LESTER BOWIE

O N TH E COVER
lester bowie
brass memories
by kurt gottschalk
alan nahigian
Chicago doesn’t have a history of being good to local
heroes, but it does love a homecoming. While the city’s
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
(AACM) has held strong in town for five decades and
counting, it’s only when members leave and return
again that they get the star treatment. Such was the
case last summer, when AACM co-founder Muhal
Richard Abrams reunited his Experimental Big Band
for the Chicago Jazz Festival or in 1995 when association
member Henry Threadgill brought an expanded
version of his Very Very Circus to the lakefront stage.
And such was also the case in 1992, when Lester Bowie
appeared at the annual free festival with his aptly
named Brass Fantasy.
Bowie was among the first AACM members to
break out of Chicago’s city limits. His international
fame began with the Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC),
who set up residency in Paris in the late ‘60s and went
on to become about as big a name as an avant garde
jazz band can hope to be.
The bespectacled trumpeter, in lab coat and pointed
beard, charmed the AEC’s audiences. Drawing on his
background with R&B acts Albert King, Rufus Thomas
and Jackie Wilson, Bowie was never too proud to please
the crowd. In the midst of percussion jams or free
blowouts, Bowie could blow a few swinging notes and
the band would stop on the dime he dropped. If they
were there to inject tribal rhythm into jazz
experimentalism, Bowie was going to make sure
Broadway and Tin Pan Alley weren’t left out of the mix.
That hot September night in 1992 was an unusually
strong one for the historically hit-and-miss festival.
The Brass Fantasy took the stage to close the night:
trumpeters Earl Gardner, Eddie E.J. Allen and Gerald
Brazel; trombonists Frank Lacy and Luis Bonilla;
Vincent Chancey on French horn and Bob Stewart on
tuba; and percussionists Vinnie Johnson and Famoudou
Don Moye, all decked out in blue sequin jackets that
hung well past their hips. After a star-denoting pause,
the leader strutted out, his jacket sparkling in silver.
They swung hard like only a brass band can. They
played jazz standards and popular songs of the day, as
a good entertainment review is wont to do. Near the
end of the set, they played a haunting rendition of
“God Bless the Child” during which Bowie staggered
backwards, reached into his jacket, pulled out a pistol
and fired into the air. They left the audience stunned
and screaming when they left the stage and when they
returned for an encore, the band was bedecked in silver
and Bowie all a-glitter in gold. The band was there to
put on a show and that’s just what they did.
Years later, the band (without Bowie, who died at
his home in Brooklyn in 1999 at the age of 58) is coming
together again to play again. At the Tribeca Performing
Arts Center, Brass Fantasy will take the stage once
again as a part of the Lost Jazz Shrine series. While
memories of the charismatic trumpeter will no doubt
be thick in the air, the evening will actually celebrate
the West Village club Sweet Basil, which enjoyed a run
just down the street from the Village Vanguard from
1974-2001. It was one of the relatively few clubs the
band played in America. Ironically, according to
Chancey, Bowie’s populist tendencies made the band a
hard sell stateside. “It’s a band that didn’t play a lot in
the States because a lot of club owners and festival
promoters had the Art Ensemble in mind as to what
Lester would do,” Chancey remembered. “But from
the moment he formed the band he said, ‘This is going
to be a show band.’ He wanted it to be in that kind of
vein. We even had our costumes—that the musicians
weren’t so excited to wear.”
Chancey is one of the Brass Fantasy alumni
returning for the reunion. Bonilla, Lacy and Earl
McIntyre will be on hand, along with Steve Turre,
noted for playing seashells along with his trombone.
Trumpeter Stanton Davis will also return and holding
down the bottom will be a trio of tuba players—Marcus
Rojas, David Scheiman and Bob Stewart—all of whom
played in Bowie’s original lineup. The evening will
include a number of guests, including trumpeter
Steven Bernstein, vocalist Renee Manning and students
from the jazz big band Stewart directs at The Juilliard
School. His son Curtis Stewart, who plays violin in the
PUBLIQuartet, will also join in. Bringing in younger
players is an effort to keep the band “fresh, both
conceptually and musically,” he said.
