Page One a column by Rereading Byard Lancaster ![]() Byard Lancaster, © 2024 Jean-Jacques Pussiau Rereading, not reading, is what counts. – Jorge Luis Borges T.S. Eliot valued minor poets. In his essay, “What is Minor Poetry?,” he sought out “to dispel any derogatory association connected with the term ‘minor poetry,’ together with the suggestion that it is easier to read, or less worth while [sic] to read, than ‘major poetry.’ The question is simply, what kinds of minor poetry are there, and why should we read it?” His was an approach and a question easily applied to minor poets of the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s and early ‘70s like Byard Lancaster. “Rereading” Lancaster’s work reveals him not to be a fire music ideologue. He drew upon the blossoming Afrocentric sensibility, and he could bring on the funk as well as play pretty for the people. “When I play, I have to give people something they know, something they don't know, something they like, something they don't like, and something to think about,” Lancaster related to Jazz Magazine editor Philippe Carles. “A kind of panorama: rock, avant-garde, bebop, jazz, and my own interpretation of what the music is going to become.” His inclusiveness signaled an emergent aesthetic that remains viable today, but the jazz market then was not ready for it. Subsequently, like many of his contemporaries, Lancaster experienced long gaps in performance and recording opportunities beginning in the mid to late 1970s, as the times became increasing inimical to DIY artists. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was seen busking in DC and Chicago. Until his passing in 2012, Lancaster recorded sporadically. When he did, it was noteworthy, particularly his 2001 reunion with Mitchell and Odean Pope, Philadelphia Spirit in New York. However, Lancaster did enjoy several years in the early 1970s when he recorded extensively. The resulting albums are worth rereading, as they reveal Lancaster not as a footnote in a worn trope, but an iconoclast. Although Lancaster is primarily known as an alto saxophonist, piano was his first instrument, with lessons foisted upon him by his mother in the late 1940s when he was 4-1/2. Mid-century Philadelphia was a jazz-rich environment, where the teenagers that played together in school or in each other’s homes grew up to become masters of the art – John Coltrane played with friends that met in the basement of the Heath family home – so it’s no surprise that Lancaster played with Kenny Barron and J.R. Mitchell in junior high school, and Sonny Sharrock, Dave Burrell, and Eric Gravatt in high school. Lancaster landed in New York by 1965, after studying at the Berklee School of Music and Boston Conservatory, living with Burrell and Bobby Kapp in a Bowery space large enough for around-the-clock jam sessions that hosted Archie Shepp, Elvin Jones, and other New Thing luminaries. Before he returned to Philadelphia two years later, Lancaster worked with a widening circle of musicians, including Larry Young (who would feature Lancaster on his funk-infused ‘68 Blue Note album, Heaven on Earth) and Burton Greene (with whom Lancaster performed on the John Hammond-produced Presenting Burton Greene, issued by Columbia in ‘68). More importantly, Lancaster was featured on Bill Dixon’s singular Intents and Purposes However, the pivotal figure in Lancaster’s development was Sunny Murray, who placed Lancaster on the front line for the drummer’s enduring self-titled ESP album, and then first brought Lancaster to France in 1969 to play at BYG Records’ Festival Actuel in Amougies. Before returning to Philadelphia in 1967, Lancaster recorded what could have been a career-changing debut as a leader for Vortex, the short-lived Atlantic subsidiary whose patchwork catalogue included titles by Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and Joe Zawinul. A quintet date that not only featured Sharrock, but another Philadelphia musician who would work with Lancaster well into the 1970s – percussionist Keno Speller, then known as Kenny – It’s Not Up to Us had the ingredients for a break-out. Instead of unrelenting withering fire music, the album featured gentle grooves for his pellucid flute, standards like “Misty,” and Coltrane-inspired, vamp-driven originals like “John’s Children.” Despite its accessibility, the album got lost in the crowd. Lancaster’s career trajectory would have been quite different had Atlantic effectively used its marketing and radio outreach assets. Over the next several years, Lancaster’s searing alto sound and wide-spectrum nation-time music was more enthusiastically received in France than in the US. Although he did not participate in the 1,000-year flood of BYG’s recording sessions in August 1969 that produced Murray’s Sunshine and Homage to Africa, Lancaster’s first overseas stint not only yielded another famously bristling Murray album on the iconic label – An Even Break (Never Give a Sucker) – but laid the groundwork for his most concentrated body of work, the four albums recorded for PALM in 1973-4, recently reissued by Souffle Continu both as a LP box set and individual CDs. In the summer of 1973, the wife-and-husband team of writer Chris Flicker and photographer Thierry Trombert attended the New York Musicians’ Jazz Festival, where Lancaster was featured in ensembles led by Murray and Norman Connors, and with Sounds of Liberation, which he co-led with Mitchell and featured Khan Jamal. When Flicker and Trombert returned to Paris, they laid the three albums recently minted by the Lancaster co-founded Dogtown label on PALM producer Jef Gilson – Live at Macalester College by the J. R. Mitchell-Byard Lancaster Experience, Sounds of Liberation’s New Horizons, and Jamal’s Drum Dance to the Motherland. Like the Tribe label founded by Wendell Harrison, Phil Ranelin, and others in Detroit, Julius Hemphill’s Mbari, and Charles Bobo Shaw and Jim and Carol Marshall’s Universal Justice – titles issued by the two St. Louis labels were