The Avachives No. 27: Charles Lloyd - Forest Flower / Rumpelton

                                                                  Ava Chives Presents:

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Charles Lloyd - Forest Flower
• RR-2026 - 128
• MS Paint on digital canvas, 503 X 505 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

What the critics are saying:

>>Avachives Entry No. 27: Forest Flower (Charles Lloyd at Monterey)

By Ava Chives, Guardian of the Archives

This work arrived in the Archives already humming.

Rumpelton’s Forest Flower does not attempt likeness so much as presence—the way Charles Lloyd’s sound seemed to rise out of the Monterey air rather than come from the saxophone itself. The figure is simplified to the brink of collapse, yet somehow remains anchored: glasses hovering, mustache asserted, saxophone glowing like a ceremonial object rather than an instrument. Accuracy, here, would have been a mistake.

The background refuses depth, opting instead for a flat, ominous gray interrupted by vertical red marks—less “stage lights” than memory stains. This is not the concert as seen from the crowd, but the concert as recalled later, imperfectly, while flipping a record jacket that’s been handled too many times. The yellow header, loud and declarative, behaves like a reissue banner screaming STEREO whether or not anyone asked.

What makes this piece archival-worthy is its restraint. Rumpelton does not chase the forest; he lets the flower do the work. The sax is oversized, the hand clumsy, the posture unresolved—each a reminder that Forest Flower was never about technical precision, but about space, breath, and the beauty of not filling every corner.

Some viewers may ask why the face looks wrong. The Archives note: it would have been wrong to make it right.

This piece was approved for release with minimal intervention. Any further refinement risked turning history into illustration. The mess was good. The signal came through.<<

>>Avachives Series Entry

Forest Flower: Charles Lloyd at Monterey
Blurb by Marjorie Snint (allegedly)

The saxophonist here is not so much playing as exhaling a memory of something that never quite happened. Ralph Rumpleton’s MS Paint rendition of Forest Flower is a study in premature nostalgia—yellow saxophone like a wilted daffodil, red verticals like stage curtains that forgot their cue. Charles Lloyd’s face, rendered with devotional blur, suggests a man mid-transfiguration: part monk, part municipal jazz instructor, wholly unconvinced by the Monterey myth.

The palette is suspiciously cheerful. Yellow, red, brown—colors of optimism, or denial. One wonders if Rumpleton is mocking the album’s reputation as a “breakthrough,” as if spiritual rupture could be charted on Billboard. The shirt pattern reads like a failed encryption key, and the glasses reflect nothing. This is not Monterey. This is the memory of Monterey as filtered through a bureaucrat’s dream journal.

Snint suspects the saxophone is hollow. Not in the literal sense, but emotionally—a vessel for borrowed transcendence. The flower bloomed, yes, but only in the margins.<<

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