Editor's Note: Old Friends

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As I scribbled in my reporter's notebook, Lloyd reminisced about playing jazz standards 'when giants roamed the earth' in the early '60s, being named Down Beat's 'Jazzman of the Year' in 1967, and then, two years later, leaving it all behind--the fame, the drugs, the fatigue--to spend nearly two decades meditating in Malibu and Big Sur, California. 'I was in deep isolation, exploring my spirituality,' he explained. 'I finally came back to the music [full-time in 1986] because it's the one thing that renews my faith, gives me grace.

'Playing for me now is a form of service. I just want to pass along the beauty, spread the word.'

Billy Higgins, with whom Lloyd first played in 1956, was his fellow missionary. 'I'd been working on my spirituality, and he had also. It was like two kids meeting again. He's an incredible spirit. He brings out the best in those around him.

'We played a gig in San Francisco not that long ago. It was out of this world, and the next day I was riding high, and Billy said, ÔYou ain't the man. It's not your music. You're just a vessel. Don't forget it.'

'I'm still working on that, still trying to remember that every time I play, it's a lesson.'

I can imagine Lloyd coming off as an aging hipster, all shallow pose and recycled Beat poetry. In person, though, he has an ethereal, shamanic presence. His free-floating intellect, like his delivery, is measured and kind. I spent only a couple of hours with him, but it's an interaction I'll never forget. He had something I wanted--not religion, or God, or an easy cool, but a deep sense of self born out of rigorous honesty. In his presence, listening to his stories, I felt I had grown just a tiny bit wiser.

Our interview finished, we said our goodbyes, and, as I was packing up, Higgins came into the room. A soft-spoken man who made up for words with the mischievous smile of a cartoon Buddha, he greeted his friend and bandmate with a hug.

As the embrace ended, Lloyd stepped back, looked his brother up and down, put his hand over his heart and patted it twice.

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