Which Way Is East

Charles Lloyd, Billy Higgins

2-CD23,90 out of print
Featured Artists Recorded

January 2001, Montecito, California

Original Release Date

22.03.2004

  • CD 1
  • What Is Man
  • 1The Forest
    (Billy Higgins, Charles Lloyd)
    03:32
  • 2Being and Becoming
    (Charles Lloyd)
    04:43
  • 3Civilization
    (Charles Lloyd)
    04:35
  • 4Sea of Tranquility
    (Charles Lloyd)
    02:40
  • Divans
    (Charles Lloyd)
  • 5Prayer, Sanctuary04:12
  • 6Supreme Love Dance03:35
  • 7A Wild and Holy Band03:52
  • Salaam
  • 8Oh, Karim
    (Billy Higgins)
    02:29
  • 9Akhi
    (Charles Lloyd)
    05:58
  • 10Ya, Karim
    (Charles Lloyd)
    05:51
  • 11Tagi
    (Charles Lloyd)
    04:13
  • All This Is That
  • 12Hanuman’s Dance
    (Charles Lloyd)
    13:04
  • 13Sky Valley
    (Charles Lloyd)
    05:57
  • 14Blues Tinges
    (Billy Higgins)
    05:00
  • 15Atman Alone Abides
    (Charles Lloyd)
    02:56
  • CD 2
  • Desire
    (Charles Lloyd)
  • 1Wild Orchids Bloom06:40
  • 2Advaita03:34
  • 3Chomolungma12:53
  • Devotion
  • 4Sally Sunflower Whitecloud
    (Charles Lloyd)
    03:06
  • 5My Lord, My Lord
    (Billy Higgins)
    06:09
  • 6Windy Mountain
    (Charles Lloyd)
    05:34
  • 7Through Fields and Underground
    (Charles Lloyd)
    03:46
  • Light Of Love
  • 8Mi Corazon
    (Billy Higgins)
    03:23
  • 9Beloved, Chimes at Midnight
    (Billy Higgins, Charles Lloyd)
    05:15
  • 10Take A Chance
    (Billy Higgins)
    04:01
  • Surrender
  • 11Perfume of the Desert
    (Charles Lloyd)
    04:30
  • 12Benares
    (Charles Lloyd)
    02:18
  • 13Amor
    (Billy Higgins)
    04:23
  • 14Forever Dance
    (Billy Higgins, Charles Lloyd)
    01:48
  • 15Bis
    (Billy Higgins)
    03:44
Higgins gives us the music of his heart without fear of expectations. In turn, Lloyd is freed. So one of the premier drummers of the modern jazz age also picks up all manner of ethnic percussion, guitar and the one-string Syrian lute and, when the mood strikes him, sings. Lloyd, a master of the tenor saxophone and flute, also grabs an alto, a Tibetan oboe, and sits himself down at the piano. Free jazz, country blues, impressionistic piano sketches, religious chants, samba: If the music dwells within these two, it comes out here. And while the thought of all that rampant self-expression might fill you with fearful visions of cultural arrogance run amok, the upshot is an honest outpouring of gratitude for the ability to communicate through sound. … At almost 2 ½ hours, Which Way Is East may be no easy listening session, but it gives us a fuller musical portrait of Higgins than we ever expected to have. And for that we should be thankful.
Steve Futterman, Washington Post
 
Personal relationships often best demarcate jazz history. This two-disc, two-hour-plus encounter builds on a half-century bond, expanding the open-minded legacy both musicians helped shape. And it holds surprises, like Higgins singing blues in English and Spanish while strumming guitar, and in Arabic while playing “Syrian One-String”. Arranged into eight suites, each of distinct mood, the music works as a deftly edited montage: intimate scenes form the twilight of a man’s life.
Larry Blumenfeld, The Village Voice
 
Charles and Billy recorded this double CD at Charles’ house not long before the drummer’s untimely death. It’s a huge, sprawling record that seems to encompass much of what we understand today by world music and yet returns inevitably to the jazz that inspired both Lloyd and Higgins throughout their careers. With 30 tracks of varying length, the music tells a new story about Higgins. There’s Higgins the romantic singing love songs in Portuguese accompanying himself on guitar. Elsewhere he sings the blues or chants over hand drums. Charles plays solo piano and alto sax for the first time since his days with Chico Hamilton. There’s a beautiful duet dedicated to Charles’ grandmother with flute and Indian drums and a Coltrane vs Elvin workout. … An utterly charming record made by two close friends and a wonderfully fitting epitaph for a master drummer and musician.
Duncan Heining, Jazzwise
 
