Peter Lamb is not timid about his passion for jazz and the saxophone. Music permeates his family, but the instrument choice wasn’t a sure thing. Lamb was born in San Francisco, where his father was a well-connected musician who roomed with Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, knew Ken Kesey and Janis Joplin and played at The Fillmore, but he moved to Raleigh when he was 8. He was surrounded by music in those early days.

“My grandmother was a concert pianist. My brother is a trumpet player. My stepfather was a jazz DJ. There was always jazz in my house, but as far as taking the saxophone,” explained Lamb, “that was just completely on a whim.”

The moment came during his first week of middle school, when he was given a choice of electives.

“It was either P.E. or Art,” Lamb said. “I love exercise, but I freaking hate sports – I have no interest in playing sports. So I was like, ‘I’ll just join band class.’

“I got to band class and was like, ‘I think saxophone is cool.’ That was it. That one decision changed my life completely. Because now I own a saxophone repair shop, I teach saxophone and I play saxophone. My entire life is saxophone.”

He leaned in after he made the choice. He received lessons from Gregg Gelb, a prominent Raleigh jazz saxophonist, and many others over the years. He earned his Jazz Performance degree from ECU.

“I moved to New York after college and lived there until 9/11 happened. I would go to the jam sessions every night and play with all the players I could play with,” Lamb said. “It’s a constant, and still it’s a constant learning thing. I practice every morning.”

After moving back to Raleigh, Lamb found a place in a band called the Countdown Quartet, led by a former member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, trombone player Dave Wright.

“Then, Dave decided he was going to go in another direction, and the band stopped, and I became a freelance sax player.” But Lamb soon found another pack.

“We’re kind of just like family,” said Lamb of his band mates in Peter Lamb and the Wolves, ignoring the fact that one of the members, Paul Rogers, is Lamb’s biological brother. Lamb plays tenor saxophone, Rogers plays trumpet, Mark Wells is the keyboardist and vocalist, Peter Kimosh plays upright bass and Stephen Coffman is on the drums.

The group formed in 2008, when a Raleigh bar, Humble Pie, hired Lamb to play a show for the night of President Barack Obama’s first inauguration.
“I was just a saxophone player living in Raleigh, and they’re like, ‘Can you put together a band?’” Lamb recalls. His wife, Jessica, came up with the name, and it stuck.

“People really liked the the band. I didn’t know it was going to be a thing.”

But they kept playing. They released their self-titled debut album in 2010. Shortly thereafter, Lamb said, the band was hired more and more for gigs around the state.

“A lot of it had to do with the advent of music appearing on like Spotify and the ability for anyone over the world to hear us, so they don’t have to buy an album. They could just listen to us on the internet.”
They were doing shows all over the state, particularly Charlotte, where the Democratic National Convention was held in 2012, and someone took notice. The band was invited to Washington, D.C. to play the night of President Obama’s second inauguration.

In 2013, they released their second album, Humble Pie, named after the venue that started it all, and then, their third album in 2016, Carolina Tiger Milk. After its release, North Carolina music writer David Menconi said this of the album: “Recorded in the upstairs room at Lamb’s former workplace Marsh Woodwinds, Carolina Tiger Milk is an all-star super-session featuring some of the best of North Carolina’s roots, jazz, and blues players – The Old Ceremony frontman Django Haskins, Sidecar Social Club singer Lisa Wood, bluesman Bullfrog Willard McGhee and even the legendary James Brown sideman Maceo Parker.”

This past decade has brought Lamb and the Wolves to 17 years as a group, with another album in 2021, Live at Bond Brothers Eastside.

“We’re obviously good friends. We’re there for each other and we show up to gigs early and set up our stuff,” said Lamb of the experience. “It’s ‘How’s it going, and how was your week?’ You know? It’s just like hanging out with your buddies, and instead of going to the bar and drinking, we’re going to the bar and playing.”

That tight-knit relationship allows for flexibility in the writing process. Originally, Lamb said he was following in the footsteps of some of the greats.
“When I started, it was kind of my idea of what I thought was cool – that anything I thought was music could become a jazz,” he said. “Kind of like how Miles Davis recorded ‘Someday My Prince Would Come,’ Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things.’ All the old jazz people would take songs in the pop culture and turn them into jazz songs. So we do things like Super Mario Brothers and Tom Waits, Astor Piazzolla and just whatever. We would put it into a jazz format and see how it comes out. And that’s kind of how the band started. But now that we’ve been together for so long, just everybody contributes.”

The work they’re doing now is in anticipation of a recording studio Kimosh is set to open in the near future.

“We’re going to start rehearsing in his place,” Lamb said/ “While we’re rehearsing, we’re just going to start recording everything we rehearse, and see if we can’t put together an album like that.

“Then there’s a really amazing studio that opened in Durham by a guy named Dave Tilley. He recorded our first three albums, and he’s a good buddy of mine. His new studio uses nothing but ribbon microphones and old, old stuff – everything is analog. So our goal is to next year, spend a week in there and really knock out some stuff, and, hopefully, two years from now have two new albums.”

Lamb is in a different stage of his life than when he gathered the wolves. He has a family, teaches and runs a business called Flying Squirrel Music, where he repairs saxophones. He doesn’t accept a lot of gigs far afield.
“I did a lot of that when I was in my 20s, and I’m in my 40s now, and so I try to play just in North Carolina, just to make it easy on both my business, my wife and my family.

Peter Lamb and the Wolves still roam the state, they’re playing two gigs this weekend, including one in Pinehurst this Sunday, September 15, hosted by Vision 4 Moore and benefiting Linden Lodge Foundation.

But Lamb marvels at the experience he’s had with the group.

“We’ve kind of grown old together, you know, and, and it’s a lovely thing because the guys that I work with are just fantastic people,” said Lamb. “I’m just so fortunate to have them in my band. And I keep wondering, ‘Why are they playing with me?’ You know, like what happened? Haven’t they figured out that they could be playing with anybody? What are they doing? But, no, it’s really great.”

See their discography.