licensed by Arista-Freedom later in the decade – Dogtown was representative of the newest iteration of African American self-determination in the production and dissemination of music. The three albums they released in 1972-3 palatably blended traditional African music, modal jazz, and funk, as well as free jazz; they were built around Lancaster, Mitchell, Jamal, and Monette Sudler, all of whom had the energy and ideas to sustain a steady flow of worthy releases had the money lasted; but like many DIY operations at the time, the label was undercapitalized and did not reach a broad national audience. Presumably, Lancaster saw the writing on the wall and was in Paris by November to start his next chapter. Gilson promptly booked a session with Steve McCall (who would soon return to the States after several years in France) and Sylvian Marc, the electric bassist for Malagasy, a band from Madagascar featured on early PALM releases. Us does not sound like an ad hoc date. From the outset of “McCall All,” the volatile chemistry of Lancaster’s keening alto, McCall’s churning, propulsive drums, and Marc’s often sprinting counter figures, is compelling. After an opening ten-minute barrage, McCall and Marc lay out for Lancaster to preach momentarily before the trio launches into another scorching exposition. Lancaster then cues the cooling down of this side-long performance with a lengthy quoting of “Naima.” With Lancaster playing flute and McCall employing mallets and disengaging his snares, “Flora” takes on a more impressionist tilt, but the push and pull between the three improvisers creates an undercurrent that repeatedly attempts to fully surface, distinguishing the performance from the standard snapshot of paradisal bliss. Although “John III” confirms Lancaster to have great control in bending pitches, thickening and thinning the textures of long notes, and lacing together phrases from the depths of the African American music continuum, ending the album with this unaccompanied alto solo is anticlimactic. “Us” and “Just Test,” the two sides of the 45 that accompanied the original LP, are included on the CD: both are generic funk workouts that land closer to Gary Bartz than Maceo Parker. On the basis of Us, Gilson began extensively recording Lancaster, but not all of the sessions were released contemporaneously. Gilson's instincts about presenting Lancaster were hit and miss, the case in point being Mother Africa. The two tracks originally issued on LP featured a quintet co-led by Lancaster and Clint Jackson III, a trumpeter from Fort Worth who was busking in Paris when Lancaster first encountered him. The band is rounded out by Speller, drummer Jonathan Dickinson, and bassist – and Gilson favorite – Jean-François Catoire. The music was solid when Gilson was hands off: on “We the Blessed,” Lancaster and Jackson proved to be a persuasive front line, with Speller, Dickinson, and Catoire (whom Gilson habitually foregrounded in the mix) providing plenty of fuel. However, Gilson suffered from Leonard Feather syndrome, and imposed forgettable compositions like “Mother Africa, in 3 parts” and “Love Always” on the ensemble – the latter, included on the CD as a bonus track, also features his serviceable piano playing. Gilson also made the inexplicable decision of retaining a few minutes of talk-punctuated dead air between the sections of the title piece. Even though “John III” had its shortcomings as a finale to Us, the decision to make an album focusing on unaccompanied solos is evidence that Lancaster and Gilson knew which way the winds were about to blow. Even though Anthony Braxton’s For Alto and Saxophone Improvisations Series F were the only solo saxophone albums then on the market, Steve Lacy, Roscoe Mitchell, and others were already developing their respective repertoires that would be documented in a succession of enduring albums, beginning with Lacy’s Solo, issued later in ‘74. As a multi-instrumentalist, Lancaster had the varied assets to engage a broader audience; as a soloist who more overtly referenced traditional African American vernaculars than Braxton, he had the potential of keeping them engaged. For the most part, Exactement is a stellar, surprise-filled album. In addition to a roots-tapping alto solo, his pieces for unaccompanied soprano saxophone, flute, bass clarinet (an impeccably structured, thoroughly unDolphy-like gem worthy of an anthology of the horn’s history in jazz and improvised music), and an alto solo with what sounds like the Varitone introduced by Eddie Harris on Plug Me In are legacy tracks. Lancaster demonstrates immaculate technique and a focused development of materials. However, it is easy to understand why the album did not place Lancaster among his more celebrated contemporaries, particularly Stateside. It was a double LP issued at a time when European labels were scantily available in the US, and commanded high prices when they were. It also could be not be conveniently divided into two separate volumes as Inner City did with Saxophone Solos Series F in ‘76. The overall shape of the collection would have been mangled, as the first disc begins with a proficient but arguably out-of-place, Japanese-influenced piano solo, and the second has two energetic flute-percussion duets with Speller sandwiched between the bass clarinet solo and the concluding sanctified soprano solo. Less could have been much more than more; it may have elevated Exactement to classic status decades ago. It is obvious why Lancaster’s last outing for PALM – Funny Funky Rib Crib – was only released after an eight-year delay and Gilson’s sale of the label: it’s mediocre. Assembling Jackson, McCall, François Tusques, guitarist François Nyombo, Malagasy’s rhythm section, and others, did not produce a cross-cultural chemistry; rather, Lancaster doubled down on funk formulae. It was a disappointing conclusion to a body of work affirming Lancaster’s status as a minor poet well worth rereading.
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