vision festival 2022 - celebrating oliver lake, nyc, jun 26
photography by ©Clara Pereira; text by Filipe Freitas
The last day of the acclaimed Vision Festival, whose concerts began at Roulette in Brooklyn on June 21, served the purpose of homaging the creative alto saxophone player, composer, painter, and poet Oliver Lake with the Lifetime Achievement Award. The event, which took place at The Clemente in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was enjoyed by a group of supporters and enthusiasts of this free, imaginative music whose powerful voice aims at justice issues and promotes cultural identities.
We arrived at 5:10 PM, exactly when the multi-woodwind player JD Parran stepped on stage to play music by Oliver Lake with a renewed version of his ensemble Spirit Stage. Now a sextet, the band featured Gene Lake on drums, Bill Lowe on trombone, Gwen Laster on violin, Hilliard Greene on bass, and the guitarist Kelvyn Bell, the only member to remain from the original 1997 formation. Opening in free style with short solo statements by all musicians, the group soon embraced a collective conversational exchange with “Rocket”, the closing piece of Lake’s 1975 debut and masterpiece, Heavy Spirits. The volatile, nearly ethereal “Aztec” followed it with an indolent pace but crescent magnetism, whereas “Thank You” emphasized by tonal contrasts between Parran’s alto flute and Lowe’s deep brass sounds. The group finished in great style with a piece where Parran, wielding his robust bass saxophone, stretched with multiphonics and growls over a danceable funky groove delivered at a fast triple tempo. The audience was finally in ecstasy.
The following performance - Justice: Vocal Works - consisted of a suite of compositions by Lake specifically composed for the Sonic Liberation Front, a combo led by drummer Kevobatala. A three-vocal choir joined them, with the honoree conducting his own arrangements and reciting poems with LOVE at the center.
Lake led the Trio 3 with no horn but with passionate poetry. Accompanied by bassist Reggie Workman, who was celebrating his birthday, and Andrew Cyrille, also celebrating his wedding anniversary, he professed lancinating words about preexisting conditions in America - meaning racism - mentioning the cases of George Floyd and Eric Garner. Saxophonist Hamiett Bluiett, poet Amiri Baraka, and triomate Cyrille were praised in his poetry.
The program ended in big with the boisterous World Saxophone Quartet, whose recent lineup includes David Murray (tenor and bass clarinet), James Carter (baritone), Greg Osby (alto), and Bruce Williams (alto and soprano). After the lead-off piece - marked by a groovy baritone conduction, tenor counterpoint, and the altos united in bright unison - Murray congratulates Lake, who, like him, is an original member of this group founded in 1976. The chosen repertoire, notably blues-oriented, also included the beautiful ballad “Love Like Sisters”, the unbending sextuple-metered “Africa”, and the lyrical “Tone Poem”, written for Julius Hemphill.
This was a very special day for Mr. Lake, whose work is outstanding, and also for us, since it marked our return to concert coverage nearly two and a half years after the pandemic hit.