Oxford American
Eleventh Annual Music Issue
1 December 2009
Half a lifetime ago, I worked in a record store where I earned an ad-hoc music-appreciation degree; my coworkers were my professors. Cynthia, Steve, and Darius trained me on anything raging, banging, weird, and angular—Joy Division, Radiohead, Morrissey, Violent Femmes, Built to Spill, Dinosaur Jr., and Pavement; Jim gave me access to his outrageous collection of Congolese music, especially Franco, Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Papa Wemba; Bryan dropped nuanced mini-lectures on the parallel wonders of John Coltrane and Buddhism; and Jamie guided me along the cobbled, connected pathways of classic and avant-garde jazz.
Back then, when Jamie started talking about experimental and freely improvised music coming from the jazz tradition, my conversations with him usually ground to a halt. To my unappreciative and untrained ears, listening to a musician like Ornette Coleman or Eric Dolphy was like hearing composition and melody in the throes of a cacophonous death. I was like those critics in the late 1950s and '60s who heard late Coltrane, or early Coleman, or any Cecil Taylor and denigrated their recordings as anti-music. But Jamie told me to listen again to Thelonious Monk and Coleman Hawkins, coached me through Taylor and Coleman, and hipped me to Don Pullen and Oliver Lake, explaining finally how these bebop, free, and avant-garde musicians were using different formulas for fulfilling the similar musical goal of producing African American art music.
Lake, an acolyte of the alto saxophonists Jackie McLean and Eric Dolphy, and one of the avant-garde’s premier musicians, remains a wonderful reminder of the halcyon days of my musical education. Lake can make the alto sound sweet or caustic, tart or sentimental, savory or joyful; his solos are simultaneously and dynamically traditional, avant-garde, and contemporary. Lake points to this last word as an indication of his most urgent musical desires: "I . . .like the term 'contemporary jazz' because it implies that I am today and want to be dealt with today." Over the course of his career, Lake has helped develop and explode the boundaries of the avant-garde (at various points it has also been called "free jazz," "The New Thing," "Black Music," "the new music," and "The music") by drawing upon all facets of jazz’s history in order to make contemporary music.Born in 1942 in Marianna, Arkansas, Lake grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, listening to r&b and urban blues music—Hank Ballard, Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins. In the early 1960s, after graduating from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, Lake returned to St. Louis and began jamming with young professional musicians like Lester Bowie, who’d already been out touring the traditional r&b and blues scene with Oliver Sain and Albert King. Even as Lake and his cohort began experimenting without compositions, or improvising longer and more openly, the blues was still at the core of the music.
During the mid-1960s, along with the saxophonists Julius Hemphill and Hamiet Bluiett, Lake founded the Black Artists Group (BAG) in St. Louis. BAG founders emulated arts cooperatives like the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) in Chicago, organizing their community around the argument that contemporary jazz’s newer, freer vocabulary could act as the lingua franca for the interdisciplinary teaching, practicing, and merging of experimental music, modern dance, revolutionary theatre, avant-garde literature, and radical politics within St. Louis’s black arts community.
In 1974, following Hemphill and Bluiett, Lake moved to New York City and began performing in Soho and the Lower East Side lofts, the hotbed of the jazz avant-garde. Since the late 1970s the three St. Louis saxophonists have performed with David Murray as the World Saxophone Quartet (WSQ), one of the most popular and significant outgrowths of the downtown scene. During this period, in New York, Asia, and Europe, working as a soloist or in various groups, Lake refined his musicianship, creating his cosmopolitan, piquant sound.
Lake opens "Gano" squawking a sharp, four-note figure, birdcall-doubling it. Repeated six times, the melodic fragment is capped alternately by a three-note arpeggio from Lake and a shuffled three-note blues riff from Jared Gold on organ. After the clarion introduction, the pair swings into a chorus of soulful blues, with Lake stating the melody and Gold offering chunky, resonant chords behind the alto. Arranged without percussion, the track records a rare, odd bird: an alto saxophone/Hammond B-3 organ duet. Lake’s solo begins from a blues and r&b melodic motif—a funky, braying, lick that mixes Charlie Parker with Maceo Parker. But the song clocks in at a mere one minute thirty-four seconds, so there’s no time or space for experimenting with riffs or improvising melodic line out into the open stratosphere. Quickly, though, Lake plays the logical continuities from funk to soul to free jazz. Listen: As he attacks the melodic line, improvising a granite-hard riff, swelling its structure and grinding it down to a tattered, shrill, glissandi, Gold sure-footedly pumps the bass pedals providing rhythmic ballast. Gold’s solo riposte begins with a quarter-note snort that inflates into a gospel trill. After two measures, Gold’s swift additions become a thick, soul jazz stew with marbled meat lumps of John Patton and Jimmy McGriff sizzling in his echoing, humming chords. "Gano" is a bourbon shot: short, potent, and delightful.
Over the last thirty-five years, whether fronting bands under his name, as a sideman, or with the WSQ, Lake’s music has continuously expressed one of the avant-garde’s most powerful themes: Jazz has always been avant-garde. At every turn, master musicians have established jazz’s presence and its future: Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Muhal Richard Abrams. These musicians illustrate musically Gary Giddins’s argument that "the jazz avant-garde, like the classical avant-garde, is empowered by the fact that true classicism is impervious to anything but prostration. Imitation, as Emerson pointed out, is suicide." The jazz’s historical past, in other words, keeps educating us about the music’s future. Rather than recreate the past through imitation, however, avant-garde musicians like Lake reinterpret older performance modes, compositions, and techniques in order to name the present and suggest future directions. On "Gano," as he turns his honked melody into a funky flock of wild notes, Lake is addressing the contemporary moment and releasing messages toward an imagined future.
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[Listen to the All Things Considered interview with Oxford American editor, Marc Smirnoff. Among the songs he discusses is Oliver Lake's "Gano".]
Walton Muyumba
