Background
Lambert was born in New Orleans to Charles-Richard Lambert, a native of New York, and his wife, a free Creole woman of color.
Lambert was born in New Orleans to Charles-Richard Lambert, a native of New York, and his wife, a free Creole woman of color.
He and his family were noted for talent in music and gained international acclaim. They were a very musical family. Free people of color constituted a special class in New Orleans, where they had privileges not available to free blacks in other areas.
After his mother"s death, his father married Coralie Suzanne Orzy, also a free woman of color.
They had a son Sidney Lambert, born in 1838, and the half-brothers learned to be musicians together. Because of racism in the United States, Lambert moved to France with his family in 1854, where he worked as a composer and musician.
Sometime in the 1860s, he moved his family to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he was so associated with French music that some historians referred to him as a French musician. Lambert had a piano and music store in the city.
He also became part of the Brazilian National Institute of Music.
In 1869 he greeted Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a contemporary French Creole whom he had known as a fellow musician in New Orleans. Noted students include Ernesto Nazareth. Lambert died in Rio. Numerous of his compositions are held by the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris.