By Jon Garelick

Multi-instrumentalist Andrew Lamb, with his spiritual imperative, is clearly seeking, and achieving, incantatory power.

Andrew Lamb Trio at the Lilypad, August 8.

Andrew Lamb on sax, Joe Fonda on bass, and a large gentleman in the front row of the Lilypad. Photo: Jon Garelick

The multi-instrumentalist and composer Andrew Lamb is what you could call 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) as well as J.D. Parran. In New York, he became part of the Bedford-Stuyvesant arts community and began playing and recording with prominent players in the jazz avant-garde like Warren Smith, Wilbur Morris, Henry Grimes, Marshall Allen, and Cecil Taylor.

But Lamb, 65, hasn’t left a big paper trail, and his discography is scattered. So I had never heard of him until Alex Lemski booked him for his Creative Music Series at the Lilypad. It turned out Lemski, despite his many years of broad interest in creative improv, had never heard of him either, but invited him on the enthusiastic recommendation of a trusted friend.

At the Lilypad, it was clear that I should have heard of Lamb (or at least heard him) a lot sooner. Lamb, on tenor and flute, was playing with another avant-garde stalwart, bassist Joe Fonda (a member of Anthony Braxton’s bands for years), as well as a Boston mainstay, the drummer Luther Gray.

Lamb (who also goes by The Black Lamb) is explicit about music as a spiritual, healing force, and before the set at the Lilypad, he offered a series of libations to deities and ancestors, pouring from a water bottle into a cooler on the floor. With that, Gray opened with his own kind of invocation: dry, flat, hard hits with no snare, building into insistent rolls and light, resonant cymbal work. Fonda joined him, immediately ferocious, a running independent commentary alongside Gray’s drums, mixing free pulsating phrases with exclamatory double-stops, jumping between contrasting high and low register, punctuating cadences with toothy grimaces and satisfied grunts, “Aaahhh!”

Lamb stepped up, played a couple of exclamatory phrases, pausing between each, and then retreated to take a seat and change reeds. Fonda and Gray played on. When Lamb came back, he returned to those short rhythmic-melodic phrases — building on them, playing in a robust mid-range, arpeggiating, then swooping up into long-held notes of altissimo and shifting down again for broken shards of melody.

This kind of old-school free jazz — heavy on volume, velocity, and discordant patterns free of regular meter or chord changes — is not for everyone. But for those weaned on Ornette Coleman, late Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and, later, the tenor saxophonist David S. Ware’s work with William Parker and others, it can be a tonic. Lamb, with his spiritual imperative, is clearly seeking, and achieving, incantatory power. You might think such long passages of unvaried intensity would be monotonous, but they were rife with rhythmic and melodic invention, and they never lost a sense of propulsive forward motion. There were plenty of moments where you might have felt, like Fonda, your own involuntary release of a satisfied “Aaahhh!”

It’s not as though the music was completely unrelenting. After that long (40 minutes or so) opening barrage, there was a quiet interlude for bass, soon joined by trumpeter Vance Provey (a regular at CMS events), and Lamb picking up flute to play a minor-ish melody with the air of an African folk tune. As Lamb spun his melody, Fonda plucked a seven-note vamp figure and Provey played long-toned counterpoint in assent.

After the long 50-minute first set, there was a break, and then a shorter (23 minutes or so) second set. There was more fury here, but there were also more breaks for quiet moments, and at one point Lamb — with shoulder-length hair, dressed in a jack-o-lantern orange open shirt over black t-shirt and pants — moved around the stage looking up at the ceiling as he played (he usually played eyes closed), as if testing the reverberations of different stage locations, or maybe just looking for something else. When the set ended, to a strong ovation, he raised his horn horizontally toward the crowd, thanked them, and said, “May the Almighty be with you.” Perhaps it was.

Jon Garelick writes regularly for the Arts Fuse and other publications. He can be reached at garelickjon@gmail.com.