SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2016
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2016
VOLUME THREE NUMBER THREE
HENRY THREADGILL
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE
(December 3-9)
DEXTER GORDON
(December 10-16)
JEANNE LEE
(December 17-23)
CASSANDRA WILSON
(December 24-30)
SAM RIVERS
(December 31-January 6)
TERRY CALLIER
(January 7-13)
ODETTA
(January 14-20)
LESTER BOWIE
(January 21-27)
SHIRLEY BASSEY
(January 28-February 3)
HAMPTON HAWES
(February 4-10)
GRACHAN MONCUR III
(February 11-17)
LARRY YOUNG
(February 18-24)
http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/08/memorable-quotes-lester-bowie/
Features
Lester Bowie
August 3, 2014
JerryJazzMusician.com
“Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise… but a way of life.”
– Lester Bowie
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/lester-bowie-mn0000255287/biography
LESTER BOWIE
(1941-1999)
Artist Biography by Chris Kelsey
From the 1970s until his death in 1999, Lester Bowie
was the preeminent trumpeter of the jazz avant-garde -- one of the few
trumpet players of his generation to adopt the techniques of free jazz
successfully and completely. Indeed, Bowie
was the most successful in translating the expressive demands of the
music -- so well suited to the tonally pliant saxophone -- to the more
difficult-to-manipulate brass instrument. Like a saxophonist such as David Murray or Eric Dolphy, Bowie
invested his sound with a variety of timbral effects; his work had a
more vocal quality when compared with that of most contemporary
trumpeters. In a sense, he was a throwback to the pre-modern jazz of Cootie Williams or Bubber Miley, though Bowie
was by no means a revivalist. Though he was certainly not afraid to
appropriate the growls, whinnies, slurs, and slides of the early
jazzers, it was always in the service of a thoroughly modern
sensibility. And Bowie had chops; his style was quirky, to be sure, but grounded in
fundamental jazz concepts of melody, harmony, and rhythm.
Bowie grew up in St. Louis, playing in local jazz and rhythm & blues bands, including those led by Little Milton and Albert King. Bowie moved to Chicago in 1965, where he became musical director for singer Fontella Bass. There Bowie met most of the musicians with whom he would go on to make his name -- saxophonists Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell and drummer Jack DeJohnette among them. He was a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and (in 1969) the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Bowie's various bands included From the Root to the Source -- a sort of gospel/jazz/rock fusion group -- and Brass Fantasy, an all-brass, postmodern big band that became his most popular vehicle. Bowie's catholic tastes were evidenced by the band's repertoire; on albums, they covered a nutty assortment of tunes, ranging from Jimmy Lunceford's "Siesta for the Fiesta" to Michael Jackson's "Black and White." Besides his work as a leader and with the Art Ensemble, Bowie recorded as a sideman with DeJohnette, percussionist Kahil El'Zabar, composer Kip Hanrahan, and saxophonist David Murray. He was also a member of the mid-'80s all-star cooperative the Leaders. Bowie's music occasionally leaned too heavily on parody and aural slapstick to be truly affecting, but at its best, a Bowie-led ensemble could open the mind and move the feet in equal measure.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-lester-bowie-1125271.html
Culture
Obituary: Lester Bowie
by Steve Voce
Thursday 11 November 1999
The Independent
A CONTRADICTION amongst trumpet players, Lester Bowie was the most successful trumpeter of the avant-garde and at the same time the contemporary player who was most happy when digging about in the roots of jazz from the earlier parts of the century.
Because he used mutes in the "wah-wah" style that was a Duke Ellington speciality of the Twenties and Thirties, Bowie was sometimes known as "the new Cootie Williams" after one of Ellington's more spectacular trumpeters. Bowie was happy to lift the growls and half-valved sounds of the earlier players and drag them into his experimental playing. Gospel music also figured in his plans and there was a vocal quality to his trumpet that was unfashionable but very effective. When he played, he swept from slashing, violent improvisations to themes of haunting beauty, often stepping off in between to incorporate banal quotes from pop songs.
He also delved sideways into contemporary black pop music, and one of his most famous recordings was a vivid 16-minute version of the Platters' hit "The Great Pretender", recorded with his first wife, the singer Fontella Bass, in 1981. Was it sly humour or the wish to provide an easy access to his music that led him to follow up with long reworkings of "I Only Have Eyes For You" (1985) and Louis Armstrong's "Blueberry Hill" (1986) and "Hello, Dolly" (1987)?
His music covered the widest and most unpredictable spectrum, so that one had to absorb, next to "Blueberry Hill" on the ascetic and dignified ECM label, his composition "No Shit" - words and arrangement by Lester Bowie. The lyrics consisted of two words repeated. Bowie's music was unfailingly exuberant and everybody went along with his wry humour and volcanic trumpet playing. Except, that is, for some of the eminent younger musicians who followed and, as is the habit of the young, regarded him as either a traitor or a musical irrelevance.
Neither was the case, for Bowie was one of a group of intelligent and committed musicians who combined their music with their fight for racial freedom. Considering the emerging trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis, Bowie said, "With his chops and my brains I could have been one of the greatest." Bowie was by no means in the Marsalis league as a technician. He and his fellows in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and the subsequent Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC), a band that they formed in 1968, brought pantomime to jazz, using face make-up and creating a travelling theatre from their bands. The only programme for their concerts was that there wasn't one and they happily mixed theatrical jokes with serious creative avant-garde music.
Born in Maryland in 1941, Bowie grew up in St Louis at a time when musicians were still coming up from New Orleans. He played first in local rhythm- and-blues bands led by Little Milton and Albert King, both soon to become famous. He also worked with some of the young musicians in the city who, like him, were destined for fame. They included the saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman and the drummer Jack DeJohnette. Bowie moved to Chicago in 1965, where he met Fontella Bass and became her musical director.
The same year, the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams formed the AACM as a jazz workshop and Bowie joined him. Their first recordings in 1967 show a group of unknown but very advanced musicians in completely spontaneous but expert and intoxicating improvisations. From this point on Bowie and his friends were no strangers to odd instrumentation. He played trumpet and flugelhorn but also anything exotic that seized his fancy, like bass drum or the mysterious cowhorn. Logs, bells, sirens, gongs, whistles and a zither also found their way into the armoury.
The band, finding no outlet at home, moved to France in 1968 and the following year recorded the LP A Jackson in Your House. Typically, the piece begins with a dignified and pompous overture which is punctured by the laughter of the band before it rocks into a Dixieland ensemble complete with clarinet and then into an approximation of the swing style. Although the music is unusually and intentionally funny, the direct social criticism of A Message to Our Folks done a couple of months later is much more serious. The two albums perhaps typified Bowie's weakness for slapstick and the way it occasionally diluted his more serious messages.
In 1969 ACM was founded with a completely new vision of jazz. On stage, the band imitated the street bands of South America, recited poetry and used a variety of unlikely sound effects as they played both avant-garde and more conventional jazz.
Bowie moved all over Europe and recorded in 1969 as soloist and composer of the suite Gettin' to Know Y'All with the Baden-Baden Free Jazz Orchestra, a 50-piece group that included some of the top stars of European jazz. More recently, in 1994, he recorded with the Polish avant-garde band Milosc, and had been in London this autumn with his group Brass Fantasy.
He didn't confine himself to Europe and performed with local drummers in Senegal during an African visit in 1974. In 1983 he was a member of the New York Hot Trumpet Repertory with Wynton Marsalis and played with the all-star avant-garde group the Leaders in the middle Eighties.
In 1990 he recorded the theme music for the television series The Bill Cosby Show and worked on film soundtracks with the composer Philippe Sard in the early Nineties. He taught at many trumpet clinics and was at one time artist in residence in colleges at Yale, Dartmouth and Harvard.
He has left a multitude of recordings, one of the most fascinating a double LP from 1982 called All the Magic. It features on the first LP his group with Fontella Bass and David Peaston in gospel-inspired vocals and includes his suite For Louie. The second has Bowie in a series of often hilarious trumpet solos, including amongst them "Miles Davis Meets Donald Duck".
In 1985 he first formed Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, the group that he recently brought to Britain. It consisted of four trumpets, two trombones, French horn, tuba and drums. Later the line-up rose to 10 pieces. The band was quite dazzling, using imaginative tone colours and subtle scoring that was perhaps obscured by the reinterpretation of pop songs that his audiences had come to love and expect. His programmes for Brass Fantasy included Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love For You" and Patsy Cline's "Crazy". The 1990 album by the band, My Way, included the Sinatra hit along with "Honky Tonk" and James Brown's "I Got You".
He remained a sight to make the eyes sore and in later years added sequins to his trademark white medical coat.
William Lester Bowie, trumpet and flugelhorn player, composer and bandleader: born Frederick, Maryland 11 October 1941; twice married (six children); died New York 8 November 1999
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/lesterbowie
Lester Bowie was one of the most adventurous and proficient manipulators of the trumpet, having made use of everything from strict melodic lines to abstracted explosions of sound. He became a member of the newly- established Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and it was through this he met the musicians with whom he went on to form the radical Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Lester Bowie was born in Frederick, Maryland in 1941, but he was raised in St. Louis, Missouri. His trumpet- playing dad was a high school band director who owned a master's degree, then, not an easy feat for a black man. By age five Lester was taking lessons from a proud father and by 14 he was under the wing of St. Louis trumpeter, Bobby Danzie, who was instrumental in tuning the young Bowie's jazz ears. A year later he was broadcasting and directing his own band. Later he joined the Air Force at 17, and played in ‘after hours’ R&B clubs in Texas.
It was while in the service that Lester began to incorporate elements of his early idol, Louis Armstrong, into his own style of playing. By the time his stint with Uncle Sam's regulars ended, those ears had absorbed Kenny Dorham and Freddie Hubbard , as well. An across-the-river (East St. Louis, Illinois) local kid had further tickled Lester's lobes as Miles Davis ' smoothness crept into Lester's playing.
If you're getting the idea that Lester Bowie is a hybrid, with roots and branches of varying hues, well, you're getting the right idea. But His eclecticism does not stop there. He went on the road with Blues, R&B, circus bands and carnival tent shows, settling back in St. Louis to form a hard-bop group with drummer Phillip Wilson, which included John Chapman on piano. His association with the likes of Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, and Floyd LaFlore, led to the formation of the Black Artist Guild (BAG).
Lester landed in Chicago in 1965 with his entire band in his horn and embarked on the obvious next exploration, the so-called “free-jazz” movement. He joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) the following year. As he walked into the room for his first meeting, he was startled to see a passel of musicians the world was not yet ready to take to its bosom: Malachi Favors, Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre, Roscoe Mitchell, and many others. From that not quite chance meeting sprang the Art Ensemble of Chicago, among the most influential and creative groups in modern music: Lester Bowie, (trumpet) Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, (woodwinds) Malachi Favors Maghostut, (bass) and eventually, Famoudou Don Moye (percussion).
Moving into the 70's and 80's, Lester's penchant for “serious fun” led him to albums under his own name with titles such as “Rope-A-Dope” (for Muhammad Ali), “Let the Good Times Roll,” “The Great Pretender,” “Its Howdy Doody Time,” and “Miles Davis meets Donald Duck.”
Bowie's various bands have included From the Root to the Source, a sort of gospel/jazz/rock fusion group, and Brass Fantasy, Lester's last band, boasted ten assorted trumpets, trombones, French Horns, tuba and drums. Nothing escaped their repertoire: the free, obscure, standards of decades past, funk, Latin, R&B. Brass Fantasy played them, poked fun at them, but always in good taste. Besides his work as a leader and with the Art Ensemble, Bowie has recorded as a sideman with drummer Jack DeJohnette, percussionist Kahil El'zabar, composer Kip Hanrahan, and saxophonist David Murray. He was also a member of the mid-'80s all-star cooperative the Leaders.
Lester believed in expanding his musical philosophies. In that endeavor, he was a Yale Fellow, and a Visiting professor at Harvard and Dartmouth, as well as a clinician and lecturer. Lester calls it all “avant pop”. In fact, he named an album just that. His philosophy: “All's fair in love and war....and music is both.....so use anything, as long as it works.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/nov/11/guardianobituaries.johnfordham
Lester Bowie
Bold improviser at the cutting-edge of jazz
by John Fordham
Wednesday 10 November 1999
The Art Ensemble of Chicago was from 1968 until recent times one of the boldest, most colourful and yet tradition-steeped of all jazz ensembles to juggle the hot coals of free-improvisation. It was also the setting in which most of his admirers first encountered the trumpeter Lester Bowie, who has died of liver cancer aged 58.
The Art Ensemble's performances could resemble a sermon, a drama, a stand-up comedy routine and a history lecture all at once, and Bowie was usually central to the success of all those elements. The Art Ensemble, which also originally featured Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell on reeds, Malachi Favors on bass and Don Moye on drums, was decisively an improvising band preoccupied with performance rather than self-absorbed rumination, and that was Bowie's musical impulse too.
With its tribal makeup and idiosyncratic couture, the experience of an Art Ensemble show could suggest a rolling slide-show of visual and aural images - forests seething with life, village fiestas, traffic jams, arguments, stampedes. The musical framework on which it was festooned featured references from every era of jazz, from southlands marching music to total free-improvisation via ideas reminiscent of Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman and many other postwar jazz pioneers.
Bowie's star climbed from the early 80s onward, when the Art Ensemble attracted unprecedented mainstream acclaim for a band so close to the avant garde. An affable, funny and shrewdly analytical man, Bowie was often the public voice for the Art Ensemble, despite its collectivity - and he was widely liked as well as admired for an instantly recognisable trumpet sound that joined the cutting-edge jazz of the 60s and 70s to the voice-like instrumental sounds of the earliest jazz, and particularly to the raucous, earthy and expressive intonation of Duke Ellington's famous "hot" brass star of the 20s, James "Bubber" Miley.
Dapper and relaxed, with a wealth of both anecdote and argument at his disposal, Bowie was an adopted Chicagoan raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, and St Louis, Missouri. His enthusiasm for cheroots and a mischievous set of the eyebrows made him sometimes resemble a black Groucho Marx, a connection he often seemed to consolidate on stage.
Bowie was always an enthusiast for openness and experimentation, but he was not intimidated by the ascetic tendencies of some experimenters into eschewing the accessible and the populist. He recorded everything from free-jazz to an affectionately sardonic version of the pop song The Great Pretender, the latter with his own group Brass Fantasy, which explored a broad repertoire of postwar pop and Motown music through the medium of a New Orleans-style brass band. The word "jazz" was only of passing interest to him, and the Art Ensemble would preface its shows by announcing its intention to play: "great black music - ancient to the future".
Bowie began playing at the age of five and by his mid-teens was leading a youth group in St Louis. The story went that he would practise his trumpet by an open window hoping that Louis Armstrong might be in the vicinity and hear him. He absorbed many jazz trumpet styles including the intricate and linear manner of bebop, which he rarely displayed in later performances, leading detractors of his rough-cut style to say he was only a special-effects man. He loved the blues - often working with r&b bands in his early career, with Albert King and Little Milton, on sessions for Chess Records, and in such settings with his first wife, the singer Fontella Bass.
Bowie was also an active self-help campaigner for unconventional musicians, helping to form BAG (the Black Artists Group) and the Great Black Music Orchestra in St Louis. In 1966 he moved to Chicago, and became involved with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, playing in the band of Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell in what became a long association.
It was Bowie and Mitchell who spawned the Art Ensemble, but the trumpeter also worked with many other stars of the period's black avant garde, including Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, Jimmy Lyons and Cecil Taylor. Bowie also frequently worked as a composer, and as a participator in unorthodox crossovers, such as the collaboration with African non-jazz musicians and dancers he helped organise for a Camden jazz festival in London in the 80s.
In between Art Ensemble tours, Bowie would sometimes pack a bag and head for the airport with his trumpet, sure that it wouldn't let him starve. He stayed in Jamaica for a year and the locals would enquire after his health if they didn't hear him practising. In Nigeria, he worked with Fela Kuti. Bowie recalled once that he was at his wits' end in Lagos in 1977, telling himself "Lester, you finally fucked up, you can't play your way out of this. Then a guy told me to go see Fela Kuti. I took a cab to Fela's place and a little African guy comes out and says: 'You play jazz? You from Chicago? Well, you've come to the right place, 'cause we're the baddest band in Africa.' Then Fela tells me to play a blues, my speciality. I played a couple of bars and he says: 'Go get his bags, he's moving in'. I stayed with him about a year, and it was fantastic."
Bowie was legendary for his dismissal of the heroes of 80s cool bebop revivalism, notably trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. A fierce, colourful, untramelled player himself, with a penchant for a wide vibrato and the slurred, slinky half-valve effects of very early trumpeters that proposition you like a gigantic wink, Bowie disliked both the immaculately technocratic style of some of the younger players - "androids" - and the adulation of the classic jazz of the 50s and 60s.
"What worries me most about this jazz revival," he once said to the Guardian, "is that it's opened a new young audience up to jazz, and then bored them. You can't repeat the past because it's over. I have to make a Chicago reality. People here have to make a London reality. You have to use the past to make a new reality."
He is survived by his wife Deborah, six children, and two grandchildren.
•Lester Bowie, jazz musician, born October 11 1941; died November 9 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/11/arts/lester-bowie-is-dead-at-58-innovative-jazz-trumpeter.html
Arts
Lester Bowie Is Dead at 58; Innovative Jazz Trumpeter
by BEN RATLIFF
November 11, 1999
New York Times
The trumpeter, band leader and composer Lester Bowie, an icon of the experimental movement in jazz from the mid-1960's on who was also known for his comic shows and jazz-based treatments of pop music, died on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 58.
The cause was liver cancer, said his brother Byron.
