Lloyd’s efforts on tenor, alto, and taragato infused a Coltranish abstract melodicism to his trance-like flurries of notes, often opening wide spaces only to go back and fill them to overflowing. His flute provided the most haunting, melodic lines of the set.

Zakir Hussein is considered by many to be the world’s premier tabla player, and as the son of India’s master tablist, he comes by the crown honestly. The tablas themselves are a wonder of percussion, offering a seemingly endless array of tones and sound effects—light pops, staccato clicks, hollow glugs as if bubbling from a deep well. Add to the choreography of the tablas Hussein’s hypnotic and often melodic vocals that seemed drawn from the north Indian tradition of Katha, the ancient art of storytelling through dance, combining movement, rhythm, and chants.

Eric Harland’s additional layers of percussion furthered the eastern spirituality of the interplay among the three musicians. Some of the most memorable passages this evening involved exchanges between Hussein (vocals and tablas) and Harland (vocals and trap percussion), a musical conversation that accelerated to the status of a duel in the tradition of the Indian “Jugalbandhi,” morphing into a staccato vocal exchange or “Bol” that resembled a mystical forerunner of Rap. The tablas often resembled the human voice, and Hussein’s chants in turn echoed the tablas. Harland was particularly impressive in his array of percussive wizardry, at one point recalling distant hoofbeats with his steady rolls, on other occasions converting strings of shells to effective mallets, peppering rims with his sticks, even using the microphone as an instrument of attack. On his side of the stage, Hussein turned to other instruments including what looked like an ancient tambourine from which he coaxed some harmonic scrapes with sticks. Each percussionist engaged in at least one long solo excursion to the delight of the crowd, the applause recognizing the magic of these moments.

This dissection obscures the harmonic synergy of the whole, which indeed is what Lloyd and Higgins sought to create in Big Sur. Where the Lloyd/Higgins partnership on Which Way Is East (over the course of two-discs and 30 movements) may offer a more diverse sampling from tribal rhythms to ancient Indian meditations to American blues elements, the performance at the Dakota more heavily reflected the eastern spiritualism that surrounded Billy Higgins as well as Lloyd. The musicians each sing in their own voice (reflecting their diverse roots in African, Native American, and Indian heritages), each using his unique arsenal of reeds and percussion, but it was the freedom of collective improvisation more than individual contributions that created the magical, mystical, other-worldly tapestry of sound and silence, joy and sorrow, and ultimately hope and reverence. Master Higgins must be smiling.

“…when you slow down enough, you can understand volition and velocity better. In other words, there is only now. And when you play, the timelessness of that becomes infused and your song has a natural rhythm that you can move through space in a different kind of way. You’re dealing on another level of…bowing down and praying and asking for it. It is such a true high that causes great humility because you know it is not yours, and you can’t misuse it.” –Charles Lloyd

Quotes from conversations between Charles Lloyd and Billy Higgins, liner notes, Which Way Is East. For more information about Charles Lloyd, see http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/lloyd_charles/artist.jhtml; as well as the June 2004 issue of Jazz Times; more information about Zakir Hussein is available at http://www.momentrecords.com/zakir.html. For Eric Harland, see http://www.zildjian.com/artist.asp?id=310&gr=JZ.  Information about Billy Higgins is available at http://www.drummerworld.com/drummers/Billy_Higgins.html