Während die Aufnahmemaschinen laufen, spielen die beiden um ihr Leben, um ihre Musik. ... Frei und ungebunden spielen sie, improvisieren weit jenseits des Professionalitätsdrucks, legen sukzessive die Schichten ihrer musikalischen Imagination frei. Die Trommelwelten Afrikas, die Hymnen der südlichen Kirchen, den Blues, die fixierten Harmonien des Ostens. Higgins an der Gitarre, Lloyd am Klavier, beide als Sänger. Technische Meisterschaft spielt dabei schon lange keine Rolle mehr. Je brüchiger die Oberflächen werden, desto überwältigender die Intensität ihres Zusammenspiels.
Stefan Hentz, Financial Times Deutschland
 
Zweieinhalb Stunden Musik weit weg vom Zeitgeist, bar kommerzieller Überlegungen. Im Januar 2001 haben sich der Saxophonist Charles Lloyd und der Drummer Billy Higgins im Haus des Holzbläsers getroffen und musiziert. So entstanden die dreißig kürzeren und längeren Dialoge und Soli auf allen möglichen Instrumenten, die nun auf der neuen Doppel-CD Which Way is East zu hören sind. Diese scheinbar unspektakuläre Dokumentation spontaner Eingebungen ist eine in allen Farben schillernde Wundertüte. ... Wer hat schon gewusst, wie glänzend dieser Meister das Altsaxophon zu spielen versteht und was für ein introvertierter Meister er am Flügel ist? Higgins afrikanisch anmutende und immer swingende Trommlereien und sein unverwechselbarer Ride-Beat auf dem Becken haben schon manchen Jazzer auf Höhenflüge geschickt. Aber wer kannte seinen erdig-archaischen Bluesgesang mit Gitarrenbegleitung oder seine stimmungsvollen Huldigungen Allahs und Mohammeds?
Nick Liebmann, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
 
Das Dokument einer Seelenverwandtschaft auf einer Doppel-CD, keineswegs zufällig entstanden mit analoger Aufnahmetechnik in Lloyds Hacienda bei Santa Barbara im Januar 2001, vier Monate vor Higgins’ Tod. ... Higgins schleppte seine ganze Instrumentenarmada mit zu Lloyd: senegalesische, guineische und indianische Handtrommeln, mehrere Perkussionsinstrumente, Holzkästen, die nordafrikanische Guimbri, die einsaitige syrische Laute und seine Gitarre, die er überall dabei hatte. Dann spielten sie ohne Vorgaben: mal entfesselte Free-Diskurse, dann mystische Folkweisen oder einen simplen, völlig reduzierten Mississippi-Blues, bei dem Lloyd singt. Zwei Männer entdecken den letzten Rest ihrer Geheimnisse, ersinnen Träume, generieren kraftvolle Emotionen und eine überwältigende Spiritualität.
Reinhard Köchl, Jazzthing
 
Wir erleben die Gefährten in einem multi-instrumentalen Zwiegespräch ... Das Herzstück des zweieinhalbstündigen Dialogs bilden indes die gemeinsamen poetischen Explorationen von Saxophon und Schlagzeug. Absichtslos ist diese Musik, entspannt und ohne virtuose Allüre, doch plänkelt und tändelt sie nicht. Vielmehr ist sie ganz innerlich und gesammelt: ein Zeugnis der Begegnung zweier großer Musiker, die alt sind durch ihre Erfahrung, aber jung und frisch durch ihre Neugier.
 
 
Amongst the most remarkable recordings in Charles Lloyd’s discography, “Which Way Is East” documents a week spent playing duets with his old friend Billy Higgins. The improvisations on this expansive double album bring both players to new musical terrain while also acknowledging the deep roots of ‘free’ playing The inspirational level is exceptionally high as the music explores and generates powerful emotions, but the overriding spirit of the work is unmistakably celebratory - even though both men were aware that they were unlikely to do this again. Billy Higgins, who had been battling ill-health with great stoicism and good humour for years, died four months after the session.

