Collection: Oliver Lake

Oliver Lake grew up in St. Louis playing cymbals in a drum and bugle corps before picking up the saxophone at 18, and by the late 1960s he was one of the architects of the Black Artists Group, a St. Louis collective of musicians, poets, dancers and painters built explicitly to give Black creative artists control over their own work. That same instinct for self-organisation followed him to New York in the mid 1970s, where he became a fixture of the loft jazz scene, recording "Heavy Spirits" (Arista/Freedom, 1975) across sessions in New York and Boston with a rotating cast that included fellow BAG alumnus Bobo Shaw and trumpeter Olu Dara. In 1977, Lake co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet with David Murray, Julius Hemphill and Hamiet Bluiett, four saxophones with no rhythm section at all, an idea so unlikely on paper that its success rewired what people assumed an ensemble needed. Lake kept building from there: his own quartets and big bands, the long-running cooperative trio Trio 3 with Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille, and decades of work straddling jazz, poetry and visual art. What's stocked here centres on the loft era recordings and his BAG-rooted early catalogue.