Forest Flower: Charles Lloyd at Monterey

It’s hard to even comprehend now how popular saxophonist Charles Lloyd was in the late ’60s. His quartet with Keith Jarrett on piano, Cecil McBee (and later Ron McClure) on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums played jazz festivals, but they also co-headlined with rock bands at the Fillmore (a January 1967 concert yielded two live albums, Love-In and Journey Within) and toured around the world, including the Soviet Union. Forest Flower was their breakthrough release; it got them heavy airplay on “free form” FM radio and wound up becoming one of the most commercially successful jazz albums of all time, going platinum. 

It’s not hard to understand why this music reached a broad audience. The opening two-part title suite (“Forest Flower: Sunrise” and “Forest Flower: Sunset”) is a simple modal vamp that allows all the players to draw the listener in with hypnotic grooves and carefully modulated extemporization. Jarrett’s solo in particular is more about effects than showboating; he strikes the keys in a way that makes them sound like sharp rocks banging together and is clearly developing the kind of “Romantic boogie” that would be a hallmark of his work as a leader. Lloyd is a gentle but crowd-pleasing saxophonist, the Memphis R&B of his youth audible within his spiritual jazz excursions, and McBee and DeJohnette swing, but with a powerful backbeat. “Sorcery” is a high-energy blowout, verging on free jazz but with Lloyd on frantic flute; “Song For Her” is a tender ballad given extra energy by DeJohnette’s sweeps across the cymbals; and the nearly 11-minute closer, “East Of The Sun,” is the most hardcore jazz performance of the whole show, with Lloyd heading into a Wayne Shorter-esque zone of intellectual, post-Coltrane abstraction as the band surges behind him like a wave headed inexorably for shore, and Jarrett’s piano solo is extremely free (for him).