The great saxophonist Charles Lloyd turns 75 on 15 March, and to mark this significant day his label ECM is releasing a new duo album called Hagar’s Song on 18 February, with Lloyd joined by pianist Jason Moran, the award winning pianist who is also a member of the acclaimed Charles Lloyd Quartet.

Hagar’s Song features favourites of Lloyd’s, with Billy Strayhorn tune ‘Pretty Girl’ (also known as ‘Star-Crossed Lovers’), ‘Mood Indigo’, and Gershwin’s ‘Bess You Is My Woman Now’ among the material included for the duo treatment.

Lloyd in the 1970s worked extensively with the Beach Boys, and Brian Wilson’s classic, ‘God Only Knows’, is also featured on Hagar’s Song as is a title suite dedicated to Lloyd’s great-great-grandmother who was sold to a Tennessee slave owner when she was just 10 years old, and whose story has greatly affected Lloyd so inspiring the suite. Well before Charles Lloyd returns to the London stage for a Barbican concert with his quartet (joined by guest singer Maria Farantouri) on 28 April, and just three days after his 75th, ECM is also to release a major boxed set of Lloyd’s first five albums for the label: Fish Out of Water, Notes From Big Sur, The Call, All My Relations, and Canto recorded between 1989 and the end of 1996 at the Rainbow studio in Oslo.

Stephen Graham