New Books by ‘Indy’ Writers

One of the great pleasures of working at The Santa Barbara Independent is the degree to which it exposes one to life’s rich pageant. As colorful as the news that occurs every day outside in Santa Barbara may be, what happens inside this office never fails to achieve its own potent level of interest. For example, witness the range of subjects and styles covered by the four volumes considered below. Each of these new books was published this season, and people who have written extensively for this paper wrote all of them. Josef Woodard’s Fringe Beat set the paper’s record for longest-running culture column by an individual author. Hannah Tennant-Moore delivered many great news stories and was a steady presence under deadline pressure as a news editor. Michael Smith, longtime theater critic at the Village Voice, was the Independent’s arts editor for several crucial early years, and Ashleigh Brilliant’s Pot-Shots have at various times been proudly featured in our pages. Taken together, these new books indicate just how eclectic we can be.

Charles Lloyd: A Wild, Blatant Truth by Josef Woodard. Silman-James Press: Los Angeles. Can it be a coincidence that these two figures on the international jazz scene, one a great and lauded artist, the other an experienced and respected critic, found one another here in Santa Barbara? The matches, both of author to subject and of these two men to this city, are perfection. Only someone with Josef Woodard’s broad range of interests, remarkable memory for people and music, and long-term tenacity could have stayed with a project like documenting Charles Lloyd’s extraordinary life. The book deftly weaves together a series of interviews with Lloyd and his wife, Dorothy Darr, taken over decades with testimony from a galaxy of Lloyd’s distinguished fellow musicians, thus managing to develop something like a master narrative for the man’s admittedly discontinuous, sometimes even hidden life story.

Few musicians in any genre can claim Lloyd’s breadth of experience, and Woodard has the ears to hear and appreciate all of it, from the Memphis boyhood when Lloyd heard such early blues greats as Howlin’ Wolf to his groundbreaking appearances with the Charles Lloyd Quartet alongside psychedelic rockers like Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead. Careful to respect his subject’s right to his own often forceful opinions, Woodard nevertheless provides the historical context by which this musical giant, whose works span not only decades but generations of cultural change, can at last be properly appreciated. Charles Lloyd: A Wild, Blatant Truth is a must for anyone who wants to understand the genius whose collaborative impulse influenced such musicians as Keith Jarrett, Michel Petrucciani, Jack DeJohnette, Cecil McBee, and Miles Davis.