Search - Oliver Lake Steel Quartet :: Dat Love

You know what's weird about jazz?

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 06/20/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Oliver Lake. Here's a guy who's ostensibly Eric Dolphy's successor. He carves out a decent enough career going down that path. Weirdo out-jazz. Then one day, out of the blue, as it were, he gets the idea of incorporating a steel drummer into his ensemble.Whaaaa???How's that work? He just hears something in his head. Your Know? He hears Lyndon Achee, even though he's never heard of the dude. But he hears what he does--make steel drums sound like they've never sounded before. Then he actually stumbles, via a vast system of networking, on Achee, even though he'd not previously known a player like this existed. He's not Andy Narell. He's not Oliver Molineaux. He's not anybody that could've been imagined, even though, somehow, Oliver Lake imagined him.Then he encounters him. And the whole history of jazz shifts. It accommodates, welcomes, this new wrinkle.And an artist who formerly was relegated to keeping alive the Dolphy flame finds an entirely new context to ply his genius.Amazing.But not that atypical.And that's what I've come to love about jazz: its protean nature. Its ability to appropriate and accommodate the most unlikely resources, and, once incorporated, to carve out a music of both unexpected, impossible-to-anticipate, revelatory character.Make no mistake, Oliver Lake has stumbled onto what he was always meant to become, meant to do, as a jazz artist.This weird amalgam of funk electric bass (courtesy of Reggie Washington), punkish, rockish drumming (purveyed by one Damon Duewhite [huh?]), a-traditional steel drumming, and Dolphy-esque alto brilliantly morphs into some new jazz tongue. And we, the listeners, can do little but express our admiration, our awe at the magic that emerges.This, the second Oliver Lake Steel Quartet recording consolidates the advances of the first disc and transforms the music into some kind of ur-jazz Nu territory."