Best known as a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Mr. Bowie performed and recorded for more than 30 years. In that group he developed the two things that would brand him: his knowing, Groucho Marx-like sense of humor, expressed musically and otherwise, and his appearance. In most performances he wore a long white lab coat and his narrow face was bracketed by a flat-top haircut and a sharp goatee. In publicity photos he was rarely seen without a cigar.
His early working experiences were in rhythm-and-blues bands, and a slow, expressive blues was his specialty. But the most famous part of Mr. Bowie's trumpet language was timbral effects -- glissandos, smears, growls, flutters, half-valved winces and other vocalizations that worked their way into the style of almost every self-consciously experimental jazz trumpeter who came after him, including Butch Morris, Dave Douglas, Herb Robertson and Roy Campbell.
His recordings often seemed like prankish arguments that the only way to understand jazz is to see it both in carnivalesque and intellectual contexts, to play circus music and modernist post-bop, pure hit-parade pop and nearly academic composition.Mr. Bowie was born in Frederick, Md. His father was a trumpeter who turned to high-school teaching after striving for a performance career in classical music. At age 5 Mr. Bowie was playing trumpet in daily practice with his father, and he played in dance bands as a teenager.
He joined the Army at the age of 17 and was stationed in Texas, where he served as a military policeman. Mr. Bowie credited his career longevity to the four years he spent in the service. After his discharge he played in bands led by blues and rhythm-and-blues performers including Albert King, Jackie Wilson, Rufus Thomas and Joe Tex, and was privately rehearsing more experimental music with St. Louis musicians like Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake.
He married a rhythm-and-blues singer, Fontella Bass, and moved to Chicago in 1965 to become her musical director; during that period Ms. Bass recorded ''Rescue Me,'' which became a major hit on radio. The marriage ended in divorce.
In Chicago Mr. Bowie worked with a big band led by George Hunter and played in rhythm-and-blues studio sessions, including many for Chess Records. Tiring of the grind, he followed the advice of a saxophonist colleague named Delbert Hill and attended a composers' workshop led by the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams.
Many of those in the workshop, including Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Joseph Jarman, Anthony Braxton and Jack DeJohnette, would in the next decade become major figures in the new jazz. Mr. Abrams's workshop bands formed the nucleus of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the nonprofit cooperative first organized in 1965.
Mr. Mitchell created a band with three other A.A.C.M. members: Mr. Bowie, the bassist Malachi Favors and the drummer Phillip Wilson. When Mr. Wilson left, the band had trouble finding a replacement. Out of desperation its members incorporated small percussion instruments -- gongs, bells, shakers -- into their group improvisations. This sound would be one of the staple gestures of the music played by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which the Mitchell group became in 1969.
By Mr. Bowie's reckoning, the Art Ensemble of Chicago rehearsed about 300 times a year in Chicago and gave only a handful of performances because there was almost nowhere to present their music. So they traveled to France, where there was curiosity about American experimental jazz. They made six albums in two months and performed hundreds of times in their two years there. The band played blues and Bach fugues and percussion interludes and hooting free-improvisation pieces and wore tribalist face-paint.
The Art Ensemble's notoriety followed it back to the United States, and the group was soon recording for Atlantic Records. By the mid-70's the Art Ensemble had an easier time reaching large audiences. The band soon came to define an esthetic involving ethnic music, humor, eclecticism and physical intensity that had a considerable impact.
In addition to his brother Byron, of Frederick, Mr. Bowie is survived by his current wife, Deborah; his father, W. Lester Bowie Sr., and another brother, Joseph, both of Frederick; six children, Larry Stevenson of Sardinia, Italy; Ju'lene Coney and Nueka Mitchell of St. Louis; Sukari Ivester of Chicago; Bahnamous Bowie of Queens, and Zola Bowie of Brooklyn, and 10 grandchildren.
During the 1970's Mr. Bowie spent two years in Jamaica playing and teaching trumpet and took a brief trip to Nigeria, where he became a sideman on three records with the popular bandleader Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
Mr. Bowie started one new band after another, always surrounding himself with work and often undertaking his own business affairs without a manager. He led a quintet and a gospel group, From the Root to the Source. In the early 80's, he formed the New York Hot Trumpet Quintet, which briefly included Wynton Marsalis. Later Mr. Bowie and Mr. Marsalis would often be cited in contrast in debates on the issue of futurism versus traditionalism in jazz.
He assembled a 59-piece band called the Sho Nuff Orchestra for a concert at Symphony Space in Manhattan. His octet Brass Fantasy, formed in the mid-80's, performed versions of pop and funk tunes by artists like the Platters, Michael Jackson and James Brown, and recorded for the ECM, DIW and Atlantic record labels. The group's last album was the 1998 ''Odyssey of Funk and Popular Music, Vol. 1.''
In recent years Mr. Bowie set up the Hip-Hop Feel-Harmonic, an unrecorded project with rappers and musicians in his Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene.
His sly sensibility won an appreciative following. An enduring example was his track ''Jazz Death?'' from a 1968 album by Roscoe Mitchell's band, ''Congliptious.'' It begins with Mr. Bowie's dramatically clearing his throat and asking, ''Is jazz, as we know it, dead yet?''
The reply is a long trumpet solo punctuated with silences, muted wah-wah passages, Mr. Bowie's own off-horn shrieks and murmured comments, and finally, six minutes later, a sentence: ''Well, I guess that all depends on, ah, what you know.''
http://www.nndb.com/people/495/000042369/
Lester Bowie
Born: 11-Oct-1941
Birthplace: Frederick, MD
Died: 9-Nov-1999
Location of death: New York City
Cause of death: Cancer - Liver
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: Black
Occupation: Jazz Musician
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Influential jazz trumpeter
Lester Bowie was one of the most adventurous and proficient manipulators of the trumpet, having made use of everything from strict melodic lines to abstracted explosions of sound. In his early years he played in bands directed by performers such as Albert King and Little Milton, but it was after moving to Chicago in 1965, initially to work as music director for his then-wife Fonatnella Bass, that his individual style began to fully develop. He became a member of the newly-established Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and it was through this he met the musicians with whom he went on to form the radical Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Bowie remained active with the Ensemble until his death in 1999, but worked with a variety of other musicians over the years (even making an appearance on one of David Bowie's records in 1993). His own projects included the eclectic fusion group From the Root to the Source and the popular, all-brass big band Brass Fantasy.
Brother: Joseph Bowie (musician)
Wife: Fontella Bass (div.)
Art Ensemble of Chicago 1969-
From the Root to the Source
Brass Fantasy
http://www.villagevoice.com/music/lester-bowie-19411999-6420283
Lester Bowie 1941–1999
December 7, 1999
by Gary Giddins
Village Voice
When an e-mail informed me of Lester Bowie's death—at 58, on November 8, of cancer—I was reading Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, and suddenly everything he wrote about Goethe and Marx seemed to be about Lester. "Why should modern men, who have seen what man's activity can bring about, passively accept the structure of their society as it is given?" A pretext for avant-garde jazz if I ever heard one. A subsequent idea, that revolutionary activity will undermine bourgeois rule by expressing energies "the bourgeoisie itself has set free," is pure Lester: Lester in his long white lab coat, with not one but two Mephistophelian goatees waxed into points, his hair a flattop, his eyes smiling and luminous, his trumpet knifing the air with jerky parabolas of sputtering fragments, like a machine in need of oil.
Lester was the most bourgeois of underminers, the wiliest jazz provocateur of his generation. He earned the glint in his eye honestly, along with the six children and 10 grandchildren, the Brooklyn brownstone, the Lexus, and the cigar that accentuated his preternatural calm; when he removed it, he was seriously intelligent, expansive, and funny, but when it was in his mouth you half expected to hear the heh-heh-hehs that occasionally marked his records. He was raised in St. Louis, where his father played trumpet, but he was formed by carnivals, the Air Force, a flock of r&b and soul bands, the liberating wonders of Muhal Richard Abrams's Experimental Band, and the pop culture all around him, especially that of the 1950s, which he tweaked as only a fan can. Maybe you have to know that era to be moved by the 40 seconds of "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain," intoned with his plump, creamy timbre on The Great Pretender (ECM, 1981), climaxing a side with the relentless title number, a peanut gallery's "It's Howdy Doody Time," and a cataclysmic snapshot called "Doom?"—the '50s tied up with Kate Smith's bow.
Another formative influence was his idol, Louis Armstrong, whom he celebrated when the great man was still alive. You can't imagine how refreshing it was to encounter a young avant-gardist in the early '70s who understood and loved all of Armstrong, not just the '20s classics. When Lester recorded "Hello Dolly" on Fast Last! (Muse, 1974), everyone assumed it was a send-up. But you only have to listen to realize how urgently personal and affectionate it is, a eulogy from one who knows, right through to the chortling sneeze of a coda, one of the essential tracks of that decade. "Hello Dolly" began Lester's ardent 25-year pursuit of what he recently titled The Odyssey of Funk & Popular Music (Atlantic, 1998), the only record, I'm confident, with tunes by Puccini, Cole Porter, the Spice Girls, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Teddy Pendergrass, Notorious B.I.G., and Marilyn Manson.
In that period, Lester devoted most of his energy to the punctilious Brass Fantasy and the grievously undervalued New York Organ Ensemble (with James Carter and Amina Claudine Myers never better), which made two albums in 1991 for DIW that will make my shortlist for the decade. Some of his pop excavations fell flat. Avant Pop (ECM, 1986) was all pop and no avant, though it boasts Lester's memorable solo on "Blueberry Hill" and his chorale "No Shit" (sample lyric: "No shit/No shit/No shit/No shit"). But he ultimately brought the two poles together. If the initial "Great Pretender" achieves some of its levity by comin' atcha and atcha and atcha, the tight Steve Turre arrangement on Brass Fantasy's The Fire This Time (In + Out, 1992) gives it the satisfying feel of a hard-earned theme song, climaxing another essential disc, one that also includes Turre's version of Jimmie Lunceford's "Siesta at the Fiesta," E. J. Allen's best writing and playing, and the affecting "For Louis," composed by and dedicated to the memory of Phillip Wilson. Turre also arranged (and plays a wicked solo on) the title cut from My Way (DIW, 1990), a reminder that Lester at his best isn't a satirist. His dirty secret was the same as Armstrong's and Fats Waller's—the stuff they play is the stuff they love, animated by a strong sense of irony.
But all this was part of Lester's later phases, and it's the earlier period I most relish, because I can't imagine the 1970s without him. Berman writes that 1960s attempts at modernism failed, but "sprang from a largeness of vision and imagination, and from an ardent desire to seize the day." True: Coleman, Taylor, Coltrane, Mingus, Ayler—only they did not fail, Marshall. "It was the absence of these generous visions and initiatives that made the 1970s such a bleak decade." Right again, or so it appeared until we New York provincials began to hear of a generation of musicians in Chicago who went national only after a triumphant stay in Europe. They were nothing like the preceding avant-gardists, though they could not have existed without them. They played everything and they played nothing (the longest rests on records ever); they revealed technical aplomb while developing a methodology that put their skill in question. They almost always went out swinging, but before that—this was the Art Ensemble of Chicago's m.o.—they put you through an anthropological hour of bells, chimes, chants, beeps, blats, honks, and squalls. Man, you earned your catharsis.
When I learned of Lester's death, I had to hear his first album, Numbers 1 & 2 (Nessa, 1967), which I hadn't played in at least 15 years. It holds up, truly, and so do its mates—Roscoe Mitchell's Congliptious and Old/Quartet and all the early Art Ensemble of Chicago LPs, to mention just a few Lester landmarks. These albums pass the time with an almost arrogant indifference to the clocks of the world. The music suns itself on the porch, and if it gets too hot for you, stick around, because the weather changes every minute or so. In assessing the influence of Lester and his comrades, consider Terry Martin's parenthetical liner comment on the instrumentation: "three horns and a bassist!!" That sort of lineup wouldn't merit a single exclamation point today. Lester's best-known band had four trumpets, two trombones, French horn, tuba, and two drummers!!!
About a quarter into "Number 1," Lester plays a lovely, lyrical passage of sustained notes, before kneading his timbre into more expressive and eccentric tones, ending in the tuba's range. Much has been made of his flutters and growls, his ascending rips that fade off into high, whinnying slurs or his guffawing half-valve effects, but he was a commanding, skilled trumpet player—here and in the startling unison episodes of "Number 2," the limning of the melody in part two of the Art Ensemble's epochal People in Sorrow (Nessa, 1969), and numerous other instances. He showed how much he could play one night in 1977, sitting in with Roy Eldridge at Jimmy Ryan's, an encounter still talked about. A few nights ago, Eddie Locke, Roy's drummer, remembered that Roy arrived three hours early he was so nervous, and though, as always, he kept his crown, Lester acquitted himself admirably and the older guys were impressed—they didn't like the avant-garde, but they knew whatever he played must be deliberate, because he had the chops and knew the changes.
Listening to the discs today, it's hard to believe anyone questioned his ability, but the same doubts were registered about Ornette and Cecil. Lester's importance as a trumpeter can hardly be overstated. Except for Don Cherry, the instrument was all but moribund in the new music. Don Ellis's antics had become academic, Freddie Hubbard couldn't make the leap, and players like Bill Dixon, Mike Mantler, Donald Ayler, and Eddie Gale lacked either the technical or intellectual resources to carry through. In restoring the panoply of jazz trumpet effects, Lester brought it back to life and inspired a generation of brass players.
The Chicagoans' national impact was first felt in the mid '70s, and helped to overcome the direst malaise in jazz history. But they began recording in the 1960s—Lester's debut came out a year after Unit Structures, two after Ascension. Yet it divines a different world, far removed from the buoyant swing of Coleman, the steamrolling ardor of Coltrane, the virtuoso exhilaration of Taylor. Berman quotes Octavio Paz's observation that modernity is "cut off from the past and continually hurtling forward at such a dizzy pace that it cannot take root [or] recover its powers of renewal." That's just what Bowie and company were attempting to do, with their bells and harmonica, their irreverent reverence for blues and swing and pop tunes, their humor and ceremony, their music that only made sense if you listened, because you wouldn't get too far patting your feet.
Inevitably, perhaps, Lester renewed himself by returning to gospel and pop, the world of his past and the world around him, all bourgeois grist to seize a new day. Perhaps the symbolic moment of transition between the Art Ensemble Lester and the Brass Fantasy Lester took place in February 1979 at Symphony Space, when he conducted the 59-piece Sho' Nuff Orchestra, with a cast that amazed then and seems dreamlike now; the reed section alone included Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, David Murray, Arthur Blythe, John Stubblefield, Frank Lowe, Frank Wright, and Charles Tyler. The evening began when Jism Magazine's Dave Flexingbergstein ran out, press card in hat, and popped the question first heard on Bowie's 1968 "Jazz Death?": "Isn't jazz, as we know it, dead yet?" Lester rolled his eyes and said, "Well, that all depends on what you know." It ended with a churchy hymn, the band whooping in time, which showman Lester interrupted to inquire if we were having a good time. We absolutely were.
http://www.elsewhere.co.nz/jazz/2196/lester-bowie-remembered-1941-1999-does-humour-belong-in-music/
LESTER BOWIE REMEMBERED (1941-1999):
Does humour belong in music?
by Graham Reid | April 22, 2010
Art Ensemble of Chicago: Suite for Lester
Humour hasn’t had much place in jazz. Certainly Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong entertained by mugging things up. But mostly jazz is poker-faced music played to furrowed brow audiences which think it’s somehow more morally uplifting than other music.
A couple of years ago Denis Dutton, the philosopher/academic from Canterbury University, wrote of an anti-capitalist friend in New York who discarded the consumer society – yet had acquired an extensive and expensive jazz collection. But, the New Yorker reasoned, jazz is an important modern art-form.
It is. But as Dutton noted his friend could simply have said, “Yeah, but I like this stuff”.
Dutton's friend sounded an arrogant prick.
Well, jazz does have moments of humour, few more frivolous than a track on Lester Bowie’s 1992 album All the Magic!, entitled Miles Davis Meets Donald Duck.
The multi-instrumentalist horn player blew a straw under water and made it sound like Miles Davis meeting ...
Critics were baffled and some even angry (squandering his talent if not a few minutes of vinyl), but that was just Bowie having what he called, “serious fun”.
He did it throughout the 70s and 80s on tunes with titles like Rope-a-Dope (from Muhammad Ali’s famous phrase) and It’s Howdy Doody Time. In the late 80s, with his Brass Fantasy band – which often included his wife, the great soul singer Fontella Bass – he covered Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the old Lloyd Price hit Personality, Willie Nelson’s Crazy and Whitney Houston’s Saving All My Love For You.
Bowie’s superb band (which included tuba player Bob Stewart and trombonists Steve Turre and Frank Lacy) pushed the boundaries of jazz, and Bowie himself wouldn’t allow them to be pigeon-holed: “Don’t call it jazz, no way!” he said in 1986, “That word has lost any real meaning. Most real jazz musicians died penniless, right? So the term jazz to me symbolises poverty.”
Bowie wasn’t poor when he died in 1999 at 58 from liver cancer. He was well known across the music world – he played on David (no relation) Bowie’s 1993 album Black Tie White Noise – and if anyone could claim to have changed jazz it was this good humoured, bespectacled member of the innovative Art Ensemble of Chicago from the mid-60s through to the early 80s.
The AEC – whose members initially wore African tribal costumes and face paint in performance – were a musical and philosophical attempt to bridge the divide between ancient black Africa and modernist free jazz. They were the most visible and influential off-shoot of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians which formed in Chicago in the early 60s and whose members included Joseph Jarman, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors and Andrew Hill.
They were inspired by the music of Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey.
Bowie arrived in 1966 and famously remarked: “I never in my life met so many insane people in one room.”
The flexible and political philosophical group became known as the Art Ensemble and in 1989 the quartet of Mitchell, Bowie, Jarman and Favors had their hometown name appended for a European show. Percussionist Famoudou Don Moye joined and for two decades the AEC’s percussive exploratory music – much of it recorded by ECM whose founder/producer, Manfred Eicher, brought a sonic clarity to their project – was the benchmark in free jazz.
