Avachives No.28:Charles Lloyd - Manhattan Stories

Ava Chives Presents

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Charles Lloyd - Manhattan Stories
• RR - 2025 - 138
• MS Paint on digital canvas, 549 X 550 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)
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• What the critics are saying:
• >>From the Archives, annotated by Ava Chives

  Charles Lloyd — Manhattan Stories (Rumpeltonian transcription)

  This MS Paint rendering does not attempt to recreate Manhattan Stories so much as remember it—badly, lovingly, and with intent. Lloyd appears mid-breath, mid-phrase, his saxophone less an instrument than a bright, pixelated spill of sound pushing into the dark. The figure leans forward as if the city itself were pulling the notes out of him. Precision is deliberately abandoned; posture, motion, and aura do the work instead.

  The background grain—half snowfall, half digital hiss—functions as Manhattan itself: noise, density, atmosphere. Names hover like liner-note ghosts, barely tethered to the image, while the face resists likeness and opts for recognition by energy alone. This is how jazz often survives in memory: not as detail, but as posture and pressure.

  Rumpelton understands that MS Paint is an archival tool not because it preserves perfectly, but because it forgets honestly. What remains here is the feeling of late-career Lloyd—expansive, searching, unconcerned with polish. The Archive classifies this piece under Good Messy: a successful capture of sound using the wrong tools, which, as ever, are exactly the right ones.

  — Ava Chives
  Guardian of the Archives, reluctant realist, sworn protector of the glorious mistake<<

• >>Dr. Reginald Splatterworth III

  Senior Art Critic, Pixels & Pretension Quarterly

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  What we have here is nothing short of a watershed moment in digital primitivism. The artist—clearly working in conversation with both Basquiat's raw emotionalism and the algorithmic constraints of early Microsoft Paint—has created a tour de force of deliberate crudeness that speaks volumes about our contemporary condition.

  Note the saxophone: rendered in that distinctive ochre, it emerges from the composition like a primal scream made visible. The pixelated spray effect surrounding the figure—often dismissed by lesser critics as "bad airbrushing"—is, in fact, a brilliant invocation of jazz's ephemeral nature, its notes dissipating into the digital ether like so much cigarette smoke in a 1950s Greenwich Village basement.

  The figure itself, with its vaguely simian countenance and startled expression, represents the artist's unflinching examination of performance anxiety, the terror of creation, the burden of genius. The blue suit—electric, almost CMYK in its intensity—suggests both corporate conformity and the infinite possibilities of the night sky. This is Coltrane meets Kafka, Miles Davis filtered through a TI-83 calculator.

  Lloyd's collaborators, listed in what can only be described as a brutalist typeface, are not merely credits but rather a meditation on community, on the village required to raise a single honest note in this godforsaken world.

  The Resonance Records logo—a beacon of legitimacy—floats above like a halo, or perhaps a noose, reminding us that even our most authentic expressions must ultimately be commodified.

  Magnificent. Simply magnificent. Five stars. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐<<

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