By Jon Garelick
Multi-instrumentalist Andrew Lamb’s spiritual imperative clearly seeks and achieves evocative power.
Andrew Lamb Trio at Lilypad, August 8th.
Andrew Lamb on saxophone, Joe Fonda on the base and a tall gentleman in the front row of the Lilypad. Photo: Jon Garelick
Multi-instrumentalist and composer Andrew Lamb is what one might call an old-school avant-garde. Born in Clinton, North Carolina, he grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, and studied early on with Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and JD Parran. In New York, he became part of the Bedford-Stuyvesant art scene and began playing and recording with prominent representatives of the jazz avant-garde such as Warren Smith, Wilbur Morris, Henry Grimes, Marshall Allen, and Cecil Taylor.
But Lamb, 65, hasn’t left much of a written footprint and his discography is scattered, so I’d never heard of him until Alex Lemski booked him for his Creative Music Series at Lilypad. It turns out that despite his longstanding interest in creative improvisation, Lemski had never heard of him either, but invited him on the enthusiastic recommendation of a trusted friend.
At the Lilypad, I realized I should have heard of Lamb (or at least him) much sooner. Lamb, tenor and flute, played with another avant-garde stalwart, bassist Joe Fonda (who was a member of Anthony Braxton’s bands for years), and a Boston mainstay, drummer Luther Gray.
Lamb (who also performs as The Black Lamb) explicitly advocates music as a spiritual, healing force, and before his performance at Lilypad he offered a series of libations to deities and ancestors, pouring them from a water bottle into a cooler on the floor. Then Gray began his own brand of invocation: dry, flat, hard hits without a snare, building to haunting rolls and light, resonant cymbal work. Fonda joined him, immediately wild, a running, independent commentary alongside Gray’s drums, mixing freely pulsating phrases with exclamatory double stops, jumping between contrasting high and low registers, punctuating cadences with toothy grimaces and contented grunts of “Aaahhhhh!”
Lamb stepped forward, played a few phrases with exclamation points, paused between each one, then retreated to sit down and switch reeds. Fonda and Gray continued playing. When Lamb returned, he returned to those short rhythmic-melodic phrases – building on them, playing in a robust mid-range, arpeggiating, then diving into long-held altissimo notes, then going back again to create broken shards of melody.
This kind of old-school free jazz—with lots of volume, speed, and dissonant patterns without regular meter or chord changes—isn’t for everyone. But for those who grew up with Ornette Coleman, the late Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and later the work of tenor saxophonist David S. Ware with William Parker and others, it can be a tonic. Lamb is clearly seeking evocative power with his spiritual imperative, and he achieves it. You might think such long passages of unchanging intensity would be monotonous, but they were full of rhythmic and melodic inventiveness and never lost a sense of propulsive forward motion. There were many moments when, like Fonda, you might have felt your own involuntary, satisfied “Aaahhh!”
It’s not as if the music was entirely relentless. After that long (about 40 minutes) opening fireworks, there was a quiet interlude for bass, soon joined by trumpeter Vance Provey (a regular at CMS events), and Lamb took up the flute to play a minor-key tune with hints of an African folk melody. As Lamb played his melody, Fonda plucked a seven-note vamp figure and Provey approvingly played a long-note counterpoint.
After the long 50-minute first set, there was an intermission and then a shorter second set (about 23 minutes). This one was wilder, but there were also more breaks for quiet moments, and at one point Lamb – with shoulder-length hair, dressed in an orange jack-o-lantern-style open shirt over black T-shirt and pants – moved around the stage, looking up at the ceiling as he played (he usually played with his eyes closed), as if he was testing the reverberation of different stage positions, or perhaps just searching for something else. As the set ended to strong applause, he raised his horn horizontally toward the crowd, thanked them, and said, “May the Almighty be with you.” Perhaps he was.
Jon Garelick writes regularly for The Arts Fuse and other publications. You can reach him at [email protected].
