Byard Lancaster was born on August 6, 1942, in Philadelphia. Lancaster's
family is from the South; his mother was born near Gloucester, VA, and
his mother's family is registered as having started the first slave
uprising in 1743, on September 13th. His father was a very good businessman
and brought his mother to Philadelphia. Lancaster has three siblings; his brothers are a businessman and
politician and an educator, respectively, and his sister, Dr. Mary Anne
Lancaster Tyler, is a noted musicologist who studied with Donald Byrd and
Nathan Davis. Byard and his sister were the musicians of the family and played in
church starting in 1949. Byard played piano until age five, when his mother
bought him his first alto saxophone: “I wanted to play saxophone originally,
because there was this junkie across the street who sat on his porch high
and played every day.”
Lancaster became an in-demand
section saxophonist in school. He was restless to try new things and new
approaches. Lancaster attended the Settlement Music School in 1959, the
oldest music school in the country and Lola Junior High and Germantown High
with pianist Kenny Barron.
Lancaster attended Shaw University, in North
Carolina, for his first year. Then, he went to Berklee School of Music and was a part
of the class of the Second Wave of free jazz, including pianist Dave Burrell, trumpeter Ted Daniel and drummer Bobby Kapp.
He studied music education and, with Burrell, orchestrated loft
parties and late-night jam sessions attended by school musicians and jazzmen like Lee Morgan and Elvin Jones.
Following Berklee, Lancaster and Burrell moved to New York and Burrell
quickly started another loft space at Bowery and Bond Streets, where Elvin Jones and Archie Shepp
came. Archie
lived up the street and Rashid Ali lived not too far away, Amiri Baraka,
Marzette Watts. Marzette wanted to learn the saxophone, and Archie wouldn't
teach him, so I taught him.
In 1969, Lancaster went to Paris and played the Actuel
Festival with
Sunny Murray, with whom Lancaster made his first session - Sunny Murray Quintet
(ESP, 1966). He returned to Philadelphia after the festival, and returned to
France, with Murray, in 1971, and stayed for six months.
Lancaster returned, in
1974, on his own and met with pianist-composer Jef Gilson, producer of Palm
Records and a catalyst of the Parisian avant garde jazz scene. He recorded
nine sessions for Palm, including important duets with percussionist Keino
Speller (Exactement, 1975), a trio with bassist Sylvain Marc and drummer
Steve McCall entitled "Us", and a tribute to James Brown.
He went back to New York,
in 1978, and to Philadelphia, shortly after, returning to his
roots. “Philadelphia is a tribal city, the spiritual capital of the United States and rivals
Mecca. The laws of the country and its culture were born there, and we are
the root of all culture in the world because we're running the world culture,
now, and the root of America is Philadelphia.”
Lancaster's labels, Dogtown and Philly Jazz reference the
history of Philadelphia and its height as the cultural capital. “Even though
we call it 'Philly Jazz', it really means music,” and Lancaster wants to
bring jazz, R&B, rock, reggae and all other forms of music to the streets,
schools and to the people. Byard Lancaster knows that building from the ground up is the first step
in the process of sonic and spiritual liberation.