Charles Lloyd

June 1967: closing the first edition

On 18 June 1967, the Charles Lloyd Quartet closed the very first edition of the Montreux Jazz Festival, at the Casino. It was the first international act Claude Nobs brought in: two concerts, afternoon and evening, before a handful of spectators who did not yet know they were witnessing a birth.

Beside him, three musicians who would become legends: pianist Keith Jarrett, drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Ron McClure. The long “Forest Flower” swept the room away; the recording would appear much later as a box set. The whole festival to come is held in that first night.

Claude Nobs’s dream, and the great return

While preparing the first edition in 1967, Claude Nobs dreamed of one name: Charles Lloyd, whom Down Beat magazine had just crowned “Jazz Artist of the Year”. The dream came true — and came true again, for the saxophonist returned to the Montreux stage in 2013, nearly half a century later.

▶

In between, Charles Lloyd had gone through a long eclipse. At the turn of the 1980s a young prodigy pianist, Michel Petrucciani, convinced him to take to the road again; Lloyd set off with a new quartet and recovered, intact, his quest for a sound at once ardent and serene.

▶

At the Cully Jazz

Montreux is not the only gathering in the region to have welcomed Charles Lloyd. In Lavaux, the Cully Jazz Festival counts him among the great names to have played its stages, alongside Wayne Shorter, Ahmad Jamal and Michel Petrucciani — the same Petrucciani who, in the early 1980s, had helped bring the saxophonist back into the light.