Lester Bowie

Lester Bowie's Outer Spice

by Don Allred
June 2 - 8, 1999 Issue 22

Brass Fantasy
The Odyssey of Funk & Popular Music
Atlantic

The most radical conflagration that Free Jazz Pioneer Lester Bowie has ever
perpetrated: his Brass Fantasy of the Spice Girls' "Two Become One." The
Spicies' own softcore brass is peeled away to reveal a literally lame melody,
reducing even tuba hero Bob Stewart to stereotypical fart-waddling. Trombones steer
surviving listeners into the boodwah, where trumpet strumpets issue a
bootycall to arms (legs, etc.). Eventually, BF sonorities insinuate themselves so
warmly, deeply, that I notice bum notes only in passing, and fondly, as if they
were butt my lover's cellulite. Mondo Beyondo!
Wannabe-endless "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" gets stopped, quickly but
calmly, and shouldered aboard a tuba train, the better to pass through warm shadows
of bolero and tango, before vanishing mysteriously. "Beeyutifull Pee-pull!"
take back their title from Evita and all her escorts, rolling into and out of a
shockingly loud parade drum— Manson as Masons, in freewheeling ceremony.

Biggie's "Notorious Thugs" gets stripped of Bone's graffiti harmonies (or
complicities), revealing a lone hero-outlaw, bound to fall. Dean Bowman sings
eloquently, stoically, fades out (an ancient story, still "in progress"). "Nessum
Dorma" (Aretha pinch-hit for Pavarotti with it at the Grammys) features a
trumpet in lonely contemplation of assured triumph (a male privilege thing). Then
Bowie's horn buddies remind him he's winning the Maximum Babe, Turandot, and
does he hosanna! Still, it's kind of a . . . blues victory. Always was,
really. (Lester's got me checking out opera.)

"In the Still of the Night" revels in '50s R'n'B'n'R's glorious joke, which
anyone with ears could and can get in on, even past or sans the sands of mature regrets and lost (if any) innocence. 

To find out all the rest? Hey, buy the disc.

.