Their albums Fanfare for the Warriors (Atlantic 1974), Urban Bushmen (ECM, 1982) and The Alternative Express (DIW, 1989), should be in any serious music collection.
They slew from primal percussion through sophisticated swing with nods to Mingus and Ellington, and ride the boundaries of free jazz.
Even before the band split, Bowie had his own swaggering and good nartured projects playing a melange of funk, r’n’b, jazz and blues which reflected his early years in Texas clubs and as a session player at Chess studios.
He called his music avant pop (“Even the term avant garde is old now, avant pop is where it’s at”) and said to those who accused him of being a musical gadfly: “All’s fair in love and war – and music is both. So use anything as long as it works.”
His albums The Great Pretender (ECM 1981), Serious Fun (DIW 1989) and the hard to find The Fire This Time (In-Out, 1992), are his best, although ECM’s readily available 1988 collection, Lester Bowie: Works is a good starting point.
Deservedly, former members of the AEC – reed-player Mitchell, bassist Favors and drummer Moye – came together again to pay homage to Bowie, their fallen comrade.
Their Tribute to Lester of 2003 wasn’t sentimental, nostalgic or soft-centred. It was as challenging as the AEC ever were.
Driven from the bottom by an array of percussion which was their hallmark, this hour-long disc muscles along as Mitchell’s tough tenor scours through passages or swings over Favours’ dexterous playing. And everywhere Moye brings tonal colour and angularity from his array of congas, bongos, bells, whistles and gongs. The 12-minute As Clear As the Sun is demanding listening, especially when Mitchell turns his sax into a police siren.
Tribute to Lester isn’t a classic AEC album – how could it be with two men down? -- but is better than we had any right to expect, and reminds of how this music once was and – in the world of manicured and generic jazz – what it could be again.
The romantic, slightly baroque Suite for Lester floats on Mitchell’s sopranino sax and flute then takes off on walking-pace tenor. At five and half minutes it seems undernourished, but also gets out before any hint of sentiment invades.
And Bowie was never much for hanging on to the past. He railed against Wynton Marsalis talking about the tradition: “What tradition? The great jazz tradition was never copying, right?”
No, it wasn’t and isn’t. It’s about learning, extending and enjoying it. Like Bowie did.
It’s wrong to speak for the dead but you might guess if he heard this he’d smile.
The man who knew the meaning of serious fun often did.
http://www.scaruffi.com/jazz/bowie.html
The History of Jazz Music
Lester Bowie
Copyright © 2006
by Piero Scaruffi
Unlike his cohorts in the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, trumpeter Lester Bowie (1941), who relocated from St Louis to Chicago in 1965, was grounded in the jazz tradition. Unlike Roscoe Mitchell, Bowie maintained a close relationship with the idea of music as fun. In a sense, he represented Mitchell's alter-ego, complementing the partner's classical ambitions with a more populist approach. Nonetheless, Bowie was one of the most daring trumpters of his generation, and one of the few to adopt free jazz, capable of producing a broad range of sounds. Bowie's debut album, Numbers 1 & 2 (august 1967), contained two lengthy free-form jams that basically previewed the Art Ensemble Of Chicago (one is a trio with bassist Malachi Favors and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, and the other one is a quartet with Joseph Jarman). His sense of humour emerged from Fast Last (september 1974), an odd collection of different styles, highlighted (on the serious front) by a duet with altoist Julius Hemphill, the 13-minute Fast Last C, and Rope-A-Dope (june 1975), with Favors, Don Moye, drummer Charles Bobo Shaw and trombonist Joseph Bowie. These albums amply betrayed his tender love for blues and gospel music, a love that blossomed on The Fifth Power (1978), a quintet featuring altoist Arthur Blythe, pianist Amina Myers, Favors and drummer Philip Wilson that reworked a gospel traditional into an 18-minute juggernaut; while the same quintet crafted the double LP African Children (april 1978) that synthesized all his disparate influences and moods in 20-minute pieces such as Amina, Chili MacDonald and For Fela. The Great Pretender (june 1981) marked the beginning of his conversion to a more radio-friendly form of gospel-jazz-rock fusion, that, despite the parenthesis of All the Magic (june 1982), whose second disc is a suite of brief satirical trumpet solos, led to Bowie's artistic demise. Whether it was a case of crossover or sell-out, the Brass Fantasy (a brass octet of four trumpets, two trombones, French horn and tuba plus a drummer) that debuted with I Only Have Eyes for You (february 1985) and Avant Pop (march 1986) ended up playing mainly pop, jazz, funk and blues covers. The best original material was provided by trombonist Steve Turre.
Bowie was also a member of the Leaders, a supergroup formed by tenor saxophonist Chico Freeman with alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, pianist Kirk Lightsey, bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Don Moye that debuted with Mudfoot (june 1986). Their second album Out Here Like This (february 1987) contained Bowie's Zero. Bowie rejoined them for Unforeseen Blessings (december 1988).
Lester Bowie died in 1999
https://ecmreviews.com/2011/12/21/i-only-have-eyes-for-you/
between sound and space: ECM Records and Beyond
Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy: I Only Have Eyes For You (ECM 1296)
December 21, 2011
by Tyran Grillo
Lester Bowie´s Brass Fantasy
Only Have Eyes For You
Lester Bowie trumpet
Stanton Davis trumpet, fluegelhorn
Malachi Thompson trumpet
Bruce Purse trumpet
Craig Harris trombone
Steve Turre trombone
Vincent Chancey French horn
Bob Stewart tuba
Phillip Wilson drums
Recorded February 1985 at Rawlston Recording Studios, Brooklyn, New York
Engineer: Akili Walker
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Lester Bowie
This debut album from Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy is still the outfit’s best. The moment those doo-wop horns saunter in for the title cut, you know you’ve come home. Bowie not only enthralls us with his fortitude, but manages to do so while keeping alive in his muted cone the dying flame of a bygone era. But here is where Bowie & Co. break from the formula that would shade later Brass Fantasy efforts: from hereon out we get nothing but originals. Trumpeter Bruce Purse’s “Think” is the densest of these and is anchored by Bob Stewart’s wonderful tuba lines. Stewart also leaves his mark with “Nonet,” a creeping leviathan of sound that surfaces with a vivacious sense of coalescence. Brother in arms Malachi Thompson offers his “Lament,” which begins in the darkest recesses of the assembled instruments, gurgling like didgeridoos behind Bowie’s freshly gilded warbling. Bowie himself rounds out the set with two tunes. “Coming Back, Jamaica” is a respectful taste of the islands, grafted by chanting voices and supernatural lines, not to mention a tuba solo to end all tuba solos. “When The Spirit Returns,” on the other hand, is a trudge and a half, but one that shoulders a burden of hope which it offers to us with mounting selflessness.
Bowie’s Brass Fantasy is one of the more compelling jazz configurations of the 1980s and holds its rightful place in ECM’s hallowed halls. Nowhere better to start than here
http://culture.pl/en/work/not-two-milosc-and-lester-bowie
Not Two - Miłosc and Lester Bowie
"Not Two is a rare document of one of the last recordings by revered jazz musician Lester Bowie, recorded live on the 19th of November 1997 at the Eskulap Club, Poznań Jazz Fair, Poznań, Poland. On this record Lester Bowie is joined by on of the best European jazz and experimental music bands of 1990s scene - MIŁOŚĆ. In around 1992, a unique scene began in Gdańsk, Poland and surrounding cities. 'Yass', as the scene came to be called, generally has its philosophic roots in the Vajrayana Buddhist faith. Mainly, these musicians focus on freeing music from categorization and on blurring genre definitions. These are stunning musicians, versatile, dexterous, and often full of humor. 'Yass' groups such as MIŁOŚĆ have collectively transformed virtually every tradition of jazz, from swing to free-jazz, and have mixed in punk, noise, and playful iconoclasm.
When I founded MIŁOŚĆ back in 1988, we had an experimental new wave group background and quite a collection of weird, far-out ideas designed to blast the conformist music world. We had already been into Zappa, Beefheart, Frith and lves and had just recently discovered Coltrane, Dolphy Coleman, Ayler and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. We were a band of hot-heads around 20, who ostentatiously quit school and devoted themselves to playing and discussing music for days and nights on end. Boy, did we totally freak out when we heard that great, uncompromising, passionate music... These guys were to influence us strongly for half a decade until we worked out our own idiosyncratic Yass style involving free improvisation, rock expression, classical harmonies, ethnic rhythms & feeling and what have you... Up to December 1995 we issued two CD records of original material, having gained a cult reputation and a hard core audience mainly throughout Poland. Our music clearly appealed to improvised music fiends and punk rock fans, affecting the brainless and the sophisticated (neither the better). Actually it's because that's the way we are, I believe; highly intellectual and deadly brainless at the same time.
No wonder I immediately began arranging a mental list of the likes of us, some uninhibited musicians who'd kind to suit our sane insanity, when our Poznań mate Piotr Nycz from the Eskulap club proposed that MIŁOŚĆ play in a sextet format with a chosen guest star. The date was to be at the Poznań Jazz Fair towards the end of 1994. Another friend of ours, Jarek Tylicki of the Colosseum Agency, by the way himself a Zappa & Dolphy fan, offered me this innocent suggestion, 'What about... Lester Bowie?'. Yeah, that was it - the best hit he could make, the best combination we could dream of. When I finally confronted Lester on the 17th of November 1994, as he and his entourage were heading for the club we were to rehearse at, I told him, 'You know it's not an accident that we are playing together tomorrow...'. 'What do you mean, man?' his eyes questioned. 'It's because the Art Ensemble and us are just a bunch of freaks', I continued, while Lester laughed and nodded his approval.
The concert playing was extremely good, also thanks to the audience. Lester Bowie turned out to be a warm, charismatic person and a superb, experienced musician whose ways were far above the traditional rules and regulations. With him it was easy to relax, it was all about relaxing. You cannot say that about our uptight, ego-neurotic, professor-like jazz scene leaders. When you play with him, the music just happens. If you're able to let it go and be open to whatever comes next, magic may come your way too. 'Free jazz is not what people call or think is free. It could be a melody a song or ballad, a free or bop thing, just anything. It's about free approach and that's misunderstood', he explained to us at the rehearsal. 'Let's follow the music - it will be all clear'. And I think we did it that way with great assistance on the part of Lester who danced around with his trumpet, his lab coat waving, his eyes half-closed, his energy never demanding or disturbing, always ready to help the music flow intervening when necessary. 'When you really play you forget yourself and the ego disappears. The music cannot be controlled', he commented after the concert, visibly content with what we'd done together. We were even more than this, hoping it wasn't the last time we meet and it wasn't; as soon as in January 1996 the same sextet is to play a regular tour around Poland. C'mon, you don't really have to read all this. It's enough if you only listen to this recording of a live performance of ours which speaks for itself - music always does. Feel free to enter its magic yet not virtual reality in which lives meet, energies coalesce, worlds and music blend... All being just one, not two." (Ryszard Tymon Tymański; text courtesy of Mózg)
Miłość and Lester Bowie. Not Two: "Smart Maharishia" (Tymański-Gwinciński), "Psalm-Itch" (Tymański), "Taniec Mikołaja" (Sikała), "Orchilius" (Tymański), "Here's the olden meesaur" (Tymański), "Chłopaki na damkach" (Trzaska), "Ordre omnitonique" (Tymański). Lester Bowie - trumpet, Mikołaj Trzaska - alto, soprano & baritone saxophones, Maciej Sikała - tenor & soprano saxophones, Leszek Możdżer - piano, mezzosopran, Ryszard Tymon Tymański - bass, conductor, Jacek Olter - drums. GOWI Records, Poland 1995.
Marek Romański
January 2009
https://guardian.ng/news/lester-bowie-jazz-is-great-black-music/
Lester Bowie: ‘Jazz Is Great Black Music’
by Benson Idonije
28 February 2016
The Guardian
LESTER BOWIE
“What we are trying to do today by the term ‘Great Black Music’ is to put emphasis on the quality of music that black people have created in this world,” explained Lester Bowie in an interview with Glendora Review. “I mean this music is so great that each one of its sub divisions has influenced the whole world … rock’n roll, blues, jazz, gospel, each one is a division of this music but actually all coming from the same thing,” Explaining the role and essence of jazz in this whole experiment, he said, “the thing about jazz is that it fuses all these different elements together. In fact, jazz, is becoming the first world music. It is the contemporary music of this planet at this time. Therefore, it is very important for our people to know that out of everything happening to us on the planet, we have still maintained the pinnacle of culture. We still have that, this civilising force, this music. Our art has survived because there was a time when we were running this planet, another time when yellow people were running it, everyone has had their time, but our culture has survived and is still influencing the culture of today.”
Bowie had strong views about African music, especially in terms of the way it is tied up with the totality of African culture. And the ‘Great Black Music’ which he preached and propagated was out to reveal the power of this cultural affinity. Said he: “Just like in Zaire, they go in there and take everything out of Zaire, not leaving nothing which is exactly what is happening to music, they take from the music and we ourselves do not realise the power that we have. So what we try to do with our music is to make people aware of the power of the music and the power it represents as far as how we can influence our thinking because in Africa, art was not separated from life, it was a part of it. You learn from the culture. This is how you learned how to think, the ceremonies, the rituals, the whole sequence of growth to maturity but you see, we have gotten away from that.”
Bowie’s attitude to jazz stems from the relevance of African culture and condemns the perception of the Western world that sees culture from the ephemeral perspective, as an element of decoration. His words: “The Western world says that art is something you put on the wall… art for art’s sake! Art has got to have meaning, there must be a connection, it has to be part of our everyday lives. We are supposed to learn from our culture. It is not something we see and just go dancing. Why are we dancing? What is the history of dance? What does it mean? We have to see how it connects to our lives, and then we can apply it to our lives.
“Consequently, we will think much better and more clearly and hopefully we can get something done. So, ‘Great Black Music’ is the total embodiment of our music and what we in jazz have done is to try to bring all these different elements together because they were all separated.”
My first impression of Bowie was formed in 1977 when I met him at Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s place in Lagos. Then, Fela’s house had just been burnt down and the Afrobeat legend was temporarily occupying a specious suite at Cross Road Hotels, Jibowu, Yaba, Lagos where he had relocated. Bowie had come all the way from America without adequate preparation for the journey. By the time he came to Fela’s place, he had no money. He had no luggage. And I’m sure he had no plans as to how to survive. But from his demeanor and the ideas he generated from conversation as he held tenaciously to his trumpet case, I had no doubt in my mind that he was a musician’s musician. And indeed, he was!
This assessment of Bowie was confirmed when he stayed with Fela for six months and recorded three albums with the Afro beat legend on Afrodisia label – prominent among them, Dog Eat Dog, a free flowing rhythm over which horns made statements in the form of riffs.
The other side is No Agreement but it is on Dog Eat Dog that Bowie is heard in his elements, exhibiting a bag of trumpet and flugel horn tricks including half valve effects, growls, slurs, smears, bent notes and a wide vibrato, punctuating one of the most humorous, yet striking solo styles among brass players. What with the blowing of frenetic upper registers in the course of his dialogue with trumpeter Tunde Williams!
Tenor player Fela Anikulapo Kuti, trumpeter Tunde Williams and flugel horn player Lester Bowie himself all shared solo concessions but apart from helping to lift the quality of the music in solo context, his presence inspired Fela and Tunde who had never had it so good solo-wise in terms of the spirit feel that was generated.
Bowie became the president of Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) in 1968. Their music had African heritage as focus, playing concerts every night and rehearsing all day with all kinds of different groups and combinations. The music was popular in Chicago, from where it was taken to Europe in 1969. Based in Paris, Bowie’s Art Ensemble of Chicago played at the theatre six nights a week.
Bowie’s ‘great black music’ has since received some measure of acceptance on the jazz scene. And like a teacher and crusader of a new revolution, he was always critical of ‘repertoires’ and ‘establishment music’. He never had kind words for the likes of trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis who is Down beat’s number one. “Wynton is the key,” he informed. “He is the one they use to stop the music. He has helped to destroy the music.
“Now what’s happening is that all his younger contemporaries are not making any money or making a living or being accepted throughout the world because they are not doing anything. The only one making any money is Wynton,” said Bowie.
Notwithstanding, jazz is not all about making money. It’s like the Biblical “seek ye first the kingdom of God and every other thing will be added unto you”. Bowie and the black music revolution ensured the creatively high musical abilities of its members as a first step. And through recognition for their artistic accomplishments, their concerts were packed. Their records sold.They enjoyed individual acclaim.
However, what this whole contention is all about is that the time has come for jazz music to be elevated beyond its current perception. It is long overdue for it to assume its cultural significance of ‘great black music’ – on the same parallel with European classical music. The point is we do have black art music – music people should listen to and not dance to. And the foundation for this revolution has already been established by the likes of Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Lester Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Stanley Jordan and their various disciples. So, what next?
http://jazztimes.com/features/the-brass-fantasies-of-lester-bowie/
The Brass Fantasies of Lester Bowie
10/01/1997
By Bill Bennett
JazzTimes
Brass Fantasy is the unruly realization of a Lester Bowie dream.
Bowie, of course, is the virtuosic trumpeter who has brought a unique blend of bite and perspective to the avant garde over the past 30 years. His probing, roots-aware playing embraces the length and breadth of the brass tradition in jazz, bringing in other musical lines from cultures around the world, and fusing them in a style that is at once aesthetically demanding and playful-“Serious Fun,” as one of his recordings suggests.
Take this singular voice, add trumpets and trombones in threes, with tuba and two percussionists to anchor the ensemble in time. Stir in challenging charts that range from doo-wop to wailing stomps, and you have Brass Fantasy:
“Brass Fantasy was an idea I had had for quite a long time,” Lester recalled recently. “I first got the idea back in the early days of the AACM, when we used to do all sorts of different types of unorthodox groups. I wasn’t able to do it until 1982, when I was invited by a classical festival in Karlsruhe, Germany to put together any kind of group I wanted to for a performance at the festival. That gave me the chance I’d been looking for…and we’ve been together ever since.”
Asked to define Brass Fantasy’s place in the musical continuum, Bowie is quick to place the band in a line that extends well beyond what we usually think of as jazz. “We are definitely the world’s greatest brass choir,” he claims, “and our literature is part of the most advanced brass choir literature in the world. We’re the continuation of the whole brass choir tradition, and an extension of the New Orleans brass band-but at the same time, we’re a different entity. We’re using different techniques in our solos and ensemble playing, different sorts of voicings and arrangements…we’re trying to show just how expressive the brass instruments can be. Up until now, trumpeters have been limited to the ‘normal notes’ of the diatonic scale. But compared to 12 ‘normal’ notes, shit, you’ve got 50 notes in between. So we’re trying to utilize all those-and not just for effect, but to show how using them in conjunction with those ‘normal notes’ makes for a completely different statement.”
The mark of a large ensemble is its book, and Brass Fantasy has a book as broad and deep as the traditions it represents. “I select and assign all the songs to my different writers-I have a staff of writers. And when I feel a song-when I hear something on the radio that I like or it’s just a song I like, I give it to one of the writers and ask them to give me an arrangement on it.
“What happens is, each tour, I try to add two or three new tunes. For example, this last tour I commissioned two new pieces: ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ and ‘One Love’ by Bob Marley. We’ve now got about 75 tunes in the book. But we’ve got other stuff coming. We’re getting ready to do a great tune by Marilyn Manson.” Bowie clearly relishes his role as a musical contrarian, admitting influences to his music that many jazz fans would eschew, if they knew of them at all.
Amid such diverse music, Bowie yet manages to maintain consistency in the band’s book, both in terms of quality and approach. “First of all, I don’t accept tunes from anyone but brass players,” he notes. “Only brass players, because we really understand the instruments…most of your arrangers are piano players or saxophone players. But it so happens that some of your better arrangers are trombonists, like Steve Turre, J.J. Johnson or Melba Liston. They have a really good idea of what brass-not so much what they can or cannot do, but how they sound best, or which way are they shown in their best light.”
“But you know,” Lester continues, “when you’re doing this music, regardless of who writes it, regardless of who arranges it, it still ends up being our music because of the style and sound that we have, the players we have. They all have their own unique way of presenting this music, so regardless of who the arranger may be, you recognize a certain continuity of sound. And that’s due to the caliber of musicianship in the band.”
His own musicianship and creative presence remain very much the centerpiece of the band. At a recent performance of Brass Fantasy, Bowie worked the front of the stage through three microphones: one at knee-level that seemed to soften the sound of the horn, and two more chest-high that fed into different places in the stereo mix. As if conducting himself through his solos, he would rip his trumpet from left to right, pulling back from the microphones as his phrases peaked, cosseting in as he dropped into barely audible extensions of his line. “I’ve always done that,” Lester explains, “That’s why I have trouble with sound guys. I always tell ’em, ‘Give me a setting and just leave it alone.’ Don’t try to adjust, because the problem they always have with me is that my style goes from loud to soft to everything in between, and it can do it in an instant. What I’d tell these guys is, ‘Don’t worry, when I play loud I back away from the microphone. But there’s also things I might play in the next instant that will be whisper soft. So you have to allow me to work the microphones; don’t try to work it for me, ’cause you don’t know what I’m going to play’-and that way I can really deal with the sound. Otherwise, they’re going to get caught…if they can’t pick up the strength, and they can’t pick up the subtlety, then they’re missing 90% of what I do.”
Gearbox
“The gear thing I don’t do. I don’t make any instrumental endorsements, because I’ve never been even offered an endorsement, even a mouthpiece or a bottle of valve oil, by any instrument maker-I believe that no one wants to take responsibility for my sound. So I don’t give any information like that out for publication; if someone wants to ask me, I’ll be happy to discuss it face-to-face.”
Listening Pleasures
“I listen to all kinds of music-I listen to everything except myself: not too much Brass Fantasy, and not too much Art Ensemble. The latest things I’ve been listening to are Biggie Smalls and Marilyn Manson, because I’m working on some arrangements on them. There’s this one tune Biggie does called “Player Haters” [on L’il Kim’s CD Hard Core (Big Beat/Atlantic)]. And the Manson thing is called “Beautiful People” [on the CD Antichrist Superstar (Nothing/ Interscope)]…I’ve also been listening to a set of Miles Davis that someone taped in a club in Saint Louis in 1956; I’m a great Miles Davis fan; anything Miles does, I’m always interested in that. The recording itself is not so good, but to hear those guys in 1956 is really great; it’s Philly Joe Jones, ‘Trane, Red Garland…Miles is my all-time favorite…”
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-01-16/news/0001160291_1_brass-fantasy-lester-bowie-art-ensemble
Jazz
A Man And His Music
Artists Pay Tribute To Lester Bowie But Can't Replace His Impact
January 16, 2000
by Howard Reich
Chicago Tribune Arts Critic
The death last November of Lester Bowie, a uniquely charismatic and innovative trumpeter-bandleader, left a gaping hole in the world of avant-garde jazz.
For more than three decades, Bowie had fueled new ideas in music through fascinating, genre-bending ensembles. Though his work as a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago has been celebrated, Bowie also helped rejuvenate jazz with bands such as Brass Fantasy, a horns ensemble that applied outrageous, avant-garde sounds to venerable brass-band traditions; the Sho Nuff Orchestra, a powerhouse collection of dozens of freewheeling musical improvisers; and From the Root to the Source, a no-holds-barred group that somehow found common ground among gospel, fusion and rock idioms.
Though Bowie had been diagnosed with liver cancer early in 1998, he refused to stop performing, playing his last Chicago performance in October and taking his Brass Fantasy band to Europe thereafter. He was hospitalized in the midst of that tour, and his wife, Deborah, flew to London from their Brooklyn home to retrieve him. Bowie -- who was born in Maryland, grew up in St. Louis and emerged as a jazz revolutionary in Chicago -- died on Nov. 8, at age 58.
It's possible the marathon Chicago concert tribute to Bowie Thursday in Hyde Park Union Church will capture some of the fire of the man's music and spirit.
Even so, the impact Bowie had on performers, audiences and the art of jazz improvisation suggest that he will be sorely missed. That much is apparent from interviews with several Chicago musicians who worked closely with Bowie and spoke with the Tribune about the man's life and music:
Malachi Thompson, trumpeter-bandleader:
"I was always in awe of Lester's imagination. He went through the same schools of thought as other jazz trumpet players -- in terms of listening to Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard and people like that -- yet he conceptualized a completely different approach to playing trumpet and playing jazz.
"I equate Lester Bowie and Roscoe Mitchell (another Art Ensemble founder) with bebop icons like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Just like them, Lester and Roscoe defined a new music on their instruments.
"But Lester was also important as a personality. I remember when he was talking about putting together the Sho Nuff Orchestra, with 100 or so of the leading contributors to new music.
"And I said to him, `Man, you're crazy.' But then he did it, getting people like Henry Threadgill and Joseph Jarman and Anthony Braxton and David Murray -- all these great names that we take for granted now, and he put it together.
"When we were playing in that band, it was like being in jazz heaven. Not only that, but everyone got paid!"
Kahil El'Zabar, percussionist-bandleader whose Ethnic Heritage Ensemble will perform at the tribute concert
"You know that Nike commercial that says, `Just do it'? That's what Lester Bowie represented, and a lot more than any shoe company. When he decided he wanted to go to Nigeria and hang there for a couple of years, he just did it.
"When he wanted the Art Ensemble of Chicago to go to Europe (in the late 1960s), he said, `Let's leave, let's do it.' And that started a stellar career for the Art Ensemble.
"And I admired the way he didn't limit himself to any genre. He believed in Duke Ellington's statement, that there's only two kinds of music: good and bad.
"As a trumpeter, Lester could make a very big, fat kind of sound, but he also had these little sounds and hisses that are associated with African music. And at the same time, his trumpet playing had the presence and grittiness of an American urban sound. So when you think about a person dealing with the full capacity of his instrument, Lester was one of the rare individuals who actually did that.
"And he had this sense of humor. To him, life was a gas. This cat could laugh, and make you laugh.
"I spoke to him just a few weeks before he passed, and he said: `Whether we have to make our music in a circus tent or out on the street, it doesn't matter, we've got to do it. And I'm not going to worry about what these doctors say, I'm going out and doing this tour.'
"I can't think of any statement better than that to express what music meant to Lester in the last cycle of his life."
Roscoe Mitchell, saxophonist-bandleader whose quintet will play the Bowie tribute
"Lester was a great inspiration to all of us. He always kept a fresh idea going, always wanted to explore and study music. So in that way, he was a real motivator to a lot of people.
"For instance, when he wanted the Art Ensemble of Chicago to go to Europe for the first time, he was the one who made it possible: He sold all his furniture to come up with the money.
"His trumpet playing had a unique sound, which is what it's all about in this music. Lester sounded only like himself, he sounded individual.
http://stljazznotes.blogspot.com/2014/10/remembering-lester-bowie.html
Today, we remember the great St. Louis trumpeter Lester Bowie, who was born October 11, 1941.
Though Bowie (pictured) actually was born in Maryland, he grew up in St. Louis as part of a family that included two brothers who also became professional musicians: Joseph Bowie, a trombonist and leader of the funk-jazz band Defunkt; and Byron Bowie, a saxophonist and arranger/composer.
After developing his trumpet chops playing blues gigs around St. Louis with singers including Albert King and Little Milton and jazz wherever and whenever he could, Lester Bowie moved to Chicago in 1965, where he became a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the group with whom he is most closely associated.
In addition to the AEC, Bowie was involved in many different musical projects, recording in duo and trio settings with many of the musicians from BAG and Chicago's AACM, and leading a number of his own groups, notably Brass Fantasy and the Lester Bowie Organ Ensemble. His work incorporated many types of music, from free improv and knotty post-bop to gospel and doo-wop, and he stood out among trumpet players of his generation for his combination of deep concepts, a sense of humor, and use of extended techniques. Sadly, Lester Bowie died young, passing away from liver cancer on November 9, 1999 when he was just 58.
In the first video window below, you can see him in 1983 performing with From The Root To The Source, a multi-stylistic group reflecting Bowie's love of popular and church music as well as jazz that also was something of a family band, since it featured his ex-wife Fontella Bass and former in-laws Martha Bass and David Peaston.
In the window below that, you can see him performing "Summertime" in an undated clip with Brass Fantasy, and below that, in two parts, a complete Art Ensemble concert recorded in 1991 in Budapest.
Lester Bowie Brass Fantasy - "I only have eyes for you”
(Arrangement by Lester Bowie)
ECM, 1985:
Lester Bowie - 'Fast Last!’—Full Album
Muse Records, 1975:
Lester Bowie - "The Great Pretender”
Cut 1 From the album ECM 1209, 1981
‘The Great Pretender’
ECM, 1981
Lester Bowie - trumpet
Hamiet Bluiett - baritone saxophone
Donald Smith - piano, organ
Fred Williams - double bass, electric bass
Phillip Wilson - drums
Fontella Bass - vocal
David Peaston - vocal
Miłość & Lester Bowie - “Orchilius”:
Z płyty Not Two:
Lester Bowie - trumpet
Maciej Sikala - alto saxophone
Mikołaj Trzaska - tenor saxophone
Leszek Możdżer - piano
Tymon Tymański - double bass
Jacek Olter - drums
Lester Bowie-"Rios Negroes”
(Composition by Lester Bowie)
From the album ‘The Great Pretender’
ECM records. 1981:
ECM Records – 177 6214 - Originally released in 1981.
Double Bass, Electric Bass – Fred Williams
Drums – Phillip Wilson
Piano, Organ – Donald Smith
Trumpet – Lester Bowie
(Composition and solo performance by Lester Bowie)
Horo Records 29/30
Recorded April 16, 1978, from the album "African Children"
Belvedere Santa Croce
Lester Bowie - "Hello Dolly”
Lester Bowie (October 11, 1941 – November 8, 1999) was an American jazz trumpet player and composer. He was a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and cofounded the Art Ensemble of Chicago.[1]
In 1966, he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a studio musician, and met Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell and became a member of the AACM. In 1968, he founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago[1] with Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, and Malachi Favors. He remained a member of this group for the rest of his life, and was also a member of Jack DeJohnette's New Directions quartet. He lived and worked in Jamaica and Africa, and played and recorded with Fela Kuti.[3] Bowie's onstage appearance, in a white lab coat, with his goatee waxed into two points, was an important part of the Art Ensemble's stage show.
In 1984, he formed Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, a brass nonet in which Bowie demonstrated jazz's links to other forms of popular music, a decidedly more populist approach than that of the Art Ensemble. With this group he recorded songs previously associated with Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and Marilyn Manson, along with other material. His New York Organ Ensemble featured James Carter and Amina Claudine Myers. In the mid 1980s he was also part of the jazz supergroup The Leaders. Featuring tenor saxophonist Chico Freeman, alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, drummer Famoudou Don Moye, pianist Kirk Lightsey, and bassist Cecil McBee. At this time, he was also playing the opening theme music for The Cosby Show.
Although seen as part of the avant-garde, Bowie embraced techniques from the whole history of jazz trumpet, filling his music with humorous smears, blats, growls, half-valve effects, and so on. His affinity for reggae and ska is exemplified by his composition "Ska Reggae Hi-Bop", which he performed with the Skatalites on their 1994 "Hi-Bop Ska", and also with James Carter on "Conversin' With The Elders". He also appeared on the 1994 Red Hot Organization's compilation album, Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool. The album to raise awareness and funds in support of the AIDS epidemic in relation to the African-American community, was heralded as "Album of the Year" by Time.
In 1993, he played on the David Bowie album Black Tie White Noise, including the song "Looking for Lester", which was named after him. Lester and David Bowie were not related.
Bowie took an adventurous and humorous approach to music and criticized Wynton Marsalis for his conservative approach to jazz tradition.
Lester Bowie died of liver cancer in 1999 at his Brooklyn, New York house he shared with second wife Deborah for 20 years.[3] The following year he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.[4] In 2001, the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded Tribute to Lester.
Kelsey, Chris. "Lester Bowie Biography". AllMusic. All Media Network. Retrieved 19 October 2015.
Voce, Steve (12 November 1999). "Obituary: Lester Bowie". The Independent.
Ratliff, Ben (11 November 1999). "Lester Bowie Is Dead at 58; Innovative Jazz Trumpeter". The New York Times.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-lester-bowie-1125271.html
Culture
Obituary: Lester Bowie
by Steve Voce
Thursday 11 November 1999
The Independent
A CONTRADICTION amongst trumpet players, Lester Bowie was the most successful trumpeter of the avant-garde and at the same time the contemporary player who was most happy when digging about in the roots of jazz from the earlier parts of the century.
Because he used mutes in the "wah-wah" style that was a Duke Ellington speciality of the Twenties and Thirties, Bowie was sometimes known as "the new Cootie Williams" after one of Ellington's more spectacular trumpeters. Bowie was happy to lift the growls and half-valved sounds of the earlier players and drag them into his experimental playing. Gospel music also figured in his plans and there was a vocal quality to his trumpet that was unfashionable but very effective. When he played, he swept from slashing, violent improvisations to themes of haunting beauty, often stepping off in between to incorporate banal quotes from pop songs.
He also delved sideways into contemporary black pop music, and one of his most famous recordings was a vivid 16-minute version of the Platters' hit "The Great Pretender", recorded with his first wife, the singer Fontella Bass, in 1981. Was it sly humour or the wish to provide an easy access to his music that led him to follow up with long reworkings of "I Only Have Eyes For You" (1985) and Louis Armstrong's "Blueberry Hill" (1986) and "Hello, Dolly" (1987)?
His music covered the widest and most unpredictable spectrum, so that one had to absorb, next to "Blueberry Hill" on the ascetic and dignified ECM label, his composition "No Shit" - words and arrangement by Lester Bowie. The lyrics consisted of two words repeated. Bowie's music was unfailingly exuberant and everybody went along with his wry humour and volcanic trumpet playing. Except, that is, for some of the eminent younger musicians who followed and, as is the habit of the young, regarded him as either a traitor or a musical irrelevance.
Neither was the case, for Bowie was one of a group of intelligent and committed musicians who combined their music with their fight for racial freedom. Considering the emerging trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis, Bowie said, "With his chops and my brains I could have been one of the greatest." Bowie was by no means in the Marsalis league as a technician. He and his fellows in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and the subsequent Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC), a band that they formed in 1968, brought pantomime to jazz, using face make-up and creating a travelling theatre from their bands. The only programme for their concerts was that there wasn't one and they happily mixed theatrical jokes with serious creative avant-garde music.
Born in Maryland in 1941, Bowie grew up in St Louis at a time when musicians were still coming up from New Orleans. He played first in local rhythm- and-blues bands led by Little Milton and Albert King, both soon to become famous. He also worked with some of the young musicians in the city who, like him, were destined for fame. They included the saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman and the drummer Jack DeJohnette. Bowie moved to Chicago in 1965, where he met Fontella Bass and became her musical director.
The same year, the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams formed the AACM as a jazz workshop and Bowie joined him. Their first recordings in 1967 show a group of unknown but very advanced musicians in completely spontaneous but expert and intoxicating improvisations. From this point on Bowie and his friends were no strangers to odd instrumentation. He played trumpet and flugelhorn but also anything exotic that seized his fancy, like bass drum or the mysterious cowhorn. Logs, bells, sirens, gongs, whistles and a zither also found their way into the armoury.
