On Friday evening, at Lloyd Miller‘s invitation, my wife and I attended the screening of a new film about his life. It was presented at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City.
The film, titled Sufi, Saint, and Swinger — directed by the British-Chinese Camilla French and her Colombian husband, Andrés Borda (who was present at the screening), and produced by the British-Iranian Abbas Nokhasteh — is based on Miller’s memoir of the same name (Sufi, Saint and Swinger: A Jazzman’s Search for Spiritual Manifestations in Many Nations). It chronicles the extraordinary and extraordinarily troubled life of a man who is, quite clearly, a linguistic and musical prodigy.
Lloyd Miller — Dr. Lloyd Miller, as a matter of fact, since he earned a Fulbright fellowship and completed a doctoral dissertation on Middle Eastern music — was incarcerated by his parents as a child in a mental institution that we would today decry as abusive and, later, jailed in a Utah state prison after being convicted of arson (a conviction that he vehemently contests and that, as I understand it, was later overturned). Despite such setbacks, he became a multilingual musical virtuoso who is able to play approximately a hundred different instruments and who, for five years in the 1970s and (so far as I’m competent to judge) in accentless Persian, hosted a popular television show on national Iranian television (Kurosh Ali Khan va Dustan, or “Kurosh Ali Khan and Friends”), under the adopted name of Kurosh Ali Khan. (Kurosh is the Persian name from which we derive the name Cyrus.)
As Lloyd retells the story, his parents took him at one point, shortly before his father took a position as a financial advisor to the Shah of Iran, to some sort of child psychologist or psychiatrist who was also a Latter-day Saint bishop. While in treatment, under hypnosis, the man told Lloyd that he would travel to a faraway land and become a successful musician, mixing Oriental music with jazz. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to Tehran. Lloyd’s mother would eventually receive a decoration from the Shah for her book Bright Blue Beads: An American Family in Persia. (He and I must surely be two of the few current Utah residents who ever shook hands with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.)
Anyway — with some possible discussion necessary about the term successful, since he’s unfortunately very far from being rich and not widely known (he’s a jazz musician, after all!) — moving to a faraway land, becoming a successful musician, and mixing Oriental music with jazz is precisely what Lloyd did. (I note that the German Wikipedia entry about him is better and more thorough than its English equivalent; Europeans tend to like jazz more than Americans do.)
Now approaching his eightieth birthday (though he doesn’t look or act it), Lloyd Miller is not only an underappreciated genius but a spiritual seeker, a Latter-day Saint, and a gentle soul whom I like very, very much.
Here are some links from which, if you’re interested, you can perhaps gain some little idea of his work:
“An Interview With World Musician Lloyd Miller”
“Lloyd Miller Plots His Musical Evolution”
http://www.jazzscope.com/OJ.html
https://www.discogs.com/artist/639808-Lloyd-Miller
Music and Song in Persia: The Art of Avaz
Posted from Park City, Utah
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