Charles Lloyd

Arrows Into Infinity is a feature-length documentary about the saxophonist and flautist Charles Lloyd, published by ECM in 2014. His life crosses several chapters of jazz history, from the blues circuit of Memphis to the rock ballrooms of the late 1960s. It continues through a long retreat at Big Sur and the return that has kept him recording for ECM since 1989. The film tells it through archive footage, interviews and a great deal of music, with no narrator between the viewer and the people who lived it.

It was directed and produced by the painter and filmmaker Dorothy Darr, Lloyd's wife, together with the filmmaker and editor Jeffery Morse. It premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in January 2013 and runs 113 minutes. Those who speak include Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, Jack DeJohnette, Robbie Robertson and Manfred Eicher. Geri Allen, Don Was, John Densmore, Jim Keltner, Stanley Crouch and Michael Cuscuna are among the others. Lewis Steinberg, the original bassist of Booker T. and the MGs, recalls the young Lloyd in Memphis.

The early chapters cover Memphis, where Phineas Newborn was a mentor and Booker Little a childhood friend, and the teenage tours with Howlin' Wolf. Lloyd then replaces Eric Dolphy in Chico Hamilton's band and forms the quartet with Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee and DeJohnette, whose Forest Flower sold a million copies. Television and concert footage from London, Newport, Antibes and Tallinn shows that group at its height. Later come the hesitant return with Michel Petrucciani, the 1989 ECM album Fish Out Of Water with Bobo Stenson, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen, and concerts with Jason Moran and Zakir Hussain. Reviewers singled out two scenes. In one, Lloyd and Coleman, friends since Los Angeles in the 1950s, play pool. The other is home video of duets with the drummer Billy Higgins, among the last music they played before Higgins died.

In BBC Music Magazine Garry Booth called it a "totally absorbing bio-doc" and borrowed Hancock's description of Lloyd's music as one "that flows like a river". On his blog The Blue Moment, Richard Williams saw in it "a fascinating story of survival and self-realisation", with Lloyd himself as its most interesting witness. Writing in London Jazz News in 2014, Mike Collins noted the absence of voice-over, which lets the story come out of the footage and the people in it.

DVD, ECM 5052, released on 18 July 2014: 16:9 NTSC picture, Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1 sound, English dialogue with subtitles in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, region-free, with a 20-page booklet.