The band, finding no outlet at home, moved to France in 1968 and the following year recorded the LP A Jackson in Your House. Typically, the piece begins with a dignified and pompous overture which is punctured by the laughter of the band before it rocks into a Dixieland ensemble complete with clarinet and then into an approximation of the swing style. Although the music is unusually and intentionally funny, the direct social criticism of A Message to Our Folks done a couple of months later is much more serious. The two albums perhaps typified Bowie's weakness for slapstick and the way it occasionally diluted his more serious messages.
In 1969 ACM was founded with a completely new vision of jazz. On stage, the band imitated the street bands of South America, recited poetry and used a variety of unlikely sound effects as they played both avant-garde and more conventional jazz.
Bowie moved all over Europe and recorded in 1969 as soloist and composer of the suite Gettin' to Know Y'All with the Baden-Baden Free Jazz Orchestra, a 50-piece group that included some of the top stars of European jazz. More recently, in 1994, he recorded with the Polish avant-garde band Milosc, and had been in London this autumn with his group Brass Fantasy.
He didn't confine himself to Europe and performed with local drummers in Senegal during an African visit in 1974. In 1983 he was a member of the New York Hot Trumpet Repertory with Wynton Marsalis and played with the all-star avant-garde group the Leaders in the middle Eighties.
In 1990 he recorded the theme music for the television series The Bill Cosby Show and worked on film soundtracks with the composer Philippe Sard in the early Nineties. He taught at many trumpet clinics and was at one time artist in residence in colleges at Yale, Dartmouth and Harvard.
He has left a multitude of recordings, one of the most fascinating a double LP from 1982 called All the Magic. It features on the first LP his group with Fontella Bass and David Peaston in gospel-inspired vocals and includes his suite For Louie. The second has Bowie in a series of often hilarious trumpet solos, including amongst them "Miles Davis Meets Donald Duck".
In 1985 he first formed Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, the group that he recently brought to Britain. It consisted of four trumpets, two trombones, French horn, tuba and drums. Later the line-up rose to 10 pieces. The band was quite dazzling, using imaginative tone colours and subtle scoring that was perhaps obscured by the reinterpretation of pop songs that his audiences had come to love and expect. His programmes for Brass Fantasy included Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love For You" and Patsy Cline's "Crazy". The 1990 album by the band, My Way, included the Sinatra hit along with "Honky Tonk" and James Brown's "I Got You".
He remained a sight to make the eyes sore and in later years added sequins to his trademark white medical coat.
William Lester Bowie, trumpet and flugelhorn player, composer and bandleader: born Frederick, Maryland 11 October 1941; twice married (six children); died New York 8 November 1999
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/lesterbowie
Lester Bowie was one of the most adventurous and proficient manipulators of the trumpet, having made use of everything from strict melodic lines to abstracted explosions of sound. He became a member of the newly- established Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and it was through this he met the musicians with whom he went on to form the radical Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Lester Bowie was born in Frederick, Maryland in 1941, but he was raised in St. Louis, Missouri. His trumpet- playing dad was a high school band director who owned a master's degree, then, not an easy feat for a black man. By age five Lester was taking lessons from a proud father and by 14 he was under the wing of St. Louis trumpeter, Bobby Danzie, who was instrumental in tuning the young Bowie's jazz ears. A year later he was broadcasting and directing his own band. Later he joined the Air Force at 17, and played in ‘after hours’ R&B clubs in Texas.
It was while in the service that Lester began to incorporate elements of his early idol, Louis Armstrong, into his own style of playing. By the time his stint with Uncle Sam's regulars ended, those ears had absorbed Kenny Dorham and Freddie Hubbard , as well. An across-the-river (East St. Louis, Illinois) local kid had further tickled Lester's lobes as Miles Davis ' smoothness crept into Lester's playing.
If you're getting the idea that Lester Bowie is a hybrid, with roots and branches of varying hues, well, you're getting the right idea. But His eclecticism does not stop there. He went on the road with Blues, R&B, circus bands and carnival tent shows, settling back in St. Louis to form a hard-bop group with drummer Phillip Wilson, which included John Chapman on piano. His association with the likes of Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, and Floyd LaFlore, led to the formation of the Black Artist Guild (BAG).
Lester landed in Chicago in 1965 with his entire band in his horn and embarked on the obvious next exploration, the so-called “free-jazz” movement. He joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) the following year. As he walked into the room for his first meeting, he was startled to see a passel of musicians the world was not yet ready to take to its bosom: Malachi Favors, Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre, Roscoe Mitchell, and many others. From that not quite chance meeting sprang the Art Ensemble of Chicago, among the most influential and creative groups in modern music: Lester Bowie, (trumpet) Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, (woodwinds) Malachi Favors Maghostut, (bass) and eventually, Famoudou Don Moye (percussion).
Moving into the 70's and 80's, Lester's penchant for “serious fun” led him to albums under his own name with titles such as “Rope-A-Dope” (for Muhammad Ali), “Let the Good Times Roll,” “The Great Pretender,” “Its Howdy Doody Time,” and “Miles Davis meets Donald Duck.”
Bowie's various bands have included From the Root to the Source, a sort of gospel/jazz/rock fusion group, and Brass Fantasy, Lester's last band, boasted ten assorted trumpets, trombones, French Horns, tuba and drums. Nothing escaped their repertoire: the free, obscure, standards of decades past, funk, Latin, R&B. Brass Fantasy played them, poked fun at them, but always in good taste. Besides his work as a leader and with the Art Ensemble, Bowie has recorded as a sideman with drummer Jack DeJohnette, percussionist Kahil El'zabar, composer Kip Hanrahan, and saxophonist David Murray. He was also a member of the mid-'80s all-star cooperative the Leaders.
Lester believed in expanding his musical philosophies. In that endeavor, he was a Yale Fellow, and a Visiting professor at Harvard and Dartmouth, as well as a clinician and lecturer. Lester calls it all “avant pop”. In fact, he named an album just that. His philosophy: “All's fair in love and war....and music is both.....so use anything, as long as it works.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/nov/11/guardianobituaries.johnfordham
Lester Bowie
Bold improviser at the cutting-edge of jazz
by John Fordham
Wednesday 10 November 1999
The Art Ensemble of Chicago was from 1968 until recent times one of the boldest, most colourful and yet tradition-steeped of all jazz ensembles to juggle the hot coals of free-improvisation. It was also the setting in which most of his admirers first encountered the trumpeter Lester Bowie, who has died of liver cancer aged 58.
The Art Ensemble's performances could resemble a sermon, a drama, a stand-up comedy routine and a history lecture all at once, and Bowie was usually central to the success of all those elements. The Art Ensemble, which also originally featured Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell on reeds, Malachi Favors on bass and Don Moye on drums, was decisively an improvising band preoccupied with performance rather than self-absorbed rumination, and that was Bowie's musical impulse too.
With its tribal makeup and idiosyncratic couture, the experience of an Art Ensemble show could suggest a rolling slide-show of visual and aural images - forests seething with life, village fiestas, traffic jams, arguments, stampedes. The musical framework on which it was festooned featured references from every era of jazz, from southlands marching music to total free-improvisation via ideas reminiscent of Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman and many other postwar jazz pioneers.
Bowie's star climbed from the early 80s onward, when the Art Ensemble attracted unprecedented mainstream acclaim for a band so close to the avant garde. An affable, funny and shrewdly analytical man, Bowie was often the public voice for the Art Ensemble, despite its collectivity - and he was widely liked as well as admired for an instantly recognisable trumpet sound that joined the cutting-edge jazz of the 60s and 70s to the voice-like instrumental sounds of the earliest jazz, and particularly to the raucous, earthy and expressive intonation of Duke Ellington's famous "hot" brass star of the 20s, James "Bubber" Miley.
Dapper and relaxed, with a wealth of both anecdote and argument at his disposal, Bowie was an adopted Chicagoan raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, and St Louis, Missouri. His enthusiasm for cheroots and a mischievous set of the eyebrows made him sometimes resemble a black Groucho Marx, a connection he often seemed to consolidate on stage.
Bowie was always an enthusiast for openness and experimentation, but he was not intimidated by the ascetic tendencies of some experimenters into eschewing the accessible and the populist. He recorded everything from free-jazz to an affectionately sardonic version of the pop song The Great Pretender, the latter with his own group Brass Fantasy, which explored a broad repertoire of postwar pop and Motown music through the medium of a New Orleans-style brass band. The word "jazz" was only of passing interest to him, and the Art Ensemble would preface its shows by announcing its intention to play: "great black music - ancient to the future".
Bowie began playing at the age of five and by his mid-teens was leading a youth group in St Louis. The story went that he would practise his trumpet by an open window hoping that Louis Armstrong might be in the vicinity and hear him. He absorbed many jazz trumpet styles including the intricate and linear manner of bebop, which he rarely displayed in later performances, leading detractors of his rough-cut style to say he was only a special-effects man. He loved the blues - often working with r&b bands in his early career, with Albert King and Little Milton, on sessions for Chess Records, and in such settings with his first wife, the singer Fontella Bass.
Bowie was also an active self-help campaigner for unconventional musicians, helping to form BAG (the Black Artists Group) and the Great Black Music Orchestra in St Louis. In 1966 he moved to Chicago, and became involved with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, playing in the band of Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell in what became a long association.
It was Bowie and Mitchell who spawned the Art Ensemble, but the trumpeter also worked with many other stars of the period's black avant garde, including Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, Jimmy Lyons and Cecil Taylor. Bowie also frequently worked as a composer, and as a participator in unorthodox crossovers, such as the collaboration with African non-jazz musicians and dancers he helped organise for a Camden jazz festival in London in the 80s.
In between Art Ensemble tours, Bowie would sometimes pack a bag and head for the airport with his trumpet, sure that it wouldn't let him starve. He stayed in Jamaica for a year and the locals would enquire after his health if they didn't hear him practising. In Nigeria, he worked with Fela Kuti. Bowie recalled once that he was at his wits' end in Lagos in 1977, telling himself "Lester, you finally fucked up, you can't play your way out of this. Then a guy told me to go see Fela Kuti. I took a cab to Fela's place and a little African guy comes out and says: 'You play jazz? You from Chicago? Well, you've come to the right place, 'cause we're the baddest band in Africa.' Then Fela tells me to play a blues, my speciality. I played a couple of bars and he says: 'Go get his bags, he's moving in'. I stayed with him about a year, and it was fantastic."
Bowie was legendary for his dismissal of the heroes of 80s cool bebop revivalism, notably trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. A fierce, colourful, untramelled player himself, with a penchant for a wide vibrato and the slurred, slinky half-valve effects of very early trumpeters that proposition you like a gigantic wink, Bowie disliked both the immaculately technocratic style of some of the younger players - "androids" - and the adulation of the classic jazz of the 50s and 60s.
"What worries me most about this jazz revival," he once said to the Guardian, "is that it's opened a new young audience up to jazz, and then bored them. You can't repeat the past because it's over. I have to make a Chicago reality. People here have to make a London reality. You have to use the past to make a new reality."
He is survived by his wife Deborah, six children, and two grandchildren.
•Lester Bowie, jazz musician, born October 11 1941; died November 9 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/11/arts/lester-bowie-is-dead-at-58-innovative-jazz-trumpeter.html
Arts
Lester Bowie Is Dead at 58; Innovative Jazz Trumpeter
by BEN RATLIFF
November 11, 1999
New York Times
The trumpeter, band leader and composer Lester Bowie, an icon of the experimental movement in jazz from the mid-1960's on who was also known for his comic shows and jazz-based treatments of pop music, died on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 58.
The cause was liver cancer, said his brother Byron.
Best known as a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Mr. Bowie performed and recorded for more than 30 years. In that group he developed the two things that would brand him: his knowing, Groucho Marx-like sense of humor, expressed musically and otherwise, and his appearance. In most performances he wore a long white lab coat and his narrow face was bracketed by a flat-top haircut and a sharp goatee. In publicity photos he was rarely seen without a cigar.
His early working experiences were in rhythm-and-blues bands, and a slow, expressive blues was his specialty. But the most famous part of Mr. Bowie's trumpet language was timbral effects -- glissandos, smears, growls, flutters, half-valved winces and other vocalizations that worked their way into the style of almost every self-consciously experimental jazz trumpeter who came after him, including Butch Morris, Dave Douglas, Herb Robertson and Roy Campbell.
His recordings often seemed like prankish arguments that the only way to understand jazz is to see it both in carnivalesque and intellectual contexts, to play circus music and modernist post-bop, pure hit-parade pop and nearly academic composition.Mr. Bowie was born in Frederick, Md. His father was a trumpeter who turned to high-school teaching after striving for a performance career in classical music. At age 5 Mr. Bowie was playing trumpet in daily practice with his father, and he played in dance bands as a teenager.
He joined the Army at the age of 17 and was stationed in Texas, where he served as a military policeman. Mr. Bowie credited his career longevity to the four years he spent in the service. After his discharge he played in bands led by blues and rhythm-and-blues performers including Albert King, Jackie Wilson, Rufus Thomas and Joe Tex, and was privately rehearsing more experimental music with St. Louis musicians like Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake.
He married a rhythm-and-blues singer, Fontella Bass, and moved to Chicago in 1965 to become her musical director; during that period Ms. Bass recorded ''Rescue Me,'' which became a major hit on radio. The marriage ended in divorce.
In Chicago Mr. Bowie worked with a big band led by George Hunter and played in rhythm-and-blues studio sessions, including many for Chess Records. Tiring of the grind, he followed the advice of a saxophonist colleague named Delbert Hill and attended a composers' workshop led by the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams.
Many of those in the workshop, including Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Joseph Jarman, Anthony Braxton and Jack DeJohnette, would in the next decade become major figures in the new jazz. Mr. Abrams's workshop bands formed the nucleus of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the nonprofit cooperative first organized in 1965.
Mr. Mitchell created a band with three other A.A.C.M. members: Mr. Bowie, the bassist Malachi Favors and the drummer Phillip Wilson. When Mr. Wilson left, the band had trouble finding a replacement. Out of desperation its members incorporated small percussion instruments -- gongs, bells, shakers -- into their group improvisations. This sound would be one of the staple gestures of the music played by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which the Mitchell group became in 1969.
By Mr. Bowie's reckoning, the Art Ensemble of Chicago rehearsed about 300 times a year in Chicago and gave only a handful of performances because there was almost nowhere to present their music. So they traveled to France, where there was curiosity about American experimental jazz. They made six albums in two months and performed hundreds of times in their two years there. The band played blues and Bach fugues and percussion interludes and hooting free-improvisation pieces and wore tribalist face-paint.
The Art Ensemble's notoriety followed it back to the United States, and the group was soon recording for Atlantic Records. By the mid-70's the Art Ensemble had an easier time reaching large audiences. The band soon came to define an esthetic involving ethnic music, humor, eclecticism and physical intensity that had a considerable impact.
In addition to his brother Byron, of Frederick, Mr. Bowie is survived by his current wife, Deborah; his father, W. Lester Bowie Sr., and another brother, Joseph, both of Frederick; six children, Larry Stevenson of Sardinia, Italy; Ju'lene Coney and Nueka Mitchell of St. Louis; Sukari Ivester of Chicago; Bahnamous Bowie of Queens, and Zola Bowie of Brooklyn, and 10 grandchildren.
During the 1970's Mr. Bowie spent two years in Jamaica playing and teaching trumpet and took a brief trip to Nigeria, where he became a sideman on three records with the popular bandleader Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
Mr. Bowie started one new band after another, always surrounding himself with work and often undertaking his own business affairs without a manager. He led a quintet and a gospel group, From the Root to the Source. In the early 80's, he formed the New York Hot Trumpet Quintet, which briefly included Wynton Marsalis. Later Mr. Bowie and Mr. Marsalis would often be cited in contrast in debates on the issue of futurism versus traditionalism in jazz.
He assembled a 59-piece band called the Sho Nuff Orchestra for a concert at Symphony Space in Manhattan. His octet Brass Fantasy, formed in the mid-80's, performed versions of pop and funk tunes by artists like the Platters, Michael Jackson and James Brown, and recorded for the ECM, DIW and Atlantic record labels. The group's last album was the 1998 ''Odyssey of Funk and Popular Music, Vol. 1.''
In recent years Mr. Bowie set up the Hip-Hop Feel-Harmonic, an unrecorded project with rappers and musicians in his Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene.
His sly sensibility won an appreciative following. An enduring example was his track ''Jazz Death?'' from a 1968 album by Roscoe Mitchell's band, ''Congliptious.'' It begins with Mr. Bowie's dramatically clearing his throat and asking, ''Is jazz, as we know it, dead yet?''
The reply is a long trumpet solo punctuated with silences, muted wah-wah passages, Mr. Bowie's own off-horn shrieks and murmured comments, and finally, six minutes later, a sentence: ''Well, I guess that all depends on, ah, what you know.''
