While modern life is increasingly characterized by constant global communication and exchange, some things still feel very far away––and very improbable.
Take, for example, the story of Lloyd Miller, an American musician and intellectual who after living in Europe throughout his twenties, found his way to Tehran in the late 1960s on a Fulbright scholarship and became the host of a primetime Iranian television variety show. If this seems improbable, Miller’s mastery of over 100 instruments and half a dozen languages may appear downright outrageous. But Lloyd Miller’s ouervre amounts to more than an unlikely story, and his artistic brilliance is on full display on Orientations, a career-spanning double LP of unreleased recordings from this master of global music traditions and Heliocentrics collaborator.
The exploratory, orientalist modes of Orientations will find easy devotion among fans of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Sun Ra, and the pantheon of similarly oriented spiritual jazz stalwarts. Miller’s fascination with such modes runs deep. As a polyglot and expatriate artist who traveled the world and embedded himself in the cultures of the Middle East and Asia, Lloyd Miller manifests in such frankly unbelievable ways throughout history, and with such magical effervescence, that his musical presence is uncanny; his effect is extraordinary and literally haunting.
Orientations provides a dazzling survey of this uncanny presence, over 22 recordings that span from 1960 to 2021. This material––all of which was sourced from Miller’s master tapes and sole existing personal recordings and appears here on vinyl for the first time––documents everything from performances on Iranian TV to recent collaborations with students at Brigham Young University. Listeners may think of The Secret Museum of Mankind Ethnic Music Classics, Alice Coltrane and Yusef Lateef, as Miller interweaves oud, santur, and hand drums with saxophones and occasional analogue synthesizer. In some cases, these threads interweave across time, as on “Orientation #1 (Kheneccordion),” a reinterpreted Laotian melody arranged for accordion and recorded originally in 1963, retouched in 2021 with floating flourishes from a Roland JUNO synthesizer. “Bending space and time,” the liner notes read, “Lloyd engages in a meta conversation with his younger self.”
This meta conversation stretches out over the entire collection. The very order of the songs seems to tell a story, not unlike the way Jorge Luis Borges’ A Personal Anthology unfolds as a cohesive narrative. A few key moments of amusing dialogue haunt the conversation as well, as on a 1963 rehearsal recording of a rhapsodic modal jazz take on an Indian traditional. Upon abruptly releasing his fellow American jazz musicians from a trance, Miller says, with enthusiasm, “It sounds pretty hip!” And indeed it does.
~ Mark Trecka, 2022
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