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| The Great Pretender |
| Lester Bowie |
| első megjelenés éve: 2008 |
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| (2008)
[ DIGIPACK ]
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CD |
| 4.665 Ft
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| 1. | The Greater Pretender
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| 2. | It's Howdy Doody Time
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| 3. | When the Doom (Moon) Comes over the Mountain (A.) Doom? (B.) When ...
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| 4. | Rios Negroes
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| 5. | Rose Drop
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| 6. | Oh, How the Ghost Sings
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Jazz
Recorded June 1981
Lester Bowie trumpet
Hamiet Bluiett baritone saxophone
Donald Smith piano, organ
Fred Williams basses
Phillip Wilson drums
Fontella Bass vocal
David Peaston vocal
Flamboyant trumpeter Lester Bowie was a sonic scientist with roots in R & B, the blues and carnival music: his first ECM leader disc good-humoredly explores these elements.
This album is part of the ECM TOUCHSTONES series: Great music and full-dimensional sound at download price, in cardboard covers with original artwork.
Lester Bowie's projects apart from the Art Ensemble of Chicago tread a high wire between challenging improvised music and R&B-pop. This seeming dichotomy purports a universally appealing sound close to selling out, but speaks more to the whimsy and farcical elements Bowie sees in the hypocrisy of life. The Great Pretender is a perfect title for this effort, a mix of funk and humor, gospel and jazz, with no small points of reference to Dizzy Gillespie, early doo wop, Mahalia Jackson, James Brown, and Sun Ra. The lengthy title track modernizes the Buck Ram hit on many levels, as Bowie's sly, ribald, and comedic trumpet playing hits every nerve over a head nodding church hued backbeat, accented by the ooh-ooh vocals of Fontella Bass and David Peaston. The band doubles the tempo in waltz time with Hamiet Bluiett's burly baritone sax leading a mellow charge, while Bowie takes more slapstick liberties, adding a vocal component directly copped from Daffy Duck. The other prime cut here is "Rios Negroes," an electrifying calypso where unending kinetic energy flows through the commanding trumpeter's part Don Juan caballero, part General George Patton lyricism -- his finest jam ever. The deep bass playing of Fred Williams and montuno piano of Donald Smith perfectly support the flashy Bowie in great depth and constraint with no bombs bursting. The band does a hilarious goofball version of "It's Howdy Doody Time" with bouncy bass and Phillip Wilson's New Orleans drumming. Bowie's not finished there, calling out spooky spirits with vocal hauntings through darkness and shadows on the foreboding "Oh, How the Ghost Sings," and questions "Doom?" in "When the Doom (Moon) Comes over the Mountain" by evoking wickedly fearsome growling and bleating through his horn over Smith's organ, the popping electric bass of Williams, and Wilson's pounding drumming. The Great Pretender falls just short of Bowie's magnum opus The 5th Power, but not by much in terms of sheer modernism. It's utterly enjoyable creative jazz, worthy of a space in your collection.
---Michael G. Nastos, All Music Guide
Lester Bowie
Active Decades: '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s
Born: Oct 11, 1941 in Frederick, MD
Died: Nov 08, 1999
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Jazz-Funk, Avant-Garde, Progressive Big Band, Post-Bop, Jazz-Pop, Free Jazz, Free Funk, Avant-Garde Jazz
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 successfully and completely adopt the techniques of free jazz. 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 has a more vocal quality, 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 have included From the Root to the Source -- a sort of gospel/jazz/rock fusion group -- and Brass Fantasy, an all-brass, post-modern big band that's become his most popular vehicle. Bowie's catholic tastes are evidenced by the band's repertoire; on albums, they have 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.
---Chris Kelsey, All Music Guide |
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