"Oliver Lake (born September 14, 1942) is an American jazz saxophonist, flutist, composer and poet. He is known mainly for alto saxophone but he also performs on soprano and flute.

During the 1960s Lake worked with the Black Artists Group in St. Louis. In 1977 he founded the World Saxophone Quartet with David Murray, Julius Hemphill, and Hamiet Bluiett. He has worked in the group Trio 3 with Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille. He is the father of drummer Gene Lake.

Lake has been a resident of Montclair, New Jersey."

"Michael Gregory Jackson (born August 28, 1953, New Haven, Connecticut) is an American jazz, blues, and rock guitarist and singer.[1] Early in his career, he was known as Michael Gregory to avoid being confused with pop singer Michael Jackson. In 2013, he returned to using his full name.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jackson worked with avant-garde jazz musicians such as Pheeroan akLaff, Oliver Lake, and Baikida Carroll. He worked with playwright Ntozake Shange, poet Jessica Hagedorn, and poet Thulani Davis at the Public Theatre, New York City. Following this he began working more in rock, jazz fusion, and R&B. He worked with Walter Becker of Steely Dan. In 1983 Nile Rodgers produced Situation-X for Island Records.

In 2013 he formed Michael Gregory Jackson's Clarity Quartet and Michael Gregory Jackson's Clarity TRiO. His groups have included Anthony Davis, Baikida Carroll, Bob Moses, David Murray, Jerome Harris, Julius Hemphill, Mark Helias, Mark Trayle, Marty Ehrlich, Oliver Lake, Pheeroan aKLaff, Wadada Leo Smith, and Will Calhoun."

"Fred Hopkins had one of the most forcefully distinctive sounds of any jazz bass player of the last 30 years. Many practitioners of an instrument that has grown in stature since the war were better known. Hopkins rarely led a band of his own and was involved in an exploratory jazz movement that struggled for recognition. Yet to bass players, and listeners who let his music touch them, Hopkins was a musician of remarkable expressiveness and formidable technique.

He was involved with many playing partners and appeared on innumerable recordings, but it was his work with the trio Air (also featuring saxophonist Henry Threadgill and drummer Steve McCall) that showed how inventive and responsive he could be. Air was a mercurial, sometimes aggressive, utterly ingenious ensemble that sprang out of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an influential Chicago self-help movement for experimental players developing in the wake of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane's approach to jazz which made musician-led infrastructures necessary because the mainstream record industry was terrified of it. The band was the perfect setting for Hopkins, with his big sound, maverick approach and boldness of conception.

Like Ray Brown and Wilbur Ware, he had a loud and lustrous sound, reverberating with overtones. But though he could sustain a dark, billowing backdrop for the work of busier partners, he was also capable of astonishing agility, horn-like flurries of improvised melody full of aching, slurred sounds, plucked effects like percussion, cliff-hanging bowing experiments, and sustained low notes that seemed to rise out of the floor like a church organ. He was an ideal foil for the light, restless McCall and the mercurial, emotional Threadgill.

Fred Hopkins grew up on Chicago's South Side, moved to New York in the 1970s, then returned to Chicago for his last years. For his understanding of group improvisation, and his ability to underpin and embroider spontaneous ensemble performance, he was much in demand and his playing partners included the leading figures of the 1960s and 1970s American avant-garde, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Don Pullen and the multi-faceted saxophone hero David Murray, whose groups turned out to be some of Hopkins's most fruitful outlets.

Like many Chicago jazz luminaries, Hopkins was inspired by Captain Walter Dyett's widely respected music programme at Du Sable High School. He also worked in the city's Civic Orchestra, and studied bass with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Joseph Guastafeste. He included among his lasting inspirations the classical bassist and conductor Serge Koussevitsky, but it was the Chicago free scene that revealed his potential.

The seeds of Air were sown in a 1971 band with the same line-up, called Reflections, the more lasting version being formed in 1975 as a free-improvising ensemble but one guided by the compositional inspiration of Threadgill, and at times exploring the work of elder statesmen such as Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton.

Fred Hopkins was as forceful, vivid and charismatic as his sound, and followed his own path as a performer. Yet he only took to leading bands in his last years, and it was as a supreme accompanist on an instrument he seemed to make both gentle and thunderously assertive that he was in his element."

"Phillip Sanford Wilson (September 8, 1941 - March 25, 1992) was an American blues and jazz drummer, a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, Phillip Wilson was a third generation musician. His grandfather, Ira Kimball, was a percussionist playing on the riverboats that traveled down the Mississippi from St Louis to New Orleans. His recording debut was with Sam Lazar, noted for having one of the first interracial bands in the St. Louis area. After moving to Chicago, Illinois, he became a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians AACM and performed with the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

He joined up with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1967 at a time when the band membership changed greatly, including an added horn section. He recorded three albums with the group. Wilson's song "Love March", written with Gene Dinwiddie, was performed at Woodstock and released in 1970 on the live album from the festival.

Wilson, along with Dinwiddie and fellow former Butterfield Band member Buzz Feiten, formed the jazz-rock band Full Moon in the early 1970s. They recorded a self-titled album which is considered one of the finest early examples of jazz fusion. Wilson was part of the loft jazz scene in 1970s New York, worked as a session musician for Stax Records in Memphis and with Jimi Hendrix at the Cafe Au Go Go and Generation Club in 1968, and recorded with The Last Poets, Fontella Bass, Olu Dara, David Murray, Anthony Braxton, Carla Bley and many others. During the 1980s, he worked extensively with Lester Bowie. In 1985, he and Bill Laswell co-produced the album Down by Law under the group name Deadline. Near the end of his life, he was actively pursuing his music career and had been performing regularly at Manhattan's Lower East Side hot spot Deanna's.

Wilson was stalked and murdered in New York City on March 25, 1992. As a result of the America's Most Wanted television program, Marvin Slater was arrested and later convicted, in 1997 for premeditated murder, and sentenced to 33 1/3 years in state prison. The motive for this murder was not revealed during the trial and is still unknown."

"Jerome Douglas Cooper (December 14, 1946 - May 6, 2015) was an American free jazz musician. In addition to trap drums, Cooper played balafon, chirimia and various electronic instruments, and referred to himself as a "multi-dimensional drummer," meaning that his playing involved "layers of sounds and rhythms". AllMusic reviewer Ron Wynn called him "A sparkling drummer and percussionist... An excellent accompanist". Another Allmusic reviewer stated that "in the truest sense this drummer is a magician, adept at transformation and the creation of sacred space".

Cooper studied with Oliver Coleman and Walter Dyett in the late 1950s and early 1960s, then studied at the American Conservatory of Music and Loop College. In 1968, he worked with Oscar Brown, Jr. and Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre in the U.S. but moved to Europe before the end of the decade, where he played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Steve Lacy, Lou Bennett (with whom he visited Gambia and Senegal), the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Alan Silva, and Noah Howard. After returning to the U.S. in 1971, he joined the Revolutionary Ensemble alongside Leroy Jenkins and Sirone, where he remained for several years, and played piano, flute, and bugle in addition to drums. In the 1970s, he played with Sam Rivers, George Adams, Karl Berger, Andrew Hill, and Anthony Braxton. In the 1980s he worked with McIntyre again, as well as with Cecil Taylor.

Cooper died in Brooklyn on May 6, 2015, aged 68, from complications of multiple myeloma, according to his daughter, Levanah Cummins-Cooper."

"Baikida Carroll (born January 15, 1947) is an American jazz trumpeter.

Carroll studied at Southern Illinois University and at the Armed Forces School of Music. Following this he became a member of the Black Artists Group in St. Louis, where he directed their big band. This group recorded in Europe in the 1970s.

Carroll was born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, and attended Vashon and Soldan High School. He studied trumpet with Vernon Nashville. His early influences were Clark Terry and Lee Morgan. Carroll worked with the All City Jazz Band, whose members included Lester Bowie, J.D. Parran and James "Jabbo" Ware. While still in high school he worked with Albert King, Little Milton, and Oliver Sain. Carroll joined the United States Army in 1965 and served in the 3rd Infantry Division Band in Wurzburg, Germany. In 1968, he returned to St. Louis and led the Baikida Carroll Sextet, also becoming orchestra conductor/director of the Black Artists Group of St. Louis (BAG), a multidisciplinary arts collective that brought him into contact with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett, and John Hicks. In 1972, Carroll, Lake, Joseph Bowie, Charles "Bobo" Shaw, and Floyd LeFlore ventured to Paris, France, touring as Oliver Lake and the Black Artists Group. He also performed with Anthony Braxton, Alan Silva, Steve Lacy, and his own quartet. He taught theory and trumpet at The American Center in Paris and was artist in residence at the Cité internationale des arts.

Carroll moved to New York City in 1975 and was active in the free jazz community. He also taught at Queens College. He began composing music for plays with Joseph Papp at the New York Public Theater and continued to score for Broadway and WNET-TV as part of the series The American Playhouse and at McCarter Theatre. In 1981, he performed at the Woodstock Jazz Festival that celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio. His performance and recorded history includes works with Julius Hemphill, Howard Johnson, Sam Rivers, Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette, Cecil Taylor, Reggie Workman, Oliver Lake, Carla Bley, Wadada Leo Smith, Jay McShann, Bobby Bradford, Roscoe Mitchell, Tim Berne and Naná Vasconcelos. "