Higgins, it was universally agreed amongst musicians, made everybody sound better. There was a quality in his playing that focussed a soloist’s thought, and helped give shape to expression. During the recording of Which Way Is East Charles Lloyd told Billy Higgins “There’s a feeling when you play that I can’t describe – but there is no feeling like it in the world.” Similar sentiments will have accounted for Higgins’ enormous recorded legacy: few jazz drummers can have appeared on as many discs or in such elevated company. Billy Higgins played with many of the master musicians and innovators of jazz – Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sonny Rollins, Don Cherry, Sun Ra, Paul Bley, Lee Morgan, Steve Lacy, Dexter Gordon and dozens more – revealing an uncanny adaptability and flexibility while always sounding unmistakably like himself, with his joyous dancing beat and speeding, shimmering cymbalism.

Higgins’ affinity, as a drummer, for Charles Lloyd’s musical universe has been persuasively demonstrated on three previous ECM discs: Voice In The Night (recorded 1998) and The Water Is Wide and Hyperion With Higgins (both 1999). Speaking of the Hyperion disc, Don Heckman in the LA Times described the Lloyd/Higgins teamwork as “one of jazz’s magical associations…the sort of symbiotic musical connection that happens too rarely” and added, “it’s fortunate that ECM has preserved such a fine example of this wondrously engaging partnership.”


On Which Way Is East, however, Billy Higgins grasped the opportunity to document a side of his musical personality that had hitherto been almost secret. Without Lloyd’s encouragement, he noted at the time, it might well have remained that way. (“I’d been thinking about doin’ it but you have to have a rendezvous and a vehicle.” ) Billy Higgins’ insights as a drummer stemmed partly from his feeling for melody. Everywhere he played, he took a guitar with him, and off the bandstand and in hotel rooms would feel his way into the music from fresh perspectives. On his travels around the world, admirers would give him instruments; he learned to play many of these – some ‘properly’, some idiosyncratically. This extracurricular activity was something Higgins took very seriously, it was research work, “so that when something happens in the music, I instinctively go somewhere with sound by understanding the harmonic structure” (interview with Karen Bennett).

Born and raised in urban L.A. (where they had met, introduced by Don Cherry, way back in the 1950s), Higgins had also long talked about playing ‘in nature’ with Lloyd, intrigued by tales of flute soliloquies and long tones in the Big Sur woods. In January 2001, Higgins finally brought all of his instruments out to the Lloyd home near Santa Barbara … and the results, unobtrusively monitored by co-producer Dorothy Darr on old analogue equipment, do indeed have a ‘field recording’ charm and authenticity. “That’s two guys sittin’ on top of the mountain,” Higgins would enthuse, “a whole suite right there.”

On Which Way Is East Higgins is, at last, heard on guitar, and on the North African guimbri as well as on a range of international hand drums. And, encouraged by Lloyd, he sings. He sings the blues, sings in Arabic, sings in Portuguese…

Lloyd, for his part, was experimenting with so-called ethnic music (he would probably agree with Higgins’s old employer Ornette Coleman that “all music is ethnic music”) and unorthodox instrumentation at least as early as 1967’s Journey Within and there are moments on Which Way Is East that recall that forward-looking adventure: the great difference of course is one of accumulated experience and deeper knowledge. In addition to his saxophones, Lloyd is featured on flutes, taragato, Tibetan oboe, percussion – and piano, on which he reveals a thoroughly original touch. Amongst the disc’s great revelations are Lloyd’s forays on alto saxophone, an instrument he has seldom played in public since his days as musical director of Chico Hamilton’s band. He assigns the smaller horn a voice entirely different to his characteristically nuanced, tender, breathy tenor sound. His alto is fast moving, jabbing, angular…Inspired by the wide-open, sensitive free drumming of Higgins, Lloyd has total liberty to take his sound anywhere, and does. (Higgins was also astonished by the Lloyd alto, calling it Charles’s “secret weapon”…)

Beyond its purely musical attributes, Which Way Is East is also timely as a kind of multi-faith document. Billy Higgins was, from 1977 onward, a most dedicated follower of Islam, while Lloyd has for years been a student of Vedanta. “We’re singing songs of the spirit”, Billy Higgins said in 2001, and of course there are any number of ways to inflect such songs.

Now, three years later, Charles Lloyd is undertaking selected solo concerts to pay tribute to Billy Higgins. The first of these takes place at the Cully Jazz Festival in Switzerland in March 2004. Alongside Lloyd’s solo performances, the film “Home” will be shown, Dorothy Darr’s documentation of the making of Which Way Is East. Tribute concerts will also follow in the US, the first three taking place, Darr notes, “at locations where the promoters were farsighted enough to book the duo in 1997” - San Francisco, Seattle, and Healdsburg, California. Each of these concerts will combine performance, a photo exhibition, and a screening of the documentary.