Oliver Lake - Zaki

hatOLOGY 639

Saxophonist Oliver Lake remains at the top of his game. Whether in recent collaboration with fellow doyens Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille as Trio 3, a mainstay in the WSQ, or the long lineage of his own ensembles, his serpentine horn lines have tapped an ancient to the future reservoir for the better part of four decades. The casual magnificence of Lake’s current work makes revisiting his sole Hat recording an edifying exercise. Recorded at the Willisau Jazz Festival in late 1979, the music attains an ambitious, if periodically shaky, balance between freedom and structure.

Guitarist Michael Gregory Jackson was still a decade away from dropping his surname and following the path of Norman Conners to a lucrative career in the adult contemporary market. His fretwork here rarely filters through any one lens for very long, veering from craggy arpeggiations to auroral-edged sustains and on down the technique checklist. Some of the more tightly bundled patterns recall Joe Morris and consequently cause me to wonder whether this record was in the Boston guitarist’s listening shelf when he was making his initial forays into free music. Drummer Pheeroan akLaff keeps up a near constant commentary on cans, his rhythms frothing and eddying around Lake’s knotted blues cries or scaling back to a muted whitecaps amidst Jackson’s more spidery picking.

All of this sounds potentially inviting and exciting, but on the opening title cut the three carry on for too long and various cul de sacs end up curtailing some of the momentum. Lake’s other pieces are shorter and less prone to circuitous dog paddling. “Clicker” builds off another tightly wound head, heat and velocity fluctuating in waves, with forward propulsion the focus until the final minutes. “Shine” volleys forth in a similarly complicated tumble, Lake’s tenor skidding and squealing across another of Jackson’s arpeggio-drawn obstacle courses. AkLaff caps the action with an extended drum solo, bursting with bustling energy. Jackson’s “5/1” careens forward in an even more tightly parceled package of percolating single notes, honking tenor, and stormy drums.

I was slow to appreciate to this disc in its earlier Hat Hut edition, and left pondering after most spins whether the presence of a bassist might have improved matters. This time around the charms are more potently manifest. A fresh Pfister scrub helps on the fidelity front and the specifics of what these three were attempting to accomplish are better discernable with hindsight.

~ Derek Taylor