Mirage--Lester Bowie

[Milestones]

Any knowledge on this? Any thoughts? I guess the basis is two Bowie albums from the mid-70s, but they are short--in tunes and in playing time. Here we have 16 tracks and about 2 hours of music.

I was never too big on Art Ensemble of Chicago, but always liked Bowie's playing. I'm a much bigger fan of Brass Fantasy, and saw him once with that group--fine show.

Edited February 20, 2015 by Milestones

[Chuck Nessa]

It is his Muse recordings.

[king ubu]

... including a fine duo album with Charles "Bobo" Shaw!

[David Ayers]

It's...ok...

[paul secor]

I like both Fast Last! and Rope-a-Dope. They're better than ok to me.

[JSngry]

MUCH better!

[johnblitweiler]

I like both Fast Last! and Rope-a-Dope. They're better than ok to me.

almost Bowie's best LPs on his own

[king ubu]

I like both Fast Last! and Rope-a-Dope. They're better than ok to me.

almost Bowie's best LPs on his own

Which one(s) would you rate higher?

[Hot Ptah]

I like these Muse albums. I find everything that Lester Bowie ever recorded to be of great merit, literally. It all ranges from very interesting to great, in my opinion. So it really depends on your taste. I happen to really like his "Great Pretender" and "All the Magic" albums, for example--but I also love his contributions to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Jack DeJohnette's New Directions, and his Brass Fantasy band. To me, you just jump right in and eventually get all of it, every note he ever recorded.

[clifford_thornton]

how is the Horo?

[mjazzg]

I know you're not asking me but if I can push in.......I can let you know later in the week. A copy in the post as we speak....enough of it on youtube to whet the appetite. I'm on a big Amina C-M kick at the moment and that was the clincher

[Milestones]

What else is Amina known for? I've only heard her work with Lester Bowie.

[clifford_thornton]

Saw her with Archie Shepp years ago and it was strong stuff. AACM member from fairly early on, appeared on Kalaparusha's first LP, a great duo LP on Leo with Pheeroan Ak Laff, solo piano work honoring Marion Brown on Sweet Earth - lots of essential music.

Thanks mjazzg, for whatever reason I've never liked trying before I buy via YouTube or downloads, though sometimes I guess you've gotta...

[mjazzg]

That Leo LP with Ak Laff is fabulous as is the Marion Brown but neither are on CD. The Bessie Smith tribute on Leo is on CD and well worth a listen. I'm fond of her 'Circle of Time' trio on Black Saint and 'Jumping in the Sugar Bowl' on Minor Music with Reggie Nicholson. A live trio album has its moments too

Don't forget Threadgill's 'Song out of my trees' either. I'm keeping the duo with Muhal up my sleeve for later

CT - I admire your restraint. I can kind of understand why but .......

Edited February 23, 2015 by mjazzg

[clifford_thornton]

ah yes, indeed on the Threadgill - I don't have the duo with Muhal.

Man, so much music I haven't listened to yet - I did give a listen to one clip of African Children and it's pretty strong. Although on the used market, it's one of the more expensive Horos. The only one I've actually forked over on thus far was the MEV.

[mjazzg]

The track 'Fela' is a killer

[ep1str0phy]

ah yes, indeed on the Threadgill - I don't have the duo with Muhal.

Man, so much music I haven't listened to yet - I did give a listen to one clip of African Children and it's pretty strong. Although on the used market, it's one of the more expensive Horos. The only one I've actually forked over on thus far was the MEV.

African Children is pretty good--a lot more roving than The 5th Power. I think that giving this particular ensemble space to stretch enlivens the proceedings, since the group is ultimately "just" a first rate blowing band. The music is (in relation to most Art Ensemble stuff and even a lot of Bowie music) sort of formally conventional, and it has that kind of lopsided groove that characterizes a lot of loft-era inside/outside jazz--but it's Bowie in a too-seldom-documented extended ass-kicking mode, which makes it worthwhile.

FWIW, I like both of the Muse sessions--Fast Last! a little more because of the sublime Julius Hemphill contributions. Bowie and Hemphill share a raw funkiness that is simultaneously deeply earthy and surreal, so it's interesting to hear them together.

Bowie's playing on Frank Lowe's Fresh is similarly facinating--pranksterish and kind of perverse, but also very direct and punchy. I've always felt that this was something to aspire to as both a soloist and ensemble voice--the character of being deeply self-aware and cognizant of one's surroundings, allowing this sort of intelligence to direct and not limit your power, energy, or ingenuity.

[Hot Ptah]

I like his Horo album a lot, and recommend it.

[clifford_thornton]

Fresh is a weird record.

Out Loud, a quartet with Joe Bowie, is also weird but more paint-peelingly rambunctious.

[ep1str0phy]

Fresh is a weird record.

Out Loud, a quartet with Joe Bowie, is also weird but more paint-peelingly rambunctious.

Fresh is weird, and I hadn't listened to it for ages until I dug up my copy a few weeks ago. IIRC, it's the first Frank Lowe album that isn't a nonstop essay in firebreathing, and this turned me off a bit on first listen. Having (now) come to terms with a lot of the self-conscious inside/outside music of this period (and having developed a taste for later, more melody/rhythm-oriented Lowe), it makes a lot more sense.

