Sangam

Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain, Eric Harland

Featured Artists Recorded

May 2004, Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara

Original Release Date

04.04.2006

  • 1Dancing On One Foot
    (Charles Lloyd)
    09:04
  • 2Tales Of Rumi
    (Charles Lloyd)
    11:58
  • 3Sangam
    (Charles Lloyd)
    09:20
  • 4Nataraj
    (Charles Lloyd)
    02:47
  • 5Guman
    (Zakir Hussain)
    11:40
  • 6Tender Warriors
    (Charles Lloyd)
    08:56
  • 7Hymn To The Mother
    (Charles Lloyd)
    11:49
  • 8Lady In The Harbor
    (Charles Lloyd)
    03:27
  • 9Little Peace
    (Charles Lloyd)
    05:53
This music has scale and grandeur in the echoing sound of Hussain’s Indian percussion and the way it combines with Harland’s drums to fill the space or the way Lloyd’s various woodwinds emerge from Hussain and Harland’s rumbling thunder. (...) With that mighty tenor riding the percussionist’s storm on “Tales Of Rumi” and the title track, this is world jazz of the highest order owing as much to Harland and Hussain, as to the leader himself. … An album of depth, challenge and variety.
Duncan Heining, Jazzwise
 
Sangam is the name of his new record and his new working band, with only the Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain and the drummer Eric Harland. You might expect it to be a well-meaning attempt to cross bridges, something that ends up being rhythmically dissolute, a matter of tones and techniques that cancel each other out. It’s not; it’s a powerfully coherent record.
Ben Ratliff, The New York Times
 
Even allowing for the diversity of the genre this is, quite simply, the single best jazz release I’ve heard for months. … While Hussain’s tabla inevitably lend colouration to the music as a whole, what’s truly effective here is the trio’s ability to create a musical experience far greater than the sum of what in actual terms is a fairly sparse set of parts. The tensile silences that hold this music together are almost sounds in their own right, yet delicate piano solos and blues riffs can emerge seemingly from nowhere and immediately belong.
Roger Thomas, BBC Music Magazine
 
A record of real depth and subtlety featuring a trio that we can only hope will tour as substantially as Charles’s health and appetite allow.
Brian Morton, Jazz Review
 
Sangam documents a memorial concert in 2004 honoring his close friend, drummer Billy Higgins. Lloyd doesn’t so much act as a leader, but instead allows his trio mates lots of space and freedom to exchange ideas, and as a result he soars to new creative heights.
Charles J. Gans, Chicago Tribune
 
In jeder der insgesamt neun Kompositionen ... öffnen sich außergewöhnliche rhythmische und melodische Aktionsfelder. In großer stilistischer Spanne zeigt sich in den Chorussen des Saxophonisten ein tief empfundenes Verständnis für den Blues. Es finden spannende Grenzgänge zwischen konventionellen und freien Strukturen statt und eine sensible Hinwendung zu den Klängen anderer musikalischer Kulturen. ... Schon im Intro hatte der Saxophonist in „Dancing On One Foot“ mit dem hypnotischen Klang des Tarogato ... orientalische Impressionen einfließen lassen. Seine fantasievollen Beiträge fegen wie ein sanfter Wüstenwind über die rhythmischen Arabesken der beiden Schlagwerker. Es sind diese ungewöhnlichen Sounds, mit denen Sangam dem Fluss der Zeit eine Melodie verleiht.
Gerd Filtgen, Fono Forum
 
Nun bewegt sich der Saxofonist im Kreise eines neuen, ungewöhnlichen Trios: Lloyds etatmäßiger Schlagzeuger Eric Harland sowie Zakir Hussain an den Tablas knüpfen auf der Live-Aufnahme vom Mai 2004 aus Santa Barbara einen fliegenden, pankulturellen Rhythmusteppich... Ein Saxofon, manchmal ein Klavier, zwei Schlagwerker: Seltsamerweise fehlt es an nichts. Die Nuancen der neun Titel öffnen sich zu einem großen, reihum greifenden Geflecht. Sangam bedeutet Treffpunkt. Eine Art Delta. Drei Flüsse münden ineinander und vereinen sich zu einem großen Strom. So mitreißend, unwiderstehlich und fulminant wie diese CD.
Reinhard Köchl, Jazzthing
 
Dichte Dialoge zweier Perkussionisten, eine entspannte Konversation mit Lloyds Tenorsaxophon, flirrende, wirbelnde Kommunikation zu dritt, Wechsel vom Tenor- zum Altsaxophon zur Altflöte – all das bietet der Konzertmitschnitt in Hülle und Fülle. Sangam ist kein Album zum Nebenbei- und Obendrüber-Hören, es will die volle Aufmerksamkeit und verlangt auch vom Hörer alles. Die Magie von Musik im Augenblick ihres Entstehens einzufangen, das ist diesem Konzertmitschnitt ohne Abstriche gelungen.
Heribert Ickerott, Jazzpodium
 
 
 

   “Sangam” is the first release from Charles Lloyd’s exciting new trio with Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain and Eric Harland, the gifted drummer from his ‘regular’ quartet. The album – Lloyd’s first live disc for ECM – was recorded in California in 2004. Taped at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara in the context of a memorial concert for Billy Higgins, it brings to the surface some ‘Eastern’ enthusiasms that have been part of Lloyd’s palette for a very long time.