Lester Bowie
American musician
Lester Bowie, (born Oct. 11, 1941, Frederick, Md.—died Nov. 9, 1999, Brooklyn, N.Y.), American jazz musician who played trumpet
flamboyantly, with broad, sweeping gestures, and created extraordinary
timbres, from full, rich tones to human-sounding growls, whimpers, and
mock-laughter, in his melodies. His innovative sounds and free-wheeling
sense of rhythm yielded musical lines that encompassed
a range of expression rare for jazz; comedy and tragedy as well as
abstraction came within his scope. At an early age Bowie, from a
talented musical family, studied trumpet in St. Louis, Mo., and
practiced with his horn aimed out the window, in the hope that Louis
Armstrong would pass by and hear him; bebop trumpeters were his other early inspirations. After serving in the army, attending some college-level music
classes, and accompanying touring rhythm-and-blues stars, among them
his first wife, Fontella Bass, he lived in Chicago (1965–69) and began
his three-decade tenure with the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
The latter, an adventurous and colourful freely improvising quintet,
became a favourite of the European and Japanese jazz circuits, and
Bowie’s popularity led to his forming a series of groups from small
combos to his 59-piece Sho’ Nuff Orchestra of 1979. His best-known group
was Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, an octet that played original works
as well as jazz arrangements of rock and pop hits; he also worked often
as a sideman, and his versatility extended to performing solo trumpet
concerts and composing both songs and large-scale works. Noted for his
humour, he performed in a white laboratory coat, chef’s hat, or suede
jacket, swaying and stepping while he played, yet his underlying
seriousness and lyricism were the more significant elements that made
him the most influential jazz trumpeter of his generation.
http://www.nndb.com/people/495/000042369/
Lester Bowie
Born: 11-Oct-1941
Birthplace: Frederick, MD
Died: 9-Nov-1999
Location of death: New York City
Cause of death: Cancer - Liver
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: Black
Occupation: Jazz Musician
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Influential jazz trumpeter
Lester Bowie was one of the most adventurous and proficient manipulators of the trumpet, having made use of everything from strict melodic lines to abstracted explosions of sound. In his early years he played in bands directed by performers such as Albert King and Little Milton, but it was after moving to Chicago in 1965, initially to work as music director for his then-wife Fonatnella Bass, that his individual style began to fully develop. He became a member of the newly-established Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and it was through this he met the musicians with whom he went on to form the radical Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Bowie remained active with the Ensemble until his death in 1999, but worked with a variety of other musicians over the years (even making an appearance on one of David Bowie's records in 1993). His own projects included the eclectic fusion group From the Root to the Source and the popular, all-brass big band Brass Fantasy.
Brother: Joseph Bowie (musician)
Wife: Fontella Bass (div.)
Art Ensemble of Chicago 1969-
From the Root to the Source
Brass Fantasy
http://www.villagevoice.com/music/lester-bowie-19411999-6420283
Lester Bowie 1941–1999
December 7, 1999
by Gary Giddins
Village Voice
When an e-mail informed me of Lester Bowie's death—at 58, on November 8, of cancer—I was reading Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, and suddenly everything he wrote about Goethe and Marx seemed to be about Lester. "Why should modern men, who have seen what man's activity can bring about, passively accept the structure of their society as it is given?" A pretext for avant-garde jazz if I ever heard one. A subsequent idea, that revolutionary activity will undermine bourgeois rule by expressing energies "the bourgeoisie itself has set free," is pure Lester: Lester in his long white lab coat, with not one but two Mephistophelian goatees waxed into points, his hair a flattop, his eyes smiling and luminous, his trumpet knifing the air with jerky parabolas of sputtering fragments, like a machine in need of oil.
Lester was the most bourgeois of underminers, the wiliest jazz provocateur of his generation. He earned the glint in his eye honestly, along with the six children and 10 grandchildren, the Brooklyn brownstone, the Lexus, and the cigar that accentuated his preternatural calm; when he removed it, he was seriously intelligent, expansive, and funny, but when it was in his mouth you half expected to hear the heh-heh-hehs that occasionally marked his records. He was raised in St. Louis, where his father played trumpet, but he was formed by carnivals, the Air Force, a flock of r&b and soul bands, the liberating wonders of Muhal Richard Abrams's Experimental Band, and the pop culture all around him, especially that of the 1950s, which he tweaked as only a fan can. Maybe you have to know that era to be moved by the 40 seconds of "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain," intoned with his plump, creamy timbre on The Great Pretender (ECM, 1981), climaxing a side with the relentless title number, a peanut gallery's "It's Howdy Doody Time," and a cataclysmic snapshot called "Doom?"—the '50s tied up with Kate Smith's bow.
Another formative influence was his idol, Louis Armstrong, whom he celebrated when the great man was still alive. You can't imagine how refreshing it was to encounter a young avant-gardist in the early '70s who understood and loved all of Armstrong, not just the '20s classics. When Lester recorded "Hello Dolly" on Fast Last! (Muse, 1974), everyone assumed it was a send-up. But you only have to listen to realize how urgently personal and affectionate it is, a eulogy from one who knows, right through to the chortling sneeze of a coda, one of the essential tracks of that decade. "Hello Dolly" began Lester's ardent 25-year pursuit of what he recently titled The Odyssey of Funk & Popular Music (Atlantic, 1998), the only record, I'm confident, with tunes by Puccini, Cole Porter, the Spice Girls, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Teddy Pendergrass, Notorious B.I.G., and Marilyn Manson.
In that period, Lester devoted most of his energy to the punctilious Brass Fantasy and the grievously undervalued New York Organ Ensemble (with James Carter and Amina Claudine Myers never better), which made two albums in 1991 for DIW that will make my shortlist for the decade. Some of his pop excavations fell flat. Avant Pop (ECM, 1986) was all pop and no avant, though it boasts Lester's memorable solo on "Blueberry Hill" and his chorale "No Shit" (sample lyric: "No shit/No shit/No shit/No shit"). But he ultimately brought the two poles together. If the initial "Great Pretender" achieves some of its levity by comin' atcha and atcha and atcha, the tight Steve Turre arrangement on Brass Fantasy's The Fire This Time (In + Out, 1992) gives it the satisfying feel of a hard-earned theme song, climaxing another essential disc, one that also includes Turre's version of Jimmie Lunceford's "Siesta at the Fiesta," E. J. Allen's best writing and playing, and the affecting "For Louis," composed by and dedicated to the memory of Phillip Wilson. Turre also arranged (and plays a wicked solo on) the title cut from My Way (DIW, 1990), a reminder that Lester at his best isn't a satirist. His dirty secret was the same as Armstrong's and Fats Waller's—the stuff they play is the stuff they love, animated by a strong sense of irony.
But all this was part of Lester's later phases, and it's the earlier period I most relish, because I can't imagine the 1970s without him. Berman writes that 1960s attempts at modernism failed, but "sprang from a largeness of vision and imagination, and from an ardent desire to seize the day." True: Coleman, Taylor, Coltrane, Mingus, Ayler—only they did not fail, Marshall. "It was the absence of these generous visions and initiatives that made the 1970s such a bleak decade." Right again, or so it appeared until we New York provincials began to hear of a generation of musicians in Chicago who went national only after a triumphant stay in Europe. They were nothing like the preceding avant-gardists, though they could not have existed without them. They played everything and they played nothing (the longest rests on records ever); they revealed technical aplomb while developing a methodology that put their skill in question. They almost always went out swinging, but before that—this was the Art Ensemble of Chicago's m.o.—they put you through an anthropological hour of bells, chimes, chants, beeps, blats, honks, and squalls. Man, you earned your catharsis.
When I learned of Lester's death, I had to hear his first album, Numbers 1 & 2 (Nessa, 1967), which I hadn't played in at least 15 years. It holds up, truly, and so do its mates—Roscoe Mitchell's Congliptious and Old/Quartet and all the early Art Ensemble of Chicago LPs, to mention just a few Lester landmarks. These albums pass the time with an almost arrogant indifference to the clocks of the world. The music suns itself on the porch, and if it gets too hot for you, stick around, because the weather changes every minute or so. In assessing the influence of Lester and his comrades, consider Terry Martin's parenthetical liner comment on the instrumentation: "three horns and a bassist!!" That sort of lineup wouldn't merit a single exclamation point today. Lester's best-known band had four trumpets, two trombones, French horn, tuba, and two drummers!!!
About a quarter into "Number 1," Lester plays a lovely, lyrical passage of sustained notes, before kneading his timbre into more expressive and eccentric tones, ending in the tuba's range. Much has been made of his flutters and growls, his ascending rips that fade off into high, whinnying slurs or his guffawing half-valve effects, but he was a commanding, skilled trumpet player—here and in the startling unison episodes of "Number 2," the limning of the melody in part two of the Art Ensemble's epochal People in Sorrow (Nessa, 1969), and numerous other instances. He showed how much he could play one night in 1977, sitting in with Roy Eldridge at Jimmy Ryan's, an encounter still talked about. A few nights ago, Eddie Locke, Roy's drummer, remembered that Roy arrived three hours early he was so nervous, and though, as always, he kept his crown, Lester acquitted himself admirably and the older guys were impressed—they didn't like the avant-garde, but they knew whatever he played must be deliberate, because he had the chops and knew the changes.
Listening to the discs today, it's hard to believe anyone questioned his ability, but the same doubts were registered about Ornette and Cecil. Lester's importance as a trumpeter can hardly be overstated. Except for Don Cherry, the instrument was all but moribund in the new music. Don Ellis's antics had become academic, Freddie Hubbard couldn't make the leap, and players like Bill Dixon, Mike Mantler, Donald Ayler, and Eddie Gale lacked either the technical or intellectual resources to carry through. In restoring the panoply of jazz trumpet effects, Lester brought it back to life and inspired a generation of brass players.
The Chicagoans' national impact was first felt in the mid '70s, and helped to overcome the direst malaise in jazz history. But they began recording in the 1960s—Lester's debut came out a year after Unit Structures, two after Ascension. Yet it divines a different world, far removed from the buoyant swing of Coleman, the steamrolling ardor of Coltrane, the virtuoso exhilaration of Taylor. Berman quotes Octavio Paz's observation that modernity is "cut off from the past and continually hurtling forward at such a dizzy pace that it cannot take root [or] recover its powers of renewal." That's just what Bowie and company were attempting to do, with their bells and harmonica, their irreverent reverence for blues and swing and pop tunes, their humor and ceremony, their music that only made sense if you listened, because you wouldn't get too far patting your feet.
Inevitably, perhaps, Lester renewed himself by returning to gospel and pop, the world of his past and the world around him, all bourgeois grist to seize a new day. Perhaps the symbolic moment of transition between the Art Ensemble Lester and the Brass Fantasy Lester took place in February 1979 at Symphony Space, when he conducted the 59-piece Sho' Nuff Orchestra, with a cast that amazed then and seems dreamlike now; the reed section alone included Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, David Murray, Arthur Blythe, John Stubblefield, Frank Lowe, Frank Wright, and Charles Tyler. The evening began when Jism Magazine's Dave Flexingbergstein ran out, press card in hat, and popped the question first heard on Bowie's 1968 "Jazz Death?": "Isn't jazz, as we know it, dead yet?" Lester rolled his eyes and said, "Well, that all depends on what you know." It ended with a churchy hymn, the band whooping in time, which showman Lester interrupted to inquire if we were having a good time. We absolutely were.
http://www.elsewhere.co.nz/jazz/2196/lester-bowie-remembered-1941-1999-does-humour-belong-in-music/
LESTER BOWIE REMEMBERED (1941-1999):
Does humour belong in music?
by Graham Reid | April 22, 2010
Art Ensemble of Chicago: Suite for Lester
Humour hasn’t had much place in jazz. Certainly Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong entertained by mugging things up. But mostly jazz is poker-faced music played to furrowed brow audiences which think it’s somehow more morally uplifting than other music.
A couple of years ago Denis Dutton, the philosopher/academic from Canterbury University, wrote of an anti-capitalist friend in New York who discarded the consumer society – yet had acquired an extensive and expensive jazz collection. But, the New Yorker reasoned, jazz is an important modern art-form.
It is. But as Dutton noted his friend could simply have said, “Yeah, but I like this stuff”.
Dutton's friend sounded an arrogant prick.
Well, jazz does have moments of humour, few more frivolous than a track on Lester Bowie’s 1992 album All the Magic!, entitled Miles Davis Meets Donald Duck.
The multi-instrumentalist horn player blew a straw under water and made it sound like Miles Davis meeting ...
Critics were baffled and some even angry (squandering his talent if not a few minutes of vinyl), but that was just Bowie having what he called, “serious fun”.
He did it throughout the 70s and 80s on tunes with titles like Rope-a-Dope (from Muhammad Ali’s famous phrase) and It’s Howdy Doody Time. In the late 80s, with his Brass Fantasy band – which often included his wife, the great soul singer Fontella Bass – he covered Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the old Lloyd Price hit Personality, Willie Nelson’s Crazy and Whitney Houston’s Saving All My Love For You.
Bowie’s superb band (which included tuba player Bob Stewart and trombonists Steve Turre and Frank Lacy) pushed the boundaries of jazz, and Bowie himself wouldn’t allow them to be pigeon-holed: “Don’t call it jazz, no way!” he said in 1986, “That word has lost any real meaning. Most real jazz musicians died penniless, right? So the term jazz to me symbolises poverty.”
Bowie wasn’t poor when he died in 1999 at 58 from liver cancer. He was well known across the music world – he played on David (no relation) Bowie’s 1993 album Black Tie White Noise – and if anyone could claim to have changed jazz it was this good humoured, bespectacled member of the innovative Art Ensemble of Chicago from the mid-60s through to the early 80s.
The AEC – whose members initially wore African tribal costumes and face paint in performance – were a musical and philosophical attempt to bridge the divide between ancient black Africa and modernist free jazz. They were the most visible and influential off-shoot of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians which formed in Chicago in the early 60s and whose members included Joseph Jarman, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors and Andrew Hill.
They were inspired by the music of Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey.
Bowie arrived in 1966 and famously remarked: “I never in my life met so many insane people in one room.”
The flexible and political philosophical group became known as the Art Ensemble and in 1989 the quartet of Mitchell, Bowie, Jarman and Favors had their hometown name appended for a European show. Percussionist Famoudou Don Moye joined and for two decades the AEC’s percussive exploratory music – much of it recorded by ECM whose founder/producer, Manfred Eicher, brought a sonic clarity to their project – was the benchmark in free jazz.
Their albums Fanfare for the Warriors (Atlantic 1974), Urban Bushmen (ECM, 1982) and The Alternative Express (DIW, 1989), should be in any serious music collection.
They slew from primal percussion through sophisticated swing with nods to Mingus and Ellington, and ride the boundaries of free jazz.
Even before the band split, Bowie had his own swaggering and good nartured projects playing a melange of funk, r’n’b, jazz and blues which reflected his early years in Texas clubs and as a session player at Chess studios.
He called his music avant pop (“Even the term avant garde is old now, avant pop is where it’s at”) and said to those who accused him of being a musical gadfly: “All’s fair in love and war – and music is both. So use anything as long as it works.”
His albums The Great Pretender (ECM 1981), Serious Fun (DIW 1989) and the hard to find The Fire This Time (In-Out, 1992), are his best, although ECM’s readily available 1988 collection, Lester Bowie: Works is a good starting point.
Deservedly, former members of the AEC – reed-player Mitchell, bassist Favors and drummer Moye – came together again to pay homage to Bowie, their fallen comrade.
Their Tribute to Lester of 2003 wasn’t sentimental, nostalgic or soft-centred. It was as challenging as the AEC ever were.
Driven from the bottom by an array of percussion which was their hallmark, this hour-long disc muscles along as Mitchell’s tough tenor scours through passages or swings over Favours’ dexterous playing. And everywhere Moye brings tonal colour and angularity from his array of congas, bongos, bells, whistles and gongs. The 12-minute As Clear As the Sun is demanding listening, especially when Mitchell turns his sax into a police siren.
Tribute to Lester isn’t a classic AEC album – how could it be with two men down? -- but is better than we had any right to expect, and reminds of how this music once was and – in the world of manicured and generic jazz – what it could be again.
The romantic, slightly baroque Suite for Lester floats on Mitchell’s sopranino sax and flute then takes off on walking-pace tenor. At five and half minutes it seems undernourished, but also gets out before any hint of sentiment invades.
And Bowie was never much for hanging on to the past. He railed against Wynton Marsalis talking about the tradition: “What tradition? The great jazz tradition was never copying, right?”
No, it wasn’t and isn’t. It’s about learning, extending and enjoying it. Like Bowie did.
It’s wrong to speak for the dead but you might guess if he heard this he’d smile.
The man who knew the meaning of serious fun often did.
http://www.scaruffi.com/jazz/bowie.html
The History of Jazz Music
Lester Bowie
Copyright © 2006
by Piero Scaruffi
Unlike his cohorts in the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, trumpeter Lester Bowie (1941), who relocated from St Louis to Chicago in 1965, was grounded in the jazz tradition. Unlike Roscoe Mitchell, Bowie maintained a close relationship with the idea of music as fun. In a sense, he represented Mitchell's alter-ego, complementing the partner's classical ambitions with a more populist approach. Nonetheless, Bowie was one of the most daring trumpters of his generation, and one of the few to adopt free jazz, capable of producing a broad range of sounds. Bowie's debut album, Numbers 1 & 2 (august 1967), contained two lengthy free-form jams that basically previewed the Art Ensemble Of Chicago (one is a trio with bassist Malachi Favors and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, and the other one is a quartet with Joseph Jarman). His sense of humour emerged from Fast Last (september 1974), an odd collection of different styles, highlighted (on the serious front) by a duet with altoist Julius Hemphill, the 13-minute Fast Last C, and Rope-A-Dope (june 1975), with Favors, Don Moye, drummer Charles Bobo Shaw and trombonist Joseph Bowie. These albums amply betrayed his tender love for blues and gospel music, a love that blossomed on The Fifth Power (1978), a quintet featuring altoist Arthur Blythe, pianist Amina Myers, Favors and drummer Philip Wilson that reworked a gospel traditional into an 18-minute juggernaut; while the same quintet crafted the double LP African Children (april 1978) that synthesized all his disparate influences and moods in 20-minute pieces such as Amina, Chili MacDonald and For Fela. The Great Pretender (june 1981) marked the beginning of his conversion to a more radio-friendly form of gospel-jazz-rock fusion, that, despite the parenthesis of All the Magic (june 1982), whose second disc is a suite of brief satirical trumpet solos, led to Bowie's artistic demise. Whether it was a case of crossover or sell-out, the Brass Fantasy (a brass octet of four trumpets, two trombones, French horn and tuba plus a drummer) that debuted with I Only Have Eyes for You (february 1985) and Avant Pop (march 1986) ended up playing mainly pop, jazz, funk and blues covers. The best original material was provided by trombonist Steve Turre.
