StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: The BAG legacy, part 4

This week continues our look at music made by former members of St. Louis' Black Artists Group, which existed for a relatively brief time in the late 60s and early 70s and helped launch the careers of a number of successful creative musicians.

You can see part one of the series, which includes some links to background information about the group here, part two here, and part three here.

This week's installment features music from trombonist Joseph Bowie and saxophonist/flutist Luther Thomas, whose respective careers share a few important characteristics.

Bowie and Thomas were two of the youngest musicians affiliated with BAG, both still teenagers when the group was founded. Both wound up in New York City at the turn of the 1980s and got some notice for their involvement in the downtown scene mixing free jazz, funk and punk rock. Both subsequently expatriated to Europe, and stayed there. And both have made music that exhibits one of the distinctive features of St. Louis creative musicians: the mixing of free improvisation with rhythms and motifs from blues, funk, and other popular genres.

In addition to playing jazz and improvised music, a number of the BAG musicians also did casual gigs with bluesmen like Albert King and Little Milton, and the influence of that music shows up in various ways in their individual catalogs. For example, Joseph Bowie in the late 70s formed the band Defunkt, featuring raucous, sometimes free-form soloing over often-frantic funk beats, and it has remained one his main musical vehicles ever since.

You can get a good sampling of Defunkt's sound in the first video up above, a full show recorded in 1981 at the Metropol in Berlin, Germany for the TV program Rockpalast. In addition to Bowie on trombone and vocals, this version of Defunkt featured two more St. Louisans, guitarists Richard Martin and Kelvyn Bell, plus Bowie's longtime associates Kim Clarke on bass and John Mulkerin on trumpet, and drummer Kenneth Joseph Martin.

Defunkt also references tradition in other ways, as demonstrated in the video after the jump, which features their version of Charlie Parker's "Au Privave" as recorded in 2017 in Leverkusen, Germany by Bowie, Mulkerin, Bell, Clarke, and drummer Garry "G-Man" Sullivan.

Bowie also has "up-sized" a number of Defunkt songs, creating expanded arrangements for a project called Big Band Funk. You can see and hear what that sounds like in the third video, an absolutely bonkers (in a good way) version of one of Defunkt's signature songs, "Make Them Dance," that was recorded in 2008 with a group of student musicians called the Barbary Coast Ensemble at Dartmouth College.

Bowie is still living in Europe, still releasing new music, and, until the recent shutdown of live music around the world, playing gigs. Sadly, the same can't be said for Luther Thomas, who passed away in 2009 when he was just 59 years old.

While none of his projects ever got quite as much worldwide attention as Defunkt, he seems to have worked regularly while living in Denmark and over