Already in the early to mid 1960s, Lloyd’s way of easing meaning and emotion from a melody in his tenor sax improvisations was influenced by sitar players and druhpad singers, just as it was influenced by the lineage of jazz greats extending from Lester Young and the expressive masters of the blues. The emotional climates of raga also influenced Lloyd’s extended modal compositions. In the early 1970s he collaborated on record with sarod player Aashish Khan and tabla player Pranesh Khan. The line-up of his touring bands, however, largely followed the conventions of jazz – sax, piano and/or guitar, bass, and drums.

The association with Billy Higgins changed this. On “Which Way Is East”(recorded 2001) and some of the duo concerts that preceded it, Lloyd and his drummer friend roved far beyond definitions of jazz – touching on other traditions, combining traditions, playing a very open form pan-cultural music. Lloyd originally sought to extend the spirit of the collaboration with Higgins in the “Sangam” group, which quickly assumed a strong identity of its own. The trio has already toured widely, receiving ovations and ecstatic reviews from Montreal to Madrid.

One of the first surprises on encountering the group is the sense of completeness that it projects. A trio with sax and two drummers, it seems to lack nothing. “There are so many nuances....” Lloyd says. “Sometimes it seems almost orchestral. It’s not about somebody supporting and somebody leading. The carpet we fly on is powered by all of us and whatever is flowing through us. ” Sangam, a word of multiple definition, signifies confluence, a meeting place, a gathering or coming-together, literally or metaphorically. Triveni sangam means a three-way junction or meeting of three rivers, which merge and flow as one. Flow – free and unimpeded flow – is of central importance to the members of the group. Hussain and Harland are granted a lot of space in the music; they make the fullest use of it.

Lloyd first encountered Eric Harland at a jam session in New York’s Blue Note club in September 2001 recognising immediately that he was hearing one of the great drummers.
Within a year Harland was playing with the saxophonist – the latest in a long line of superb Lloyd group drummers that has included Roy Haynes, Tony Williams, Pete La Roca, Paul Motian, Jack DeJohnette, Jon Christensen and Billy Hart. Harland, who turns 30 in 2006, was first inspired to play jazz by the example of Elvin Jones on Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” He has since played with McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders and Ravi Coltrane, with Joshua Redman, Betty Carter, Joe Henderson, Wynton Marsalis and many others. He is especially excited about the opportunity to play with Zakir Hussain in Lloyd’s trio: “Everything Zakir plays has this feeling of freedom and authenticity about it. No matter where you go, he is able to be right there in the centre of it with the full force and flavour of his musical identity. And, of course, he’s grown up with different complex rhythms since he was a child, so it is completely natural for him to play through any metric modulation. It’s really an honour to be in a situation where I can have these dialogues with such a master musician. I’m learning a lot about tabla and Indian music, just by breathing in his rhythms.”

The son of the great innovator Alla Rakha (who effectively introduced the tabla to the wider world through his 30 year collaboration with Ravi Shankar), Zakir studied with his father from the age of three and was playing professionally by the time he was 13. He has played with every major figure in Indian classical music but has also been a prime mover in the development of a trans-cultural world music aesthetic. He was barely 20 when he participated in the pioneering genre synthesis of sarod masterAli Akbar Khan and jazz altoist John Handy. Then came Shakti with John McLaughlin, and diverse collaborations with the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart.

His 1986 ECM album “Making Music” was a major statement in the ‘world’ arena, with Jan Garbarek, John McLaughlin and bansuri flute genius Hariprasad Chaurasia as contributors. Hussain has also played on several ECM discs with violinist L. Shankar – “Who’s To Know”, “Song For Everyone”, “Nobody Told Me”, “M.R.C.S.”, and “Pancha Nadai Pallavi”.
Latterly he has been playing with the aptly-named Tabla Beat Science whose high-volume collision of cultures incorporates an ever-shifting cast of percussionists and DJs around a core of Zakir, sarangi player Ustad Sultan Khan and bassist Bill Laswell. Zakir Hussain has also collaborated on music for ballet with Yo-Yo Ma.

Charles Lloyd, born in Memphis, Tennessee, has had a long and distinguished history in music. In the 1950s he played with Don Cherry, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Billy Higgins, Bobby Hutcherson and others in California, plotting the shape of jazz to come, and in the early 60s became musical director, and principal composer, of Chico Hamilton’s group. Charles Lloyd’s own groups have been exceptional from the outset. His first band featured Hungarian guitarist Gabor Szabo. It was followed by a quartet with the then largely unknown Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, whose recorded legacy includes the million-selling “Forest Flower”. After a decade in retreat at Big Sur, Lloyd slowly returned to performing in the 1980s and began to record for ECM in 1989 with “Fish Out of Water”. Subsequent albums have included “Notes from Big Sur”, “The Call”, “All My Relations”, “Canto”, “Voice in the Night”, “The Water is Wide”, “Hyperion with Higgins”, “Lift Every Voice”, “Which Way is East”, and “Jumping the Creek”.