Eighty-six today, album release day, with the great hippie-jazz master and icon saxophonist and flautist Charles Lloyd are pianist Jason Moran, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Brian Blade - the Shorterian Blade's own Kings Highway with the Fellowship we reckoned was the top album in 2023. A long time Blue Note artist the mystically entitled studio album The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow is Lloyd's 11th for the historic label which itself is 85 years old. Full of new compositions 'The Water Is Rising,' 'Late Bloom,' 'The Ghost of Lady Day,' 'Sky Valley, Spirit of the Forest' and 'When the Sun Comes Up, Darkness Is Gone' it is a late period classic.

Mirror remains our favourite of all the recordings that we have dipped into and remains so even notwithstanding the calibre of this latest - it came out in 2010 and had Jason Moran on it, again the only link between that recording and this new one in terms of personnel. By that stage we had seen Lloyd live a few times - for the first time in 1997 at the Royal Festival Hall when his band was pianist Bobo Stenson, bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Billy Hart; and then in 2005 at the Barbican in a double bill with the much missed Tomasz Stańko who also had a band with Stenson, Jormin and Tony Oxley heard most powerfully on the classic Leosia. After first hearing the Memphis born Lloyd on the South Bank we went back and got to know the American's 1960s Dream Weaver and Forest Flower period recordings with Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette picking up again much later with his ECM recordings in the 1990s, particularly The Call and The Water Is Wide.

But from Wild Man Dance (2015) to Trio of Trios (2022) on Blue Note and now this latest, his time on the label, a formidable body of work including collaborations with Bill Frisell, has even eclipsed some of his best work on ECM it is fair to say certainly in sheer scale and quantity. Live album 8: Kindred Spirits (Live from the Lobero) also was deeply satisfying. And turning on an electric light inside yet again The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow proves another gift to humanity to be cherished and measured favourably with some of Lloyd's milestone recordings burning on to our interior lives and enriching everyone willing and open enough to truly feel and therefore know. Charles Lloyd, photo: Dorothy Darr