Dynamite Double header: Pérez/Patitucci/Blade/Turner & Charles Lloyd Quartet charge-up Chicago Symphony Center

Who’s on first? Symphony Center Presents Jazz director Jim Fahey hatched this double header as a bonanza kick-off to the 2024/2025 series. “I wanted to present the (Wayne) Shorter tribute and then after hearing Charles (again) at Monterey, I thought it would be great to bring him back to the series and worked out the double bill.” 

It was at Monterey, 1966, that Charles Lloyd waxed the trippy crossover success Forest Flower with a diaphanous, open-ended aesthetic that resonated with hippy counterculture. He was voted Downbeat’s “New Star” back then and lo and behold, almost 60 years later, he’s the magazine’s laureate for 2024 album of the year with The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow (Blue Note) and finally made the hallowed “Hall of Fame.” (Unprecedented, Lloyd also made Artist and Group of the Year and topped polls on tenor and flute). It would seem a no-brainer the veteran jazz legend would headline but that would discount the somewhat incestuous intermingling of these all-star quartets. Drummer Brian Blade for example performs on The Sky Will… and Lloyd’s longtime bassist Larry Grenadier also plays with saxist Mark Turner in Fly, their trio with Jeff Ballard.

John Patitucci (who first recorded with Shorter back in 1986), has to claim seniority over Grenadier (six years his junior), as does Danilo Pérez, who is seventeen years older than Lloyd’s pianist Aaron Parks. Pedantic perhaps were it not for the fact these meta musicians were aware their ‘understudies’ or illustrious colleagues were in the house. In the case of Mark Turner, the shadow of Shorter (who Fahey booked 7 times at the legendary venue, once in duo with Herbie Hancock, and 6 times with his quartet), seemed present (a self-confessed Peter Pan, Shorter was always regarding, with curiosity, the pursuit of one’s shadow:) Turner, despite power-saw trauma to two fingers 16 years ago, remains one of the most erudite virtuosos in jazz, yet reined in markedly to evoke the distilled genius of latter-day Shorter.

The set felt valedictory (Shorter passed in March 2023 at 89) but was stunningly lugubrious, with brooding ballads Miyako (which Shorter wrote for his first daughter in the 60s) and Sanctuary (which he recorded in very different iterations with Miles Davis and Carlos Santana). Also salient was the seldom played Lost, an oceanic piece in waltz-time that Shorter recorded on The Soothsayer (Blue Note). Sanctuary segued into Lost via an expansive improvised section and a piano cadenza, which also heralded Miyako. Pérez, Patitucci and Blade are inevitable devotees of Shorter’s “zero gravity” principle of freefall extemporization and Zero Gravity in assorted ‘dimensions’ can be experienced on Shorter’s posthumously released quartet concert Celebration Volume 1 (Blue Note 2024) recorded in Stockholm a decade ago. That fleet, ‘weightless’ musical premise was a ‘fixture’ at Symphony Center, bookending the set, which culminated with Witch Hunt, wherein Turner brilliantly extrapolated on the quartal structure of the composition (one of Shorter’s best known).

Pérez spiced impressionism with mischievous keyboard interpolations recalling his fascination with Joe Zawinul and Weather Report. As if restless with the nicety of proceedings, he’d slam ten fingers down: “Hah!” or steeplechase leapfrogging nursery rhymes across the ivories. Such gestures met with like declaration and exclamation from Blade, who’s great to watch. Uber groover Patitucci surprised with a riff reminiscent of his country-fried groove on the fragment “Zero Gravity to the 12th Dimension” (live in Stockholm), though it was likely variant, non-repetition being the standard for this supergroup.

Moving to a stalls seat after intermission, thus closer to Lloyd’s quartet, longtime Lloyd sideman Larry Grenadier sounded gigantic. He’d sourced a vintage Jeromé Thibouville-Lamy bass from Chicago friend Christian Dillingham. “It’s a great bass, very warm and clear,” commented Dillingham after the show, backstage to pick it up, “But it’s more so Larry’s voice… he can sound exactly like himself on any instrument, he’s one of the masters. His sound is iconic.”

Another Lloyd mainstay (22 years and counting) is drummer Eric Harland, who, also an ordained minister, doubtless connects with the Memphis born woodwind wizard’s meditative, celestial approach. The lady to my left in the posh seats found Harland’s cymbals overbearing, but they had a choice resonance to these ears, his kit work carefully couched around the leader’s dove-like peregrinations. Where Shorter’s soprano playing in particular could be stark and claxon (qv the “Edge of the World (End Title)” from the Stockholm concert), Lloyd’s mellifluence is his hallmark. Turner is deeply syntactical, though also original, whereas Lloyd retains a wistful parsing of the lore. Merlin-like with red kufi hat, black robe and tiny Sigmund Freud glasses, Lloyd tilted his vintage tenor like Lester Young, deploying a plethora of vented fingerings popularized by Prez in the 1930s and 40s. His painterly approach is more Claude Monet, not Normal Rockwell, but with a sketch-like aesthetic. No impasto strokes though, he’s a watercolorist, as demonstrated with the beguiling ‘The Water is Rising’, which echoed the reductive simplicity of Abdullah Ibrahim. ‘Ghost of Lady Day’ exhumed the melody of ‘Strange Fruit’, conjuring turbulent times and the racism Billie Holiday herself was subjected to, beloved as she was. 

Aaron Parks, baby of the band, channelled (no doubt obliviously:) northern English pianoman Alan Price, sporting a cloth cap, musically recalling Lloyd’s storied sideman Keith Jarrett at intervals, with rippling runs and hot gospel bounce. At one point Lloyd doused his wicker shakers under the piano lid, as if seasoning the strings. 

Lloyd’s music has a subtle buoyancy, a danceable lilt. Despite ostensible gravitas, a child-like sense of wonderment pervades, a characteristic shared with Shorter. Evanescent glissandi abound, but when he pulls out his alto flute (the longer one), time stops. “Booker’s Garden” (an homage to Lloyd’s Manassas High School buddy, trumpeter Booker Little, who died tragically young), was breathtaking, even though Lloyd’s breath control, at 86, is undiminished. 

The concert finished on a further note of melancholy, blended with flamenco and spaghetti western flourishes. The doleful ranchera ‘La Llorona’ (the ballad of a Mexican woman condemned to a limbo of perpetual tears), presaged the dismal election outcome for Kamala Harris a week or so later. Lloyd delivered a final subtone on his tenor and, after an egalitarian bow with the band, exited the stage. It had been a surfeit of poignant music, no encore necessary. Word was Lloyd was tired but had delivered a substantial hour and fifteen set. 

Neither band announced anything - there were no defacto ‘leaders’ - ears were left to absorb a sonically complimentary, generation-spanning, somewhat solemn and ominous program that mixed unabashed freeplay with trenchant lyricism.