Dolphins on a Wave

He is a sight: a one-man Happening in steel-rimmed glasses, World War I Army tunic, orange-and-black-striped pants, drooping mustache, scraggly goatee, fuzzy-wuzzy hairdo. And he is a sound: a wild, free, singing sound that assaults the frontiers of jazz. "My mu sic," says Charles Lloyd, "has shocks. People need shocks to carry them on shocks on a glorious level." Last week the Charles Lloyd Quartet had shocks aplenty for the rockers at Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco's hangar-sized discotheque. Though modern jazz normally goes over with teen agers like a 9 p.m. curfew, Lloyd's passionate attack held them spellbound. Wrapping his gangling frame around his tenor saxophone, he explored the full range of the instrument, ricocheting be tween hoarse blats and urgent bleats, pouring out great churning whirlpools of sound. Dipping and bobbing as he played, he flew off on melodic tangents that were by turns coy and playful, ten der and savage. Then, taking up his flute, he turned philosopher, evoked the soft and misty moods of a man looking back on sunnier days. Love Vibrations. Lloyd is the newest prophet of New Wave jazz -- the freeform explorations made familiar by such saxmen as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. His rapport with his sidemen, especially inventive Pianist Keith Jarrett, verges on the extrasensory. The quartet's appeal is that, for all its flights of fancy, its fractured rhythms and criss-crossing harmonies, its music makes sense. Free of the pedantry and obscurantism that plagues the avantgarde, it delivers the happy news that there can be order in the New Wave's chaos.

Unlike his grim-faced contemporaries, Lloyd is not at odds with the square world. Communication is his prime concern, and he achieves it by drawing freely on a wide variety of styles--from calypso to hootchy-kootchy, from Bartok to Indian ragas. When he tries to describe what he is doing, though, his talk tends to get lost in shifting rhythms. "Music is like breathing," he says. "When one is and when one breathes and says to the world, T'm here,' there's something quite cosmic about it. We're all here. All in harmony. Only the chords are different. I play about the unity of everything. The love, the totality--like bringing everyone together in a joyous dance. I play love vibrations."

Few Get Through. The essence of jazz, Lloyd feels, is a delicate blend of "warmth of the heart and the cool of the head." The warmth he learned while nurturing his "primitive roots" in Memphis. The cool came later when he studied composition at the University of Southern California, steeping himself in Bartok, Stravinsky and the impression- ists by day, slipping off to play jam sessions by night. After earning a master's degree in 1961, he joined the Chico Hamilton Quintet and switched from alto to tenor sax because "it seemed to be the voice I was hearing. It can be such a bitch, but with it you can draw a line of prancing dolphins."

In an effort to "extend jazz beyond its previous limits while retaining its lyrical, earthy feeling," he formed his own group in 1965 and toured Europe, where he was an immediate sensation. He walked off with top critical honors in virtually every jazz festival in which he played. Back home now, where the acceptance of New Wave jazz is luke- warm at best, the pickings are still slim. Behind his tinted glasses, Lloyd broods quietly about his future. Now 28, he says sadly: "So few have really gotten through. That's what terrifies me. Women have taken them, or drugs, or something else has happened to prevent their expressions from going on. I haven't seen anybody do what I've done so soon and not get snuffed out somewhere."

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