“Making music is my joy and passion. I could not live without it. This is my service. Getting on and off planes, checking in and out of hotels, now that is work,” Jazz musician Charles Lloyd wrote in an email.

Lloyd expressed that his purpose in life is to get in tune with the universe.

“My lifelong quest has been to find the one note that is so in tune with the Universe, it says it all,” he wrote.

This Saturday, Lloyd will continue his mission and play his music with The Marvels at the Williams Center for the Arts at 8 p.m.

Lloyd discovered his love for music when he first heard the soothing melody of a saxophone at a relatively early age in Memphis, Mississippi, where he had been born.

“There was music all around me growing up in Memphis and on my grandfather’s farm in Mississippi. When I was 3 or 4, I went to a parade with my aunt and saw someone playing a saxophone.”

He added, “A light went off in my head and I said, ‘That’s what I am supposed to be doing.'”

Lloyd wrote that his uncle Longino introduced him to artists like Calude Thornhill, Jimmy Lunceford and Bird. As a boy, at night he would go under his pillow and listen to American musician, Lady Day.

“It was as if she was singing only to me. I fell in love with her, and in love with music,” he wrote.

Lloyd wrote that he doesn’t have a favorite song to play, because “that is along the lines of asking a parent who is their favorite child.”

He wrote he likes to get a sense of the audience before he decides which song he wants to play.

“They are important components to any concert. There is a dialogue going on between myself and the musicians on a deep level – and on an equally deep level there is a silent dialogue going on between us and the audience.”

Lloyd has been recognized for his musical career by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and many more, according to his website.

The New York Times wrote, “The jazz eminence Charles Lloyd has been many things since his rocketlike emergence in the 1960s: a breakout talent, a phenomenon, a recluse, a searcher, a rumor.”

Lloyd “has a built a career on rewarding tangents, building a body of work that’s helped shape the sound of jazz from the ’60s into the new millennium,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.

His recent awards include the “2012 Brass Note on Beale Street”, the “2013 Montreal International Jazz Festival Miles Davis Award”, the “2014 Laureate Alfa Jazz International Music Award” and others.

Lloyd wrote he has never felt trapped in his line of work or his life on Earth.

“Life on Earth is an illusion – we all have choices we can make at any given point. The important thing is to be mindful when you are making that choice.”