“I had known him and worked with him since 1971 and felt privileged to play with someone who was both virtuoso musician and uniquely funny, original and generous as a person. When he died in 2012 iI felt the sadness of losing contact with a truly remarkable man. In my blog I wrote: “He actively sought out tricky situations. To me this is the measure of an improviser: a player who moves beyond their comfort zone, chips away at their own aesthetic and tics, risks foolishness and failure yet builds operational spaces in every situation, no matter how rote or ridiculous. The rest are just stylists. I say this knowing that Lol was never graced with the status of try improviser by the commissars of the game; his sidelines were his centre, his rambling ways the shadow of his bald soprano, its convolutions and folds, its serpentine unfoldings in the inaudible dark. he was dogged by eccentricity, busking, the look of him, his clothes, his baldness, his comedic turn yet never shied away from the heavy responsibility of lightening proceedings” - by David Toop from Flutter Echo Living Within Sound.

“Dare to voyage across times, cultures and self. Especially self.” - Greg Dening - Beach Crossings.

“What was incredible about Lol was that he always managed to avoid the temptation to have one singular goal, always entertaining instead a restless multiplicity of different possibilities ; and it was this, the simultaneity in his performances of what he was doing now and what he could do in the future or, indeed, just as easily have been doing now: that distinguished him from almost all of his contemporaries . This is something rarely if ever acknowledged by those who commentate on improvisation: improvisation takes place at the macro as well as the micro level...Saying yes provided him with the endless possibly of participation but, to repeat, it was the infinite openness of possibility rather than the finite closure of participation that attracted him, In this way Lol managed to participate in many things, many more than anyone else I know, yet without becoming ‘a part’ of that thing, alongside, disengaged as well as engaged, indeed often engaged with disengagement.” Gary Peters - from Improvising Improvisation.

“Lol never actually played with The Dammed, although his face was on one of their LPs. Nobody knows if he really got to riff with Jimi Hendrix. The legend did grow bigger than the man, but it was because of his influence, especially on the soprano sax.” - "The Hamburg Word Distillery".

A Note from Mike Cooper
Lol and I passed one another during the 60s and early 70s at many festivals we were both playing on, like ships passing on the ocean. I like to think that we both intuitively knew we would come together at some point in the future when the time was right to make some music. Our roots were similar. I was playing acoustic Country Blues and he was usually with a Blues or RandB band. “Watcha Mike” was his greeting and that was worth a lot to me at the time. I felt we were ‘mates’. Eventually in the early 1980s, together with drummer/percussionist Roger Turner, we formed the improvising trio The Recedents. It was time and that time lasted for 20 plus years. To me he was the shaman; the shape shifter; the joker - the one who “..exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behaviour.” - he would of course have denied this and would accuse me of talking ‘a load of bollocks’ - which he often did and which was and still is often true.