Customer Reviews

Love-In: Live at the Fillmore Auditorium

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This album took me on a journey from my psychedellic rock phase into a new-found love for jazz, as Charles Lloyd and a stunning "new" pianist named Keith Jarrett bridged the musical gap for me. The sound on this album is typical of the music of the era: it's a bit on the light and playful side. The samples of Love-In and Sunday Morning will give you a feel for the spirit of this album. You can almost picture the go-go dancers, perhaps a performance on Hef's legendary Playboy After Hours show of that era. Jarrett's then-future status as a keyboard giant is foreshadowed by his brilliant, playful improvisation on Sunday Morning. The opening track is the most freestyle, psychedellic jazz piece on the album, but it's more accessible than the other psy-jazz of those times (by which I mean such amazing albums as A Love Supreme by Coltrane or Bitches Brew by Miles Davis). I would imagine critics thinking that Love-In is Jazz Lite, but it's a fun album with great musicians and it captures the spirit of the late 1960s in a genre of music that was largely outside the hippie scene.

The Charles Lloyd quartet was the first jazz group to play at the Fillmore in San Francisco. This album is from that venue, early in 1967, and reflects some of that hippie vibe. It's one of the group's more listener-friendly, accessible albums but also suffers from some lightweight filler.

The meat of the album lies in the longer pieces. The Coltrane-ish "Tribal Dance" gets a better performance than on the Soviet Union album recorded a few months later. "Island Blues" opens with a long, powerful unaccompanied intro by Lloyd (that's the "Memphis Dues Again" part) before breaking into an uptempo romp. "Sunday Morning" is a nice piano trio performance with that classic late 60s Jarrett gospel feeling.

The rest of the album isn't quite up to the level of these pieces with some lighter material; on the Beatles cover ("Here There and Everywhere), it even hints at smooth jazz. (Though Jarrett's solo on this tune is outstanding.) Nevertheless, like almost all of this group's music, Love In is definitely worth hearing.