Recording of July 1997: Canto  Charles LLoyd, tenor sax, Tibetan
oboe; Bobo Stenson, piano; Anders Jormin, bass; Billy Hart,
drums. ECM 78118-21635-2 (CD). 1996. Manfred Eicher, prod; Jan
Erik Kongshaug, eng. DDD. TT: 65:18 Performance ****½ Sonics
****½  In 1967, Charles Lloyd's Forest Flower became one of the
first jazz albums to sell a million copies. Lloyd was a star,
and played major rock venues like the Fillmore in San Francisco.
His popularity was astonishing, given the fact that he played
uncompromised acoustic jazz. It was even more astonishing when
Lloyd walked away. At the height of his celebrity, he retreated
to Big Sur and went on a 20-year search for the "inner life."
What is just as remarkable as Lloyd's early fame and his
renunciation of it is that his return to active music making in
the 1990s has gone mostly unnoticed in his own country. When he
emerged from self-imposed exile, Lloyd recorded four albums for
Manfred Eicher's ECM label over a five-year period. Together,
they constitute a bod