Bowie was also a member of the Leaders, a supergroup formed by tenor saxophonist Chico Freeman with alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, pianist Kirk Lightsey, bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Don Moye that debuted with Mudfoot (june 1986). Their second album Out Here Like This (february 1987) contained Bowie's Zero. Bowie rejoined them for Unforeseen Blessings (december 1988).
Lester Bowie died in 1999
https://ecmreviews.com/2011/12/21/i-only-have-eyes-for-you/
between sound and space: ECM Records and Beyond
Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy: I Only Have Eyes For You (ECM 1296)
December 21, 2011
by Tyran Grillo
Lester Bowie´s Brass Fantasy
Only Have Eyes For You
Lester Bowie trumpet
Stanton Davis trumpet, fluegelhorn
Malachi Thompson trumpet
Bruce Purse trumpet
Craig Harris trombone
Steve Turre trombone
Vincent Chancey French horn
Bob Stewart tuba
Phillip Wilson drums
Recorded February 1985 at Rawlston Recording Studios, Brooklyn, New York
Engineer: Akili Walker
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Lester Bowie
This debut album from Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy is still the outfit’s best. The moment those doo-wop horns saunter in for the title cut, you know you’ve come home. Bowie not only enthralls us with his fortitude, but manages to do so while keeping alive in his muted cone the dying flame of a bygone era. But here is where Bowie & Co. break from the formula that would shade later Brass Fantasy efforts: from hereon out we get nothing but originals. Trumpeter Bruce Purse’s “Think” is the densest of these and is anchored by Bob Stewart’s wonderful tuba lines. Stewart also leaves his mark with “Nonet,” a creeping leviathan of sound that surfaces with a vivacious sense of coalescence. Brother in arms Malachi Thompson offers his “Lament,” which begins in the darkest recesses of the assembled instruments, gurgling like didgeridoos behind Bowie’s freshly gilded warbling. Bowie himself rounds out the set with two tunes. “Coming Back, Jamaica” is a respectful taste of the islands, grafted by chanting voices and supernatural lines, not to mention a tuba solo to end all tuba solos. “When The Spirit Returns,” on the other hand, is a trudge and a half, but one that shoulders a burden of hope which it offers to us with mounting selflessness.
Bowie’s Brass Fantasy is one of the more compelling jazz configurations of the 1980s and holds its rightful place in ECM’s hallowed halls. Nowhere better to start than here
http://culture.pl/en/work/not-two-milosc-and-lester-bowie
Not Two - Miłosc and Lester Bowie
"Not Two is a rare document of one of the last recordings by revered jazz musician Lester Bowie, recorded live on the 19th of November 1997 at the Eskulap Club, Poznań Jazz Fair, Poznań, Poland. On this record Lester Bowie is joined by on of the best European jazz and experimental music bands of 1990s scene - MIŁOŚĆ. In around 1992, a unique scene began in Gdańsk, Poland and surrounding cities. 'Yass', as the scene came to be called, generally has its philosophic roots in the Vajrayana Buddhist faith. Mainly, these musicians focus on freeing music from categorization and on blurring genre definitions. These are stunning musicians, versatile, dexterous, and often full of humor. 'Yass' groups such as MIŁOŚĆ have collectively transformed virtually every tradition of jazz, from swing to free-jazz, and have mixed in punk, noise, and playful iconoclasm.
When I founded MIŁOŚĆ back in 1988, we had an experimental new wave group background and quite a collection of weird, far-out ideas designed to blast the conformist music world. We had already been into Zappa, Beefheart, Frith and lves and had just recently discovered Coltrane, Dolphy Coleman, Ayler and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. We were a band of hot-heads around 20, who ostentatiously quit school and devoted themselves to playing and discussing music for days and nights on end. Boy, did we totally freak out when we heard that great, uncompromising, passionate music... These guys were to influence us strongly for half a decade until we worked out our own idiosyncratic Yass style involving free improvisation, rock expression, classical harmonies, ethnic rhythms & feeling and what have you... Up to December 1995 we issued two CD records of original material, having gained a cult reputation and a hard core audience mainly throughout Poland. Our music clearly appealed to improvised music fiends and punk rock fans, affecting the brainless and the sophisticated (neither the better). Actually it's because that's the way we are, I believe; highly intellectual and deadly brainless at the same time.
No wonder I immediately began arranging a mental list of the likes of us, some uninhibited musicians who'd kind to suit our sane insanity, when our Poznań mate Piotr Nycz from the Eskulap club proposed that MIŁOŚĆ play in a sextet format with a chosen guest star. The date was to be at the Poznań Jazz Fair towards the end of 1994. Another friend of ours, Jarek Tylicki of the Colosseum Agency, by the way himself a Zappa & Dolphy fan, offered me this innocent suggestion, 'What about... Lester Bowie?'. Yeah, that was it - the best hit he could make, the best combination we could dream of. When I finally confronted Lester on the 17th of November 1994, as he and his entourage were heading for the club we were to rehearse at, I told him, 'You know it's not an accident that we are playing together tomorrow...'. 'What do you mean, man?' his eyes questioned. 'It's because the Art Ensemble and us are just a bunch of freaks', I continued, while Lester laughed and nodded his approval.
The concert playing was extremely good, also thanks to the audience. Lester Bowie turned out to be a warm, charismatic person and a superb, experienced musician whose ways were far above the traditional rules and regulations. With him it was easy to relax, it was all about relaxing. You cannot say that about our uptight, ego-neurotic, professor-like jazz scene leaders. When you play with him, the music just happens. If you're able to let it go and be open to whatever comes next, magic may come your way too. 'Free jazz is not what people call or think is free. It could be a melody a song or ballad, a free or bop thing, just anything. It's about free approach and that's misunderstood', he explained to us at the rehearsal. 'Let's follow the music - it will be all clear'. And I think we did it that way with great assistance on the part of Lester who danced around with his trumpet, his lab coat waving, his eyes half-closed, his energy never demanding or disturbing, always ready to help the music flow intervening when necessary. 'When you really play you forget yourself and the ego disappears. The music cannot be controlled', he commented after the concert, visibly content with what we'd done together. We were even more than this, hoping it wasn't the last time we meet and it wasn't; as soon as in January 1996 the same sextet is to play a regular tour around Poland. C'mon, you don't really have to read all this. It's enough if you only listen to this recording of a live performance of ours which speaks for itself - music always does. Feel free to enter its magic yet not virtual reality in which lives meet, energies coalesce, worlds and music blend... All being just one, not two." (Ryszard Tymon Tymański; text courtesy of Mózg)
Miłość and Lester Bowie. Not Two: "Smart Maharishia" (Tymański-Gwinciński), "Psalm-Itch" (Tymański), "Taniec Mikołaja" (Sikała), "Orchilius" (Tymański), "Here's the olden meesaur" (Tymański), "Chłopaki na damkach" (Trzaska), "Ordre omnitonique" (Tymański). Lester Bowie - trumpet, Mikołaj Trzaska - alto, soprano & baritone saxophones, Maciej Sikała - tenor & soprano saxophones, Leszek Możdżer - piano, mezzosopran, Ryszard Tymon Tymański - bass, conductor, Jacek Olter - drums. GOWI Records, Poland 1995.
Marek Romański
January 2009
https://guardian.ng/news/lester-bowie-jazz-is-great-black-music/
Lester Bowie: ‘Jazz Is Great Black Music’
by Benson Idonije
28 February 2016
The Guardian
“What we are trying to do today by the term ‘Great Black Music’ is to put emphasis on the quality of music that black people have created in this world,” explained Lester Bowie in an interview with Glendora Review. “I mean this music is so great that each one of its sub divisions has influenced the whole world … rock’n roll, blues, jazz, gospel, each one is a division of this music but actually all coming from the same thing,” Explaining the role and essence of jazz in this whole experiment, he said, “the thing about jazz is that it fuses all these different elements together. In fact, jazz, is becoming the first world music. It is the contemporary music of this planet at this time. Therefore, it is very important for our people to know that out of everything happening to us on the planet, we have still maintained the pinnacle of culture. We still have that, this civilising force, this music. Our art has survived because there was a time when we were running this planet, another time when yellow people were running it, everyone has had their time, but our culture has survived and is still influencing the culture of today.”
Bowie had strong views about African music, especially in terms of the way it is tied up with the totality of African culture. And the ‘Great Black Music’ which he preached and propagated was out to reveal the power of this cultural affinity. Said he: “Just like in Zaire, they go in there and take everything out of Zaire, not leaving nothing which is exactly what is happening to music, they take from the music and we ourselves do not realise the power that we have. So what we try to do with our music is to make people aware of the power of the music and the power it represents as far as how we can influence our thinking because in Africa, art was not separated from life, it was a part of it. You learn from the culture. This is how you learned how to think, the ceremonies, the rituals, the whole sequence of growth to maturity but you see, we have gotten away from that.”
Bowie’s attitude to jazz stems from the relevance of African culture and condemns the perception of the Western world that sees culture from the ephemeral perspective, as an element of decoration. His words: “The Western world says that art is something you put on the wall… art for art’s sake! Art has got to have meaning, there must be a connection, it has to be part of our everyday lives. We are supposed to learn from our culture. It is not something we see and just go dancing. Why are we dancing? What is the history of dance? What does it mean? We have to see how it connects to our lives, and then we can apply it to our lives.
“Consequently, we will think much better and more clearly and hopefully we can get something done. So, ‘Great Black Music’ is the total embodiment of our music and what we in jazz have done is to try to bring all these different elements together because they were all separated.”
My first impression of Bowie was formed in 1977 when I met him at Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s place in Lagos. Then, Fela’s house had just been burnt down and the Afrobeat legend was temporarily occupying a specious suite at Cross Road Hotels, Jibowu, Yaba, Lagos where he had relocated. Bowie had come all the way from America without adequate preparation for the journey. By the time he came to Fela’s place, he had no money. He had no luggage. And I’m sure he had no plans as to how to survive. But from his demeanor and the ideas he generated from conversation as he held tenaciously to his trumpet case, I had no doubt in my mind that he was a musician’s musician. And indeed, he was!
This assessment of Bowie was confirmed when he stayed with Fela for six months and recorded three albums with the Afro beat legend on Afrodisia label – prominent among them, Dog Eat Dog, a free flowing rhythm over which horns made statements in the form of riffs.
The other side is No Agreement but it is on Dog Eat Dog that Bowie is heard in his elements, exhibiting a bag of trumpet and flugel horn tricks including half valve effects, growls, slurs, smears, bent notes and a wide vibrato, punctuating one of the most humorous, yet striking solo styles among brass players. What with the blowing of frenetic upper registers in the course of his dialogue with trumpeter Tunde Williams!
Tenor player Fela Anikulapo Kuti, trumpeter Tunde Williams and flugel horn player Lester Bowie himself all shared solo concessions but apart from helping to lift the quality of the music in solo context, his presence inspired Fela and Tunde who had never had it so good solo-wise in terms of the spirit feel that was generated.
Bowie became the president of Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) in 1968. Their music had African heritage as focus, playing concerts every night and rehearsing all day with all kinds of different groups and combinations. The music was popular in Chicago, from where it was taken to Europe in 1969. Based in Paris, Bowie’s Art Ensemble of Chicago played at the theatre six nights a week.
Bowie’s ‘great black music’ has since received some measure of acceptance on the jazz scene. And like a teacher and crusader of a new revolution, he was always critical of ‘repertoires’ and ‘establishment music’. He never had kind words for the likes of trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis who is Down beat’s number one. “Wynton is the key,” he informed. “He is the one they use to stop the music. He has helped to destroy the music.
“Now what’s happening is that all his younger contemporaries are not making any money or making a living or being accepted throughout the world because they are not doing anything. The only one making any money is Wynton,” said Bowie.
Notwithstanding, jazz is not all about making money. It’s like the Biblical “seek ye first the kingdom of God and every other thing will be added unto you”. Bowie and the black music revolution ensured the creatively high musical abilities of its members as a first step. And through recognition for their artistic accomplishments, their concerts were packed. Their records sold.They enjoyed individual acclaim.
However, what this whole contention is all about is that the time has come for jazz music to be elevated beyond its current perception. It is long overdue for it to assume its cultural significance of ‘great black music’ – on the same parallel with European classical music. The point is we do have black art music – music people should listen to and not dance to. And the foundation for this revolution has already been established by the likes of Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Lester Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Stanley Jordan and their various disciples. So, what next?
http://jazztimes.com/features/the-brass-fantasies-of-lester-bowie/
The Brass Fantasies of Lester Bowie
10/01/1997
By Bill Bennett
JazzTimes
LESTER BOWIE
Brass Fantasy is the unruly realization of a Lester Bowie dream.
Bowie, of course, is the virtuosic trumpeter who has brought a unique blend of bite and perspective to the avant garde over the past 30 years. His probing, roots-aware playing embraces the length and breadth of the brass tradition in jazz, bringing in other musical lines from cultures around the world, and fusing them in a style that is at once aesthetically demanding and playful-“Serious Fun,” as one of his recordings suggests.
Take this singular voice, add trumpets and trombones in threes, with tuba and two percussionists to anchor the ensemble in time. Stir in challenging charts that range from doo-wop to wailing stomps, and you have Brass Fantasy:
“Brass Fantasy was an idea I had had for quite a long time,” Lester recalled recently. “I first got the idea back in the early days of the AACM, when we used to do all sorts of different types of unorthodox groups. I wasn’t able to do it until 1982, when I was invited by a classical festival in Karlsruhe, Germany to put together any kind of group I wanted to for a performance at the festival. That gave me the chance I’d been looking for…and we’ve been together ever since.”
Asked to define Brass Fantasy’s place in the musical continuum, Bowie is quick to place the band in a line that extends well beyond what we usually think of as jazz. “We are definitely the world’s greatest brass choir,” he claims, “and our literature is part of the most advanced brass choir literature in the world. We’re the continuation of the whole brass choir tradition, and an extension of the New Orleans brass band-but at the same time, we’re a different entity. We’re using different techniques in our solos and ensemble playing, different sorts of voicings and arrangements…we’re trying to show just how expressive the brass instruments can be. Up until now, trumpeters have been limited to the ‘normal notes’ of the diatonic scale. But compared to 12 ‘normal’ notes, shit, you’ve got 50 notes in between. So we’re trying to utilize all those-and not just for effect, but to show how using them in conjunction with those ‘normal notes’ makes for a completely different statement.”
The mark of a large ensemble is its book, and Brass Fantasy has a book as broad and deep as the traditions it represents. “I select and assign all the songs to my different writers-I have a staff of writers. And when I feel a song-when I hear something on the radio that I like or it’s just a song I like, I give it to one of the writers and ask them to give me an arrangement on it.
“What happens is, each tour, I try to add two or three new tunes. For example, this last tour I commissioned two new pieces: ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ and ‘One Love’ by Bob Marley. We’ve now got about 75 tunes in the book. But we’ve got other stuff coming. We’re getting ready to do a great tune by Marilyn Manson.” Bowie clearly relishes his role as a musical contrarian, admitting influences to his music that many jazz fans would eschew, if they knew of them at all.
Amid such diverse music, Bowie yet manages to maintain consistency in the band’s book, both in terms of quality and approach. “First of all, I don’t accept tunes from anyone but brass players,” he notes. “Only brass players, because we really understand the instruments…most of your arrangers are piano players or saxophone players. But it so happens that some of your better arrangers are trombonists, like Steve Turre, J.J. Johnson or Melba Liston. They have a really good idea of what brass-not so much what they can or cannot do, but how they sound best, or which way are they shown in their best light.”
“But you know,” Lester continues, “when you’re doing this music, regardless of who writes it, regardless of who arranges it, it still ends up being our music because of the style and sound that we have, the players we have. They all have their own unique way of presenting this music, so regardless of who the arranger may be, you recognize a certain continuity of sound. And that’s due to the caliber of musicianship in the band.”
His own musicianship and creative presence remain very much the centerpiece of the band. At a recent performance of Brass Fantasy, Bowie worked the front of the stage through three microphones: one at knee-level that seemed to soften the sound of the horn, and two more chest-high that fed into different places in the stereo mix. As if conducting himself through his solos, he would rip his trumpet from left to right, pulling back from the microphones as his phrases peaked, cosseting in as he dropped into barely audible extensions of his line. “I’ve always done that,” Lester explains, “That’s why I have trouble with sound guys. I always tell ’em, ‘Give me a setting and just leave it alone.’ Don’t try to adjust, because the problem they always have with me is that my style goes from loud to soft to everything in between, and it can do it in an instant. What I’d tell these guys is, ‘Don’t worry, when I play loud I back away from the microphone. But there’s also things I might play in the next instant that will be whisper soft. So you have to allow me to work the microphones; don’t try to work it for me, ’cause you don’t know what I’m going to play’-and that way I can really deal with the sound. Otherwise, they’re going to get caught…if they can’t pick up the strength, and they can’t pick up the subtlety, then they’re missing 90% of what I do.”
Gearbox
“The gear thing I don’t do. I don’t make any instrumental endorsements, because I’ve never been even offered an endorsement, even a mouthpiece or a bottle of valve oil, by any instrument maker-I believe that no one wants to take responsibility for my sound. So I don’t give any information like that out for publication; if someone wants to ask me, I’ll be happy to discuss it face-to-face.”
