Art Ensemble of Chicago
Released September 1, 2003
JazzTimes Top 10 Albums of 2003
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/48wHPeHs18iAGkEneCcleO?si=KolbbZmcQB6zmHHSP64g1Q
About:
Almost 20 years after their last studio album for ECM, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the most influential collectives in jazz history, return with “Tribute to Lester”, paying homage to the memory of their good friend and colleague, Lester Bowie, who died in 1999.
The original alliance of the Art Ensemble and ECM resulted in the now-classic albums “Nice Guys”, “Full Force”, “Urban Bushmen” and “The Third Decade” – all recorded between 1978 and 1984. In these discs (as the press and the group members themselves concurred) the AEC’s cutting-edge improvisations benefitted enormously from Manfred Eicher’s input as producer. At last the listener could hear all the rich and complex detail of the Art Ensemble’s sonic world and follow all aspects of the musical argument, whether they were playing lyrically, dreaming up visions of Africa in spontaneous drum choirs, or locking horns in full force blasts of untrammelled sound-energy.
After a momentous Art Ensemble Munich concert in 1995 with a quartet line up of Bowie, Mitchell, Favors and Moye, plans for a new round of collaborations with ECM were drawn up. (For most of the previous decade, contractual obligations with a Japanese label had prevented the group from recording elsewhere.) The first outcome of the renewed alliance was Roscoe Mitchell’s award-winning “Nine To Get Ready” album, recorded in 1997.
With the death of Lester Bowie two years later, the Art Ensemble lost a flamboyant frontman, a charismatic performer and the participation of one of the most creative trumpeters in the music’s history. His trademark smears and slurs and growls, his half-valve effects, his wide vibrato and his anarchic humour brought new colours and ideas to jazz. Bowie, not given to false modesty, saw himself as a link in a tradition that extended from Louis Armstrong through Dizzy Gillespie to Miles Davis and Don Cherry and was outspokenly impatient of musicians who settled merely for historically correct re-creation of jazz styles. The Art Ensemble’s very motto and rallying cry “Ancient to the Future” implied that study was meant to bring a musician forward, not mire him in the past, a point that is still worth emphasizing.
Correspondingly, “Tribute to Lester” touches on the spirit of the blues that was Bowie’s first inspiration – he came up playing with the bands of Albert King and Little Milton among others – and also reflects upon the AEC’s own history. Mitchell ably carries the “frontline” role by himself, a reminder that the AEC was originally his group (in the early years it was the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble). The juxtaposing of space with high intensity playing recalls the era of Roscoe’s landmark album “Sound” (1966), which also marked the first collaborative recordings with Bowie and Malachi Favors.
Malchi Favors’ tune “Tutankhamun”, meanwhile, was a staple of the band’s set in their formative Paris years, when the AEC’s famously theatrical performances – as well as their musicianship – made a profound impact on European players.
Bowie’s “Zero” a “freebop” tune which first surfaced on “The Third Decade” is interwoven here with Mitchell’s composition “Alternate Line”. A centrepiece of the album is Mitchell’s concise yet wide-roving “Suite for Lester” which works a range of moods and colours which are as unpredictable as its subject. Roscoe moves between plangent soprano sax, pretty neo-baroque and a booting blues-blasting bass saxophone line that recalls the AEC’s signature tune “Odwalla”. Here and elsewhere Malachi Favors and Don Moye offer the empathetic, near-telepathic support honed through so many years of playing together.
“Sangaredi”, which opens the disc, is a jungle of interlocking tribal beats, in the tradition of earlier AEC percussion workouts like “Bush Magic”. This “Tribute to Lester” concludes with two collective improvisations – “Clear As The Sun”, with superb circular-breathing-powered soprano saxophone from Mitchell, and “He Speaks To Me Often In Dreams”, a beautifully detailed developmental percussion piece with bells chiming magically and “little instruments” (the use of toys, whistles, bike horns and co was another AACM innovation) providing indeterminate asides, like a window open onto the street…
Lester Bowie’s message, and the Art Ensemble’s, will continue to speak to improvisers everywhere for generations to come.
Track Listing:
1. Sangaredi (Famoudou Don Moye) 7:42
2. Suite for Lester (Roscoe Mitchell) 5:22
3. Zero/Alternate Line (Lester Bowie / Roscoe Mitchell) 9:16
4. Tutankhamun (Malachi Favors) 8:10
5. As Clear as the Sun (Malachi Favors / Malachi Favors Maghostus / Roscoe Mitchell / Famoudou Don Moye) 12:41
6. He Speaks to Me Often in Dreams (Malachi Favors / Malachi Favors Maghostus / Roscoe Mitchell / Famoudou Don Moye) 13:52
Personnel:
Roscoe Mitchell: Alto Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone, Sopranino Saxophone, Bass Saxophone, Flute, Whistles, Percussion Cage
Malachi Favors Maghostut: Double-Bass, Bells, Whistles, Gongs
Famoudou Don Moye: Drums, Congas, Bongos, Counsel Drums, Bells, Whistles, Gongs, Chimes
Recorded September 2001, at Chicago Recording Company
Engineer: James A. Farber
Mixed by Manfred Eicher and Roscoe Mitchell
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Review:
In 1978, Art Ensemble of Chicago performed at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art without Lester Bowie, who was touring Europe with Jack DeJohnette’s New Directions. The news was met with disappointment, even apprehension. Without even looking up from assembling his arsenal of woodwinds and percussion, Roscoe Mitchell told a small group of early arrivals that the spirit the AEC was dealing with was much greater than any one of its members and it would not be deterred. It took about 30 seconds after the opening gong for Malachi Favors Moghostut, Joseph Jarman, Mitchell and Famoudou Don Moye to prove the saxophonist right and all but make the audience forget that the Great Pretender hadn’t made the gig. So, the idea of the AEC going on after the trumpeter’s passing seems perfectly natural, just as it did after Jarman’s retirement in 1993. And there’s something vaguely appropriate that the AEC’s first two recordings without Bowie have hit the street almost simultaneously, with Jarman performing only on one. It’s a reminder that the spirits come and go as they will.
Certainly, the trumpeter’s absence is more sharply felt on Tribute to Lester, particularly on Bowie’s jazz-savvy “Zero,” which he recorded with the AEC and the Leaders. Even during Mitchell’s piquant alto solo there’s a nagging sense that a channel has dropped off and Bowie will bleat his way in at any moment. The same goes for the reprise of Favors’ loping “Tutankhamun,” which dates from the AEC’s early Nessa sessions. Still, the trio is able to sustain compelling levels of energy, as is the case with “As Clear as the Sun”-which reiterates Mitchell’s status as a pioneering soprano stylist-and vivid, morphing palettes of percussion colors. Additionally, the AEC’s ability to completely surprise the listener remains very much intact, the case in point being Mitchell’s “Suite for Lester”; though it is rooted in Mitchell’s explorations of baroque music, it nevertheless has a dry comedic undercurrent that, in concert, Bowie could use to trigger a house full of laughter just by raising his eyebrows.
The exponential ensemble weight gained by a second horn is immediately felt on Jarman’s “Hail We Now Sing Joy,” which opens The Meeting with a simmering midtempo swing and the type of simple melodic kernel Jarman used in AEC anthems like “Dreaming of the Masters.” (A more obscure antecedent is at work on Favors’ “It’s the Sign of the Times,” as four of its five sections are comprised of solos by each musician, reminiscent of the first side of Mitchell’s Congliptious LP).
On tunes like Mitchell’s “Tech Ritter and the Megabytes,” the second horn is essential to flesh out the quasi-funked staccato phrasing. The overlapping of Jarman’s wood flutes and Mitchell’s recorders enhances the watercolorlike delicacy of “Wind and Drum,” while their sparring saxophones on Mitchell’s title tune is crucial to the track’s molten intensity. The AEC is a different ensemble with Jarman, but he would probably be the first to say it’s not better-just different.
Only Lester Bowie could have produced a body of work that spanned the audacious solo 1967 piece “Jazz Death?” to an album of reconstituted pop hits like When the Spirit Returns without being crass or cynical (issued here in the U.S. for the first time). The mix of show band, brinkmanship, romanticism, and mischief Lester brought to Brass Fantasy was regularly misjudged during his lifetime, and perhaps this 1997 album, which includes covers of chart-toppers by TLC, Babyface and the Notorious B.I.G., will prompt a reassessment of this aspect of his work.
A serious agenda drove Brass Fantasy: the relationship between jazz and popular music in the wake of jazz once being popular music. And Bowie rarely let a tune go by without pushing some serious buttons, be it through a gratingly glitzy flourish in an arrangement or a belchlike texture at precisely the wrong moment. With jazz snobs, he was playing “Gotcha,” because Brass Fantasy was irresistible; with everyone else, it was, “Welcome to the party.” Come as you are to When the Spirit Returns.
Bill Shoemaker (JazzTimes)
