The Water Is Wide is a ballad album by the saxophonist Charles Lloyd. It is the first of two records drawn from a single, very productive studio session in Los Angeles in December 1999. It followed Voice in the Night and kept that album's core, then added two younger players from the trio of Brad Mehldau. The repertoire mixes lesser-known Ellington and Strayhorn tunes with spirituals, a folk song and Lloyd's own pieces. It is one of the calmest and most lyrical records of his long association with ECM.
From the Voice in the Night band come the guitarist John Abercrombie and the drummer Billy Higgins, who plays mostly with brushes. Mehldau is on piano and Larry Grenadier on double bass, with Darek Oleszkiewicz taking the bass on the closing Prayer. The music was recorded at Cello Studios by Michael C. Ross and mastered by Bernie Grundman. Lloyd produced it with Dorothy Darr, who also designed the cover and took the photographs, while Manfred Eicher was executive producer. The rest of the session appeared in 2001 as Hyperion with Higgins.
The album opens with Hoagy Carmichael's Georgia, played close to the melody at a slow tempo. The title track is the old Scottish folk song, with Abercrombie's guitar set inside Higgins's brushwork. The Monk and the Mermaid is a duet for Lloyd and Mehldau, and the spiritual There Is a Balm in Gilead reduces the group to tenor and drums alone. Ellington appears twice, with Black Butterfly and Heaven from his sacred concerts, and Strayhorn with Lotus Blossom.
Critics in Europe and the United States welcomed the record. In Stereophile, which made it Recording of the Month, Thomas Conrad heard in Georgia "previously unrevealed depths of poignance" in a reading that stays very close to the tune. John Fordham in The Guardian noted a little more swing than on its predecessor, with Mehldau "injecting more momentum into the approach", and closed with one word, "Terrific". It was also named Album of the Year by Swing Journal and received a Diapason d'Or.
This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1734, with the twelve tracks of the album first released by ECM on 28 August 2000.