Listening Pleasures
“I listen to all kinds of music-I listen to everything except myself: not too much Brass Fantasy, and not too much Art Ensemble. The latest things I’ve been listening to are Biggie Smalls and Marilyn Manson, because I’m working on some arrangements on them. There’s this one tune Biggie does called “Player Haters” [on L’il Kim’s CD Hard Core (Big Beat/Atlantic)]. And the Manson thing is called “Beautiful People” [on the CD Antichrist Superstar (Nothing/ Interscope)]…I’ve also been listening to a set of Miles Davis that someone taped in a club in Saint Louis in 1956; I’m a great Miles Davis fan; anything Miles does, I’m always interested in that. The recording itself is not so good, but to hear those guys in 1956 is really great; it’s Philly Joe Jones, ‘Trane, Red Garland…Miles is my all-time favorite…”
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-01-16/news/0001160291_1_brass-fantasy-lester-bowie-art-ensemble
Jazz
A Man And His Music
Artists Pay Tribute To Lester Bowie But Can't Replace His Impact
January 16, 2000
by Howard Reich
Chicago Tribune Arts Critic
The death last November of Lester Bowie, a uniquely charismatic and innovative trumpeter-bandleader, left a gaping hole in the world of avant-garde jazz.
For more than three decades, Bowie had fueled new ideas in music through fascinating, genre-bending ensembles. Though his work as a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago has been celebrated, Bowie also helped rejuvenate jazz with bands such as Brass Fantasy, a horns ensemble that applied outrageous, avant-garde sounds to venerable brass-band traditions; the Sho Nuff Orchestra, a powerhouse collection of dozens of freewheeling musical improvisers; and From the Root to the Source, a no-holds-barred group that somehow found common ground among gospel, fusion and rock idioms.
Though Bowie had been diagnosed with liver cancer early in 1998, he refused to stop performing, playing his last Chicago performance in October and taking his Brass Fantasy band to Europe thereafter. He was hospitalized in the midst of that tour, and his wife, Deborah, flew to London from their Brooklyn home to retrieve him. Bowie -- who was born in Maryland, grew up in St. Louis and emerged as a jazz revolutionary in Chicago -- died on Nov. 8, at age 58.
It's possible the marathon Chicago concert tribute to Bowie Thursday in Hyde Park Union Church will capture some of the fire of the man's music and spirit.
Even so, the impact Bowie had on performers, audiences and the art of jazz improvisation suggest that he will be sorely missed. That much is apparent from interviews with several Chicago musicians who worked closely with Bowie and spoke with the Tribune about the man's life and music:
Malachi Thompson, trumpeter-bandleader:
"I was always in awe of Lester's imagination. He went through the same schools of thought as other jazz trumpet players -- in terms of listening to Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard and people like that -- yet he conceptualized a completely different approach to playing trumpet and playing jazz.
"I equate Lester Bowie and Roscoe Mitchell (another Art Ensemble founder) with bebop icons like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Just like them, Lester and Roscoe defined a new music on their instruments.
"But Lester was also important as a personality. I remember when he was talking about putting together the Sho Nuff Orchestra, with 100 or so of the leading contributors to new music.
"And I said to him, `Man, you're crazy.' But then he did it, getting people like Henry Threadgill and Joseph Jarman and Anthony Braxton and David Murray -- all these great names that we take for granted now, and he put it together.
"When we were playing in that band, it was like being in jazz heaven. Not only that, but everyone got paid!"
Kahil El'Zabar, percussionist-bandleader whose Ethnic Heritage Ensemble will perform at the tribute concert
"You know that Nike commercial that says, `Just do it'? That's what Lester Bowie represented, and a lot more than any shoe company. When he decided he wanted to go to Nigeria and hang there for a couple of years, he just did it.
"When he wanted the Art Ensemble of Chicago to go to Europe (in the late 1960s), he said, `Let's leave, let's do it.' And that started a stellar career for the Art Ensemble.
"And I admired the way he didn't limit himself to any genre. He believed in Duke Ellington's statement, that there's only two kinds of music: good and bad.
"As a trumpeter, Lester could make a very big, fat kind of sound, but he also had these little sounds and hisses that are associated with African music. And at the same time, his trumpet playing had the presence and grittiness of an American urban sound. So when you think about a person dealing with the full capacity of his instrument, Lester was one of the rare individuals who actually did that.
"And he had this sense of humor. To him, life was a gas. This cat could laugh, and make you laugh.
"I spoke to him just a few weeks before he passed, and he said: `Whether we have to make our music in a circus tent or out on the street, it doesn't matter, we've got to do it. And I'm not going to worry about what these doctors say, I'm going out and doing this tour.'
"I can't think of any statement better than that to express what music meant to Lester in the last cycle of his life."
Roscoe Mitchell, saxophonist-bandleader whose quintet will play the Bowie tribute
"Lester was a great inspiration to all of us. He always kept a fresh idea going, always wanted to explore and study music. So in that way, he was a real motivator to a lot of people.
"For instance, when he wanted the Art Ensemble of Chicago to go to Europe for the first time, he was the one who made it possible: He sold all his furniture to come up with the money.
"His trumpet playing had a unique sound, which is what it's all about in this music. Lester sounded only like himself, he sounded individual.
http://stljazznotes.blogspot.com/2014/10/remembering-lester-bowie.html
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Remembering Lester Bowie
Though Bowie (pictured) actually was born in Maryland, he grew up in St. Louis as part of a family that included two brothers who also became professional musicians: Joseph Bowie, a trombonist and leader of the funk-jazz band Defunkt; and Byron Bowie, a saxophonist and arranger/composer.
After developing his trumpet chops playing blues gigs around St. Louis with singers including Albert King and Little Milton and jazz wherever and whenever he could, Lester Bowie moved to Chicago in 1965, where he became a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the group with whom he is most closely associated.
In addition to the AEC, Bowie was involved in many different musical projects, recording in duo and trio settings with many of the musicians from BAG and Chicago's AACM, and leading a number of his own groups, notably Brass Fantasy and the Lester Bowie Organ Ensemble. His work incorporated many types of music, from free improv and knotty post-bop to gospel and doo-wop, and he stood out among trumpet players of his generation for his combination of deep concepts, a sense of humor, and use of extended techniques. Sadly, Lester Bowie died young, passing away from liver cancer on November 9, 1999 when he was just 58.
In the first video window below, you can see him in 1983 performing with From The Root To The Source, a multi-stylistic group reflecting Bowie's love of popular and church music as well as jazz that also was something of a family band, since it featured his ex-wife Fontella Bass and former in-laws Martha Bass and David Peaston.
In the window below that, you can see him performing "Summertime" in an undated clip with Brass Fantasy, and below that, in two parts, a complete Art Ensemble concert recorded in 1991 in Budapest.
Labels:
Art Ensemble of Chicago,
birthday,
Fontella Bass,
Joseph Bowie,
Lester Bowie,
tribute
THE MUSIC OF LESTER BOWIE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. BOWIE
Lester Bowie - "For Louie”
(Composition and arrangement by Lester Bowie)
From the album 'All the magic’—ECM records, 1982
Lester Bowie - "For Louie”
(Composition and arrangement by Lester Bowie)
From the album 'All the magic’—ECM records, 1982
Lester Bowie Brass Fantasy - "I only have eyes for you”
(Arrangement by Lester Bowie)
ECM, 1985:
Lester Bowie - 'Fast Last!’—Full Album
Muse Records, 1975:
Lester Bowie - "The Great Pretender”
Cut 1 From the album ECM 1209, 1981
‘The Great Pretender’
ECM, 1981
Lester Bowie - trumpet
Hamiet Bluiett - baritone saxophone
Donald Smith - piano, organ
Fred Williams - double bass, electric bass
Phillip Wilson - drums
Fontella Bass - vocal
David Peaston - vocal
Miłość & Lester Bowie - “Orchilius”:
Z płyty Not Two:
Lester Bowie - trumpet
Maciej Sikala - alto saxophone
Mikołaj Trzaska - tenor saxophone
Leszek Możdżer - piano
Tymon Tymański - double bass
Jacek Olter - drums
Lester Bowie-"Rios Negroes”
(Composition by Lester Bowie)
From the album ‘The Great Pretender’
ECM records. 1981:
ECM Records – 177 6214 - Originally released in 1981.
Double Bass, Electric Bass – Fred Williams
Drums – Phillip Wilson
Piano, Organ – Donald Smith
Trumpet – Lester Bowie
Lester Bowie Brass Fantasy Orchestra 1984--Live concert performance playing "I Only Have Eyes For You":
The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble
"Jazz Death?"
(Composition and solo performance by Lester Bowie)
From the Congliptious LP, 1968
Nessa Records
Reissued in "The Art Ensemble 1967/68" Box set:
Lester Bowie - "For Fela":
Lester Bowie - tpt, Arthur Blythe - as, Amina Claudine Myers - organ, Malachi Favors - b, Phillip Wilson - d,
Horo Records 29/30
Recorded April 16, 1978, from the album "African Children"
Lester Bowie & Phillip Wilson Duo - Live in Alassio (Italy) 1978:
Belvedere Santa Croce
Alassio, Italy
09.09.1978
Lester Bowie, trumpet
Phillip Wilson, drums
1. Track #1 (00:00)
2. Track #2 (15:18)
Lester Bowie - "Hello Dolly”
(Composition by Lester Bowie)
Lester Bowie: trumpet
John Hicks: piano
Recorded September 1974
From 1975 album Fast Last! on Muse record label:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Bowie
Lester Bowie
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Lester Bowie | |
|---|---|
Bowie performing in the mid-1990s
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| Background information | |
| Born | October 11, 1941 Frederick, Maryland, U.S. |
| Died | November 8, 1999 (aged 58) Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | |
| Instruments | |
| Years active | 1965–1999 |
| Labels | |
| Associated acts |
|
| Notable instruments | |
Contents
Biography
Born in the historic village of Bartonsville in Frederick County, Maryland, Bowie grew up in St Louis, Missouri. At the age of five he started studying the trumpet with his father, a professional musician. He played with blues musicians such as Little Milton and Albert King, and rhythm and blues stars such as Solomon Burke, Joe Tex, and Rufus Thomas. In 1965, he became Fontella Bass's musical director and husband.[2] He was a co-founder of Black Artists Group (BAG) in St Louis.
In 1966, he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a studio musician, and met Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell and became a member of the AACM. In 1968, he founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago[1] with Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, and Malachi Favors. He remained a member of this group for the rest of his life, and was also a member of Jack DeJohnette's New Directions quartet. He lived and worked in Jamaica and Africa, and played and recorded with Fela Kuti.[3] Bowie's onstage appearance, in a white lab coat, with his goatee waxed into two points, was an important part of the Art Ensemble's stage show.
In 1984, he formed Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, a brass nonet in which Bowie demonstrated jazz's links to other forms of popular music, a decidedly more populist approach than that of the Art Ensemble. With this group he recorded songs previously associated with Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and Marilyn Manson, along with other material. His New York Organ Ensemble featured James Carter and Amina Claudine Myers. In the mid 1980s he was also part of the jazz supergroup The Leaders. Featuring tenor saxophonist Chico Freeman, alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, drummer Famoudou Don Moye, pianist Kirk Lightsey, and bassist Cecil McBee. At this time, he was also playing the opening theme music for The Cosby Show.
Although seen as part of the avant-garde, Bowie embraced techniques from the whole history of jazz trumpet, filling his music with humorous smears, blats, growls, half-valve effects, and so on. His affinity for reggae and ska is exemplified by his composition "Ska Reggae Hi-Bop", which he performed with the Skatalites on their 1994 "Hi-Bop Ska", and also with James Carter on "Conversin' With The Elders". He also appeared on the 1994 Red Hot Organization's compilation album, Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool. The album to raise awareness and funds in support of the AIDS epidemic in relation to the African-American community, was heralded as "Album of the Year" by Time.
In 1993, he played on the David Bowie album Black Tie White Noise, including the song "Looking for Lester", which was named after him. Lester and David Bowie were not related.
Bowie took an adventurous and humorous approach to music and criticized Wynton Marsalis for his conservative approach to jazz tradition.
Lester Bowie died of liver cancer in 1999 at his Brooklyn, New York house he shared with second wife Deborah for 20 years.[3] The following year he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.[4] In 2001, the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded Tribute to Lester.
Discography
Lester Bowie, New Jazz Festival Moers (Moers Festival), 1978
As leader
| Title | Year | Label | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Numbers 1 & 2 | 1967 | Nessa | |||
| Gittin' to Know Y'All (features Bowie conducting the Baden-Baden Free Jazz Orchestra) | 1970 | MPS | |||
| Fast Last! | 1974 | Muse | |||
| Rope-A-Dope | 1976 | Muse | |||
| African Children | 1978 | Horo | |||
| Duet (with Phillip Wilson) | 1978 | Improvising Artists | |||
| The 5th Power | 1978 | Black Saint | |||
| The Great Pretender | 1981 | ECM | |||
| All the Magic | 1983 | ECM | |||
| Bugle Boy Bop (with Charles "Bobo" Shaw) | 1983 | Muse | |||
| Duet (with Nobuyoshi Ino) | 1985 | Paddle Wheel |
Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy
| Title | Year | Label | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I Only Have Eyes for You | 1985 | ECM | ||
| Avant Pop | 1986 | ECM | ||
| Twilight Dreams | 1987 | Venture | ||
| Serious Fun | 1989 | DIW | ||
| My Way | 1990 | DIW | ||
| Live at the 6th Tokyo Music Joy (with the Art Ensemble Of Chicago) | 1990 | DIW | ||
| The Fire This Time | 1992 | In & Out | ||
| The Odyssey Of Funk & Popular Music | 1999 | Atlantic | ||
| When the Spirit Returns | 2003 (recorded Oct. 1997) | Dreyfus Jazz |
Lester Bowie's New York Organ Ensemble
| Title | Year | Label | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Organizer | 1991 | DIW | ||
| Funky T. Cool T. | 1992 | DIW |
With the Art Ensemble of Chicago
With the Leaders
Main article: The Leaders
- Mudfoot (Black Hawk), 1986
- Out Here Like This (Black Saint), 1986
- Unforeseen Blessings (Black Saint), 1988
As sideman
With David Bowie- Black Tie White Noise (Savage, 1993)
- Conversin' with the Elders (Atlantic, 1995)
- New Directions (ECM, 1978)
- New Directions in Europe (ECM, 1979)
- Zebra (MCA, 1989)
- Comme à la Radio (Saravah, 1971)
- Funky Skull (Limelight, 1969)
- No Agreement (Afrodisia, 1977)
- Fresh (Freedom, 1975)
- Free Jazz No. 1 (Concert Hall, 1969)
- Other Afternoons (BYG, 1970)
- Sound (Delmark, 1966)
- Live at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club (India Navigation, 1978)
- Sunshine (BYG, 1969)
- Homage to Africa (BYG, 1969)
- Under the Sun (Freedom, 1973)
- Streets of St. Louis (Moers Music, 1974)
- Yasmina, a Black Woman (BYG, 1969)
- Blasé (BYG, 1969)
- Pitchin Can (America, 1970)
- Coral Rock (America, 1970)
- Seasons (BYG, 1971)
- Divine Love (ECM, 1979)
- Funky Donkey Vol. 1 & 2 (Atavistic) (Luther Thomas & the Human Arts Ensemble)
- Under the Sun (Universal Justice) 1974 (Human Arts Ensemble)
- Funky Donkey 1977 (Circle) (Luther Thomas Creative Ensemble)
- Free to Dance (Black Saint), 1979 (Marcello Melis)
- 6 x 1 = 10 Duos for a New Decade (Circle), 1980 (John Fischer)
- The Razor's Edge/Strangling Me With Your Love (Hannibal, 12"), 1982 (Defunkt)
- The Ritual (Sound Aspects), 1985 (Kahil El'Zabar)
- Meet Danny Wilson (Virgin), 1987 (Danny Wilson)
- Sacred Love (Sound Aspects), 1988 (Kahil El'Zabar)
- Avoid The Funk (Hannibal), 1988 (Defunkt)
- Environ Days (Konnex), 1991 (John Fischer)
- Cum Funky (Enemy), 1994 (Defunkt)
- Hi-Bop Ska, 1994 (Skatalites)
- Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool (Impulse!), 1994 (Various Artists) appears on one track with Digable Planets
- Bluesiana Hurricane (Shanachie), 1995 with Rufus Thomas, Bill Doggett, Chuck Rainey, Bobby Watson, Will Calhoun, and Sue Foley
- Buddy Bolden's Rag (Delmark), 1995 (Malachi Thompson & Africa Brass)
- Not Two (Biodro Records), 1995 (Miłość and Lester Bowie)
- Conversin' with the Elders, 1996 (James Carter)
- No Ways Tired (Nonesuch), 1995 (Fontella Bass)
- Mac's Smokin' Section (McKenzie), 1996 (Mac Gollehon)
- Hello Friend: To Ennis with Love (Verve), 1997 (Bill Cosby)
- My Secret Life (Calliope), 1998 (Sonia Dada)
- Amore Pirata (Il Manifesto), 1998 (Lorenzo Gasperoni Mamud Band feat. Lester Bowie)
- Smokin' Live (McKenzie), 1999 (Mac Gollehon)
- Talkin' About Life And Death (Biodro Records), 1999 (Miłość and Lester Bowie)
- Test Pattern (Razor & Tie), 2004 (Sonia Dada)
- Hiroshima (Art Yard), 2007 (The Sun Ra All Stars Band)
Notes
- "2000 Down Beat Critics Poll". Down Beat. Retrieved 19 October 2015.
References
- Carles, Philippe; Clergeat, André; Comolli, Jean-Louis (1994). Dictionnaire du Jazz. Paris. ISBN 978-2221115923.
- Carr, Ian; Fairweather, Digby; Priestley, Brian (1987). Jazz: the Essential Companion. London. ISBN 978-0135092743.
- Cook, Richard; Morton, Brian (2002). The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (6th ed.). ISBN 978-0140515213.
External links
- Lester Bowie at the Art Ensemble of Chicago
- Lester Bowie discography at Discogs
- Lester Bowie at the Internet Movie Database
