closes with another version of "Forest Flower", after a mediocre introduction on solo tenor ("Pre-Dawn"). This one starts out inferior to the '66 version, but during the second half the rhythm section just locks into this incredible funky groove. One of the highlights of this disc, as far as I'm concerned.

My recommendation is to check out a bunch of Lloyd's other albums, both from the 60s (Dream Weaver, Flowering/Warne Marsh) and the 90s (Canto, Voice in the Night), before this one. It's enjoyable but he's done better. If you like those then this one is worth checking out. If nothing else, this one features a fantastic rhythm section.

A most joyful noise!
As it says in the liner notes, Charles Lloyd and his quartet made such a splash at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966 that the album became a million-seller, launching him onto the world jazz scene virtually overnight. Many critics over the years have compared him to John Coltrane, but Lloyd, Jarrett, McBee and DeJohnette came more out of the cool jazz tradition that played well to a west coast audience and indeed the world over, as Lloyd would be one of the few American jazz musicians to play in the Soviet Union and Red China. The infectuous rhytmns have a light funky sound, which carries forth onto the additional LP, Soundtrack, contained on this CD which features Sombrero Sam. But, it was Forest Flower that earned his place in jazz, which he played at one major jazz festival after another. Of course Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette have done pretty well themselves over the years.

hot jazz
This is a great cd not only charles lloyd but also keith jarrett in their early years the live section is so well recorded this is a cd worth having in any jazz collection it is five star value