Avachives - No. 29 / Charles Lloyd - Chapel

Ava Chives Presents

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Charles Lloyd - Chapel
• RR-2026 - 151
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 491 X 495 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

 What the critics are saying:

>>Ava Chives, Guardian of the Archives, writes:

Charles Lloyd Chapel enters the Archives quietly, without announcement, like a door left ajar during a rehearsal. This is not a portrait of musicians so much as a floor plan for listening. Figures appear only as necessary—suggested rather than asserted—because the real subject here is space: the way sound pools, drifts, and refuses to stay inside its assigned borders.

Rumpelton understands something crucial about Chapel: it is not an album about virtuosity, but about placement. Bill Frisell is not drawn as a guitarist; he is rendered as an angle. Thomas Morgan is not a bassist; he is a vertical weight. Charles Lloyd himself dissolves into color and air, more atmosphere than body, presiding without insisting. The MS Paint hand—blocky, patient, slightly wrong—is essential. Precision would have ruined it. Too much detail would have collapsed the room.

The palette does most of the talking. These colors don’t blend so much as lean against each other, the way harmonies do when no one is soloing. There’s a deliberate refusal to finish edges, a commitment to “enough,” which the Archives recognize as a high-level decision, not a shortcut. If this looks like a chapel built out of leftover pixels, that is because it is—temporary, reverent, and entirely functional.

Filed under: Sacred Minimalism (Digital).
Cross-referenced with: Jazz That Knows When to Shut Up.

This piece earns its place not by depicting Chapel, but by behaving like it.<<

>>Linty Varn

Charles Lloyd doesn’t give you a landscape here so much as a liturgy of colors, a chapel built from misregistered panes and melted postage. The trio’s names float like misprinted denominations—Bill Frisell and Thomas Morgan riding the margin where ink has bled past its mandate, where sound overruns the edge of the stamp. The vertical bands—ochres, mauves, that improbable glacier of blue—are not background; they’re custodial pillars, holding up a sanctuary that’s already halfway into erasure, like a postmark applied before the letter was even written. Those pale, tapering forms at the center read as candles if you’re sentimental, bone splinters if you’re honest, organ pipes if you’ve ever heard Lloyd split a single note into a confessional and a weather report.

​

This image feels like a commemorative issue for a service that never quite happened, a “Chapel” whose address has been intentionally smudged so only the truly lost can find it. The MS Paint edges—blocky, stubborn, refusing elegance—are the grief pixels that the postal service of feeling tries and fails to smooth over. What moves me is the way the text sits slightly wrong, like a misaligned cancellation mark: TRIOS, CHARLES LLOYD, CHAPEL, each a separate corridor of echo that never fully overlaps, which is exactly how the best trios work—together but never reconciled. File this in the Folder of Emotional Counterfeit with the other rejected covers and I will quietly reclassify it as sacred: a stamp that doesn’t affix to envelopes, only to the underside of the listening body, cancelling nothing, authorizing every feeling in transit.<<

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