I read it as a post-AACM album that doesn't make any profound statements about the structural or conceptual possibilities of a post-free landscape; it's an album about what you do do in the post-free epoch, rather than what you can do. It's fascinating because it's one of the few documents of a definitive second/third wave energy player coming to terms with the ethoses of jazz postmodernism and Great Black Music (as opposed to a document of a player "born" into one or the other--e.g., Jarman, Kalaparusha, Windo, Glenn Spearman, sort-of David Murray, etc.)--it's a sonic pivot point between diehard loft post-Coltraneisms and the "later stuff," and it's suitably messy, conceptually scattered, and imbalanced.

It's sort of a "freer" album than Black Beings in this way--it's not shackled to any particular MO, and so these previously obscured attributes of Lowe's playing are coming to the fore--"OK, let's play some Monk. Let's play some straight R&B (etc.)." The Art Ensemble, for example, always walks a fine line between irony and deathly seriousness when it participates in these sort of idiomatic conceits--with Lowe, I only hear seriousness. If the actual meat of the ensemble work and the playing still sound like they're being worked out, it's OK--it's the first album with Lowe as leader that really "sounds" like prototypical, inimitable Lowe, and as such it's kind of a stealth bellwether for so much wonderful but stylistically scattered 80's creative music.

Now The Flam--that sounds much more "together." The quartet stuff with Butch Morris--much more together. And of course, as people say religiously on these boards, the recordings tell only part of the story. Fresh--much like these Lester Bowie Muse sides--is cool because it sounds like we're listening in on a marginal point in history--not the unbelievable capital letter stuff, but the nuts and bolts of music transitioning from one psychology to the next.

Sometimes this music is the most telling, because I don't think the painful work of figuring out what to do post-Coltrane/post-Cage is really done. These days, I feel like it's more about personal solutions than either catastrophic change or definitive innovation.

[JSngry]

I heard Fresh in real time, the first Frank Lowe I had heard (thank you Arista-Freedom, easy-enough-ish accessability), and "weird" was not at all what came to mind then. Sounded like some frisky guys really playing, still does.

[ep1str0phy]

I heard Fresh in real time, the first Frank Lowe I had heard (thank you Arista-Freedom, easy-enough-ish accessability), and "weird" was not at all what came to mind then. Sounded like some frisky guys really playing, still does.

Just curious, Jim--had you followed Lowe up to that point (live or on record)? It sounds like such an abrupt turn to me. With the exception of episodes of Noah Howard's Live at the Village Vanguard, Lowe doesn't really sound like he does on Fresh before '74. It's different than, say, Marion Brown or Archie Shepp, both of whom sort of transitioned into more melodic (but also, for the most part, more subdued) playing after the fire music heyday--Lowe plays more melodically after the early 70's, but with this sort of blotchy abandon that is more akin to Braxton or Roscoe than an Ellingtonian horn.

For all suggestions that the music went into severe crisis mode after the unleashing of Ayler and late Coltrane, I definitely feel this vibe that "something's happening" on a lot of early 70's free music--and it's all at once geographical, generational, and conceptual. Even on supposedly marginal stuff like Fresh or, again, the Bowie Muse albums, there's this sense that doors once blown open raise a lot of interesting questions about residence, property, and sanctuary.

[TedR]

".....doors once blown open raise a lot of interesting questions about residence, property and sanctuary." I love that sentence and all it's implications.

[mjazzg]

Yes, so did I. I do enjoy ep1str0phy's posts - always written with insight and care.

[JSngry]

I heard Fresh in real time, the first Frank Lowe I had heard (thank you Arista-Freedom, easy-enough-ish accessability), and "weird" was not at all what came to mind then. Sounded like some frisky guys really playing, still does.

Just curious, Jim--had you followed Lowe up to that point (live or on record)?

No. Fresh was the first Lowe I had ever heard. It was 1975 when the record came out, I had recently turned 20, and still was proud of having over 100 LPs. Those few earlier Lowe performances were not on records that were particularly available (ESP at the time was not exactly a powerhouse in terms of releases or distribution) where I lived. I do remember a Downbeat feature on him from around that time, maybe around the time of Fresh, but other than that, Frank Lowe was a new player on the \scene as far as I could tell. The closest thing to an "accessible" (as in can I get this in the stores?) was the Alice Coltrane side, and Alice Coltrane was not...uh...a priority to me at that time. I did not see a Survial side in a store until Peaches opened in..1976? 1977? And where the hell did anybody buy the Intercord label in my part of the country? I don't think that even Peaches carried that.

What I'm saying is that hearing an artist's work in retrospect, with the more or less completeness of it more or less "easily" available in some form. can understandably give you a different perception than does getting to it in real time under real time considerations of what records had already been made and how available they were or weren't. Hell, when Brown Ric hit, i was thinking, oh, SHIT, Fran Lowe's about to be a star now, slickass A&M record, this is some high profile shit here, look out, here comes Frank Lowe! That was that old-school Blue Note/Prestige syndrome at work, right? Get the buzz, make a dieman appearance on a tar's side, get your own date within that organization, there you go, career made.

Well, that was then...

But even in retrospect, with the advantage of hindsight and easier access to all periods, Fresh still doesn't at all sound "weird" to me, nor do the Bowie Muse sides, which I also heard in real time (and yes, I had been following the AEC as best I could). It just sounds like guys playing in (and moving through) their moment at that time, seizing that moment, actually, taking it and running with it. When you heard it then, you had no idea what the next 5, 10, 20 years are going to bring, so you hear it like what it is right now. And like I said, what it was right now was just damn good playing that was indeed, pardon the pun, fresh.