If ever there was a disorienting topic to explore, Lloyd Miller's life and career as a jazz musician and international intellectual might be one of the more exciting and bewildering. Also known as Kurosh Ali Khan, the academic and polyglot, who has mastered over 100 instruments and is fluent in half a dozen languages, is nearly as famous for his studies of Afghan and Persian musical traditions as he is for hosting an Iranian variety show in Tehran for seven years during the '70s- a role he landed while in the country on a Fullbright Scholarship. Can you imagine that? Traveling to a foreign country to study their culture and ending up as a local version of Johnny Carson? It takes a remarkable variety and blend of plasticity and charisma to pull off a trick like that. I see many a wanna-be public intellectual trying their hand at generating genuine spectacle and popular engagement with their scholarship on Twitter daily- most of it is about as gripping as watching someone grasping at straws just out of reach as the golden strands dance on the wind. Lloyd's realm of expertise, in contrast, is broad and incredibly sticky, seemingly capable of transforming everything it touches into a subject of investigation as an extension of his previous work. His latest collection titled, Orientations is exemplary of his scholarship and popular appeal in this regard, arranging several recordings from his personal vault, ranging from the '60s onward, which see him braiding together and finding common reservoirs of modality between musical traditions of the Near and Far East, as well as amicable repurposings of distinctly American jazz styles. Beginning with the weighty trudge and silty undertow of "Camels To Cairo" and traversing through the late-night haze of deteriorating TV broadcasts, performances from festivals unstuck from time, and doppelganger improvisations like "Pacific Breeze," you will find yourself approaching a Platonic crossroads of a culture where the ideal overlaps precisely with the real and tangible. A meeting of worlds that are isolated geographically but which occupy the same space in the mind. One arrives at the impression that these arrangments have always cast a shadow over one's life, and you have only been waiting for the right moment to turn and recognize the significance of the objects whose presence was foretold by the fuzz outlines that have long invaded your line of sight. It is going to be hard to imagine how your appreciation of music, and in particular jazz, made any sense before hearing Orientations, but with time you'll acclimate and learn to prize what it has added to what you've already, always known.
