Summer Afternoon Perfection

There are certain received opinions about the album Forest Flower : Charles Lloyd At Monterey. Of course, it committed the cardinal sin for many hard core jazz afficianados of being popular and selling well. The view has also come down that Charles Lloyd was a bit of a lightweight and that any interest the quartet had revolved around the soon to be stellar sidemen Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette ( the fourth member was the reliable veteran Cecil McBee on bass ) Listening to it again after almost forty years, I find these views to be deeply unfair and feel that it remains a special album. They certainly seemed to hit the mood of the times of those two summers of love in 1966 / 67 but there is no pandering to a hippie crowd in the music, no psychedelia or gimmicky effects ( Jarrett's playing of the strings inside of the piano being genuine experimentation and something used much earlier by such as Cage of course )The title track itself is a long extended latin influenced piece that develops a perfect hypnotic ambience suited to a sunny Californian afternoon and capable of transmitting that afternoon into any wintry sitting room. It expands and evolves like one of those liquid glass slide projections much loved at the time. Sorcery is a Jarrett composition and is much freer but still within formal structures, while Song Of Her written by McBee is a wonderful ballad. The original album ends with East Of The Sun, a storming straight ahead deconstruction of the standard which reflects back these days from Jarrett and DeJohnette's standards trio with Gary Peacock. I would be happy for the disk to end there as the original album did but in the name of giving value for money, this disk includes a whole other album from two years later called Soundtrack. By now, some of the criticisms aimed at Forest Flower have become more valid, the quartet was being booked into rock venues with rock bands and the whole approach is cruder. Ron McLure has replaced McBee on bass and DeJohnette's drumming is much more four square and rock oriented. Jarrett's solos are still worth hearing and Lloyd still shows he had much to say on both tenor and flute but the moment of pure magic represented by Forest Flower had gone and the parting of the ways was not far off.