Letting new voices find a place in the band is in
keeping with Bowie’s style of leadership, according to
Stewart, who is serving as band director for the reunion
show. “He was a bandleader in the tradition of Duke
Ellington,” Stewart said. “Lester hired you because he
trusted you and he let you go ahead and play.
“Just about everyone who came through the Brass
Fantasy has gone on to have their own ensemble,” he
added. “It’s one of the first things that Lester
encouraged. I remember at one point he said to me,
‘Don’t just do this and let it be over. Do this and make
it mean something. Your own group has to be smoking
or you’ll just be the tuba player in Brass Fantasy.’ It
was liberating for me.”
Perhaps a product of Bowie’s concept for the
band—which, in short, may be described as giving
everyone room to play and making sure you give the
audience a show—is the fact that the Brass Fantasy
was very much a live band. Whether it be in front of
thousands at the Chicago Jazz Festival, any number of
festivals across Europe, the cozy confines of Sweet
Basil or augmented into a big band with rappers,
playing the Celebrate Brooklyn festival in Prospect
Park as the Hip-Hop Feel-Harmonic, the band fed off
the energy of the audience. “It was a live band but
Lester had a way of making everybody feel comfortable,
even in the studio,” Chancey conceded when asked
about the difference an audience made.
An unfortunate byproduct of the band having
been a living, breathing, organism may be that of the
ten albums they released (including one posthumously),
only two really show them in top form. The 1990
double-disc Live at the 6th Tokyo Music Joy ‘90 catches
the band on their own and as a double band with the
AEC (who also play their own set). It’s a good record
but even better is 1992’s The Fire This Time, recorded
live in Switzerland and easily the best they put out.
Touching on Billie Holiday, Jimmie Lunceford, Rahsaan
Roland Kirk, Ray Charles and Michael Jackson, the
album shows how the Brass Fantasy may have
exemplified Bowie’s notion of “Great Black Music—
Ancient Into the Future” even better than the AEC,
who routinely invoked Bowie’s credo.
Stewart acknowledged that there was something
about the band that only happened onstage.”Some of
Brass Fantasy’s best recorded work was done live,” he
said. “Certain things aren’t necessarily going to happen
in the studio that happen live. There were no two
performances that were alike. There were times that
the horns would just levitate.”
Beyond Bowie’s leadership and charm, of course,
was his musicianship. Dave Douglas, the president
and co-founder of the Festival of New Trumpet Music
and a prolific artist in his own right, said he was slow
to come around to Bowie’s unusual playing and choice
in material, but once he did he learned a lot.
“I listened to Lester Bowie in high school but the
people I was really chasing in terms of style and sound
were Miles Davis and Woody Shaw,” Douglas said.
“The impact of what Lester was doing only came to me
later in my career. The thing that struck me when
I went back to listen was how his use of extended
technique was all at the service of melody and how
much he was able to draw from different styles and be
free to explore different styles of music.”
Bowie was “really brave” to “enter the realm of
humor in music,” Douglas said. The costumes and pop
covers all put him at risk of not being taken seriously
by audiences. But then this was a man who, in 1989,
gave a Brass Fantasy album the title Serious Fun. With
covers of songs by James Brown, Bobby McFerrin and
Sade alongside the more expected jazz tunes, the
album epitomized Bowie’s belief that music doesn’t
really live in the boxes people put it in—at least not if
it’s played with purpose.
“At the root of it, Lester was a great melody
player,” Douglas said. “When he played a melody, like
you can hear him play a Whitney Houston song and
it’s the most beautiful song you’ve ever heard. The
idea of freedom that I took away from him was the
freedom to move in and out of different styles and do
whatever you want at any given moment,” he added.
“The freedom of Lester gave permission to all of us.” v
A tribute to Bowie led by Bob Stewart is at Tribeca Performing
Arts Center Jun. 4th as part of Lost Jazz Shrines. See Calendar.
Recommended Listening:
• Roscoe Mitchell—Sound (Delmark, 1966)
• Lester Bowie—Numbers 1 & 2 (Nessa, 1967)
• AEC—Fanfare for the Warriors (Atlantic, 1973)
• David Murray—Live at the Lower Manhattan Ocean
Club, Volumes 1 & 2 (India Navigation, 1977)
• Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy—
I Only Have Eyes For You (ECM, 1985)
• Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy—The Fire This Time
(In + Out, 1992)
8 JUNE 2016 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD