Racial Ambiguity in the Age of the Popular Counterculture: Charles Lloyd
Lloyd was born and raised in Memphis to a family with a varied ethnic background. Members of his family were Irish, Black, Native American and Mongolian. Despite the complexity of his family background, in Memphis he lived firmly within Memphis' Black community, and he experienced significant racism both there and when he studied music at UCLA. He also received his first professional musical experiences in a part of the music industry that was heavily coded as Black: the Memphis blues and R&B scene, where he played with musicians such as B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and Bobby "Blue" Bland.
When he embarked on his jazz career after his studies at UCLA, presentations of his race did not suggest that he was anything other than Black. Jazz was another genre that was racially coded, and his light skin did not make him any sort of anomaly within that scene.
Things began to change for the way his image was marketed, however, after his breakout LP, recorded live in performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966. Forest Flower, which featured an interracial quartet including a young white pianist with a curly afro named Keith Jarrett, sold over a million copies, an unusually high number for a jazz group in the late 1960s.
Soon, Lloyd and his band began to appear in rock halls like the Fillmore, sharing bills with popular psychedelic rock groups like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Lloyd also began to appear on the records of popular rock groups as a sideman, perhaps most notably the Beach Boys, with whom he had an extended association.
In this context, Lloyd, who had become interested in Eastern religions, and whose band featured an interracial cast of musicians, was advertised in his releases as a kind of postracial guru. Unlike earlier representations of Lloyd, where he was shown with a large afro and a saxophone, later releases portrayed him more ambiguously, as on the covers of two LPs released in 1971 and 1972, Warm Waters and Waves. The music on these releases also suggested an attempt at postracialism, with its use of folk rock, a genre usually coded as white, as well as musical stylings associated with Asian musical traditions.
