Oliver Eugene Lake was born September 14, 1942, in Marianna, Arkansas. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he began playing drums as a child before switching to saxophone at eighteen. He attended Sumner High School in St. Louis and went on to Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, earning a bachelor's degree in 1968. Through the late 1960s and into the early 1970s he taught school and worked around the St. Louis jazz scene while co-founding and leading the Black Artists' Group (BAG), an interdisciplinary collective of musicians, poets, dancers, and visual artists, alongside saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill and drummer Charles "Bobo" Shaw.

BAG sent several of its members to Paris in the early 1970s, and Lake lived there from 1972 to 1974, working in a quintet drawn from his fellow BAG musicians (documented on the Human Arts Ensemble's Whisper of Dharma, 1972). By 1975 he had relocated, like most of his BAG colleagues, to New York City, where he became active in the loft-jazz scene centered on downtown lofts such as Studio Rivbea. His early leader albums from this period, Heavy Spirits (1975, Arista/Freedom) and Holding Together (1976, Black Saint), alongside Ntu: Point From Which Creation Begins (recorded 1971, released 1976, Arista/Freedom), established him as one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from the loft scene.

In 1976, Lake co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet with Hemphill, baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, and tenor saxophonist David Murray, a cooperative, drummerless quartet built entirely around four saxophones. The group's debut album, Point of No Return, was recorded live and released in 1977 on the German label Moers Music. Over the following decades the World Saxophone Quartet built an audience unusually large for a free-jazz ensemble, particularly with its Elektra Nonesuch albums of Duke Ellington arrangements and R&B repertoire in the late 1980s. The band continued to record and tour, with later personnel changes bringing in saxophonists including James Carter and Kidd Jordan, until it was disbanded in 2016.

Alongside the World Saxophone Quartet, Lake sustained a prolific career as a leader under his own name and through a series of working bands billed under his own name: the Oliver Lake Quartet, Quintet, and Trio; a reggae- and funk-inflected band called Jump Up, whose self-titled 1982 album on Gramavision brought him a degree of pop crossover attention; and, from the 2000s onward, the Oliver Lake Steel Quartet, Oliver Lake Organ Trio, and Oliver Lake Organ Quartet, plus the large-ensemble Oliver Lake Big Band. His catalog as a leader runs from Passing Thru (1974) through albums for Arista/Freedom, Black Saint, Gramavision, Justin Time, and Passin' Thru Records (his own imprint) into the 2020s.

In the late 1980s, Lake began an ongoing musical partnership with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Andrew Cyrille after the three had repeatedly hired one another for their own projects; the collective trio they eventually named Trio 3 made its first recording together, Live in Willisau, in 1992 (released 1997 on the Swiss label Dizim). Trio 3 recorded eleven albums over roughly three decades, several with a guest pianist (Irène Schweizer, Geri Allen, Jason Moran, and Vijay Iyer all appeared on individual releases), before disbanding after a final performance at Dizzy's Club in New York in February 2022. Lake was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, the Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award at the Kennedy Center in 2006, and the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2014.

Lake's later work included the 2015 duo album To Roy, a tribute to trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr. recorded with bassist William Parker, and the OGJB Quartet, a cooperative band with cornetist Graham Haynes, bassist Joe Fonda, and drummer Barry Altschul that recorded Bamako (2019) and Ode to O (2022) for the Finnish label TUM. He continued to lead and record into the following decade, releasing Spirit in 2023 and seeing a 1975-76 Studio Rivbea concert recording issued in 2025 by NoBusiness Records. He is the father of drummer Gene Lake and has been a longtime resident of Montclair, New Jersey.

Lake's alto saxophone sound is astringent and immediately identifiable: a piercing, vocalized tone applied with a bluesy, cutting attack that critics have likened to both Eric Dolphy's harmonic daring and the funk bite of a rhythm-and-blues saxophonist. That sound made him a natural lead voice in the World Saxophone Quartet, whose all-saxophone format demanded a player who could function as both melodic lead and rhythmic engine without a drummer. Lake never confined himself to the free-jazz mainstream his BAG and loft-jazz roots might suggest; across his career he moved between uncompromising improvised music, R&B- and reggae-inflected material with Jump Up, orchestral and string-ensemble writing, and collaborations with rock and pop artists, reflecting his parallel work as a poet and visual artist as much as a saxophonist's restlessness.