If you only know Oliver Lake from the World Saxophone Quartet, you're missing half the story. Before that group existed, he was one of the founders of the Black Artists Group in St. Louis, a collective of musicians, poets, dancers and visual artists who decided in the late 1960s that they didn't need permission from the East Coast jazz establishment to make serious art. That instinct — organize, don't wait — runs through everything Lake has done since.

His alto playing is sharp and vocal, full of bends and cries that sound closer to speech than to scales. He came out of the free jazz tradition of Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, but he never got stuck there. Listen to Heavy Spirits (1975) and you'll hear strings, poetry, and structure sitting right next to total improvisation. He was never interested in noise for its own sake.

The World Saxophone Quartet, which he co-founded with Julius Hemphill, Hamiet Bluiett, and David Murray, is probably his biggest claim to fame, and for good reason — four saxophones with no rhythm section, playing everything from free blowouts to Jimi Hendrix covers, is a hard thing to pull off night after night. But Lake kept moving outside that group too. His band Jump Up folded reggae and funk into his improvising, which annoyed some purists and delighted everyone else who just wanted to dance a little at a jazz show.

He's also a painter and a poet, and that matters more than it sounds like it should — his music has the same layered, collage-like quality as his visual work, pieces built from fragments that somehow cohere. With Trio 3, alongside Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille, he's continued making music well into his eighties that still sounds alert, still sounds like it's listening to itself. Oliver Lake never became a household name, but ask any saxophonist who came up after him in St. Louis or beyond, and they'll tell you how much ground he cleared.