Not content to rest on her laurels for the successful Healdsburg Jazz Festival earlier this month, artistic director Jessica Felix is reminding fans and friends that Oliver Lake is coming back to town next weekend, Saturday June 29.
Lake, a renaissance man of the arts whose most famous collaboration is with the World Saxophone Quartet, has been to Healdsburg twice before, once with the experimental Trio 3 in a concert at the Flying Goat in 2009, and two years later with the Oliver Lake Organ Quartet, again at the Goat.
This time he's bringing not a quartet or a trio but just his own self, but he's more than enough artist on his own.
An accomplished poet, painter and performance artist, Lake will perform a solo concert of saxophone, flute and poetry, surrounded by a gallery of his visual works on June 29 at the Healdsburg Center for the Arts as part of an ongoing series produced by Healdsburg Jazz.
Even though Lake’s extraordinary talents as composer, saxophonist, flutist and bandleader have brought him world-renown, extremely few artists embrace such a diverse array of musical styles and disciplines.
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Lake is not only able to thrive in all of these environments, but does so without distorting or diluting his own remarkable artistic identity. His art work is the anchor of the current show at the Art Center, “Flying Home/Inspired By Jazz: a visual exploration of jazz.”
Born in Marianna, Arkansas in 1942, Lake moved to St. Louis at the age of two. He began drawing at the age of 13 (and paints daily, using oil, acrylics, wood, canvas, and mixed media), and soon after began playing cymbals and bass drum in various drum and bugle corps.
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At 17, he began to take a serious interest in jazz. Like many other members of the Black Artists Group (BAG) and its Chicago-based sister organization, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Lake moved to New York in the mid-’70s, working the fertile ground of the downtown loft scene and quickly establishing himself as one of its most adventurous and multi-faceted artists.
His musical collaborators include not just jazz musicians like Julius Hemphill and the other members of the World Saxophone Quartet, but pop diva Bjork, rocker Lou Reed and rap group A Tribe Called Quest; and his collaborations range from working with poets Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange, choreographers Ron Brown and Marlies Yearby, to Native American vocalist Mary Redhouse, Korean kumongo player Jin Hi Kim, and Chinese bamboo flute player Shuni Tsou, and the ground-breaking reggae ensemble Jump Up.
There will be two shows on Saturday, June 29 at the HAC gallery, 130 Plaza St. Times are 7 and 9 p.m., tickets are available through links on the HJF website or at the Gallery during open hours (707-431-1970).
