Review | From Memphis and Montecito, with Love

Montecito-Based Jazz Legend Charles Lloyd Performs with his New Delta Trio, for his 20th Appearance in the Hometown Haunt of the Lobero Theatre

Charles Lloyd performing at the Lobero Theatre on March 14, 2025. | Photo: David Bazemore

And then they were 20. Charles Lloyd, the eminent jazz saxophonist who has called Montecito home for 40 plus years, has also long called the Lobero Theatre his go-to hometown concert venue. The artist/venue pact has been a happy marriage which reached its 20-timer celebration last Friday night, March 14, on the eve of the Memphis-born Lloyd’s 87th birthday.

In a sense, this historic and suitably intimate room proved to be an ideal landing pad and reentry point for Lloyd in the mid ’80s, after the saxophonist’s decade-long hiatus from the public spotlight in the 1970s. Promoter, former manager, and friend Stephen Cloud was — and remains — the matchmaker of the Lloyd/Lobero relationship, so it made perfect sense that Cloud laid out a thumbnail history of Lloyd’s role in jazz to introduce Friday’s concert.

A little historical background is in order for appreciating the latest hometown concert, which included increasingly elaborate visual projections by Lloyd’s artist wife and manager Dorothy Darr. Contextually, the long list of Lloyd concerts here spans the range of his various projects, in sync with albums on the ECM and Blue Note labels. Although most of the concerts have featured his long-standing acoustic quartet format, Lloyd has also dipped into a more party-ish mode with the band the Marvels (with Lucinda Williams as guest) and various special trios, including the “Sangam” trio, with the late Zakir Hussain, tabla, and Eric Harland on drums. (A concert recorded live for an ECM album).

Friday night showcased the new and promising “Delta Trio,” in empathetic cahoots with Lloyd’s long time pianist Jason Moran and the poetic and under-sung guitar marvel Marvin Sewell. We’ve seen Sewell in town before, in his usual sideman role, with Regina Carter and Cassandra Wilson. As impressive and expectedly moving as Lloyd and Moran were here, it was the eminently tasteful and texturally inspired playing of Sewell that made the deepest impression this night, at least for this listener.

Lloyd, who has always had an uncanny knack for choosing stellar bandmates, has only occasionally worked with guitarists in the past, starting with Gábor Szabó and later John Abercrombie, but has more recently struck up fruitful alliances with Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, and Greg Leisz. One of the main takeaways of Friday’s concert was the notion that Sewell and Lloyd are ideally suited for each other. They’ve got to go on meeting like this.

Charles Lloyd and the Delta Trio performing at the Lobero Theatre on March 14, 2025. | Photo: David Bazemore

Setlist-wise, it all began at church. Applying his Eastern religious perspective to arrangements of Protestant hymns, as Lloyd does so well, the players eased into impressionistic variations on the classic hymn “Abide with Me” and the powerful “Lift Every Voice,” by James Weldon Johnson and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson. This hymn, the title track of Lloyd’s 2001 album, has become both a call to grace and a call to action as a Black anthem — chosen as the original NAACP song in 1919 — now often heard on MLK day, including this year’s celebration at the Arlington Theater.

Musically, this Lloyd encounter dwelt in a fairly subdued and meditative character, with a brief detour into blues-based energy at midpoint. After a standout solo guitar interlude, in which Sewell called on his blues muse and slid through bottleneck lines and a paraphrasing of the Robert Johnson standard “Come On in My Kitchen,” Lloyd busted out his flute to issue gentle blues riffs on “Blues for Langston.” Later, Sewell played slide guitar in a faintly Hindustani style, à la V. M. Bhatt.

Lloyd was attuned to the moment but generally kept his light-toned, Coltrane-inspired sound in a laid-back zone, with occasional bursts of edgier emoting. Late in the show, he switched from his mainstay tenor sax for a brief outing with the Hungarian tárogató and shivered his maracas for old time’s sake.

Moran also felt more understated than usual while demonstrating his potency and breadth on a wide range of heat levels and genre vocabularies. (Moran’s passion for pockets of jazz history, alongside modern values, found full expression in last year’s fascinating arrangement of proto-historical jazz hero James Reese Europe, on record — listen here — and in such venues as Disney Hall last fall).

A generous encore portion of the evening aligned with Lloyd’s signature admixture of east and west culture and philosophy. After leaning eastward with his customary hypnotic recitation of Christopher Isherwood’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita during the contemplative “Hymn to the Mother,” Lloyd closed out the show on a familiar grace note — with the very American and hope-centered ballad, Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere.” There’s a place for Lloyd, when concertizing in his hometown, and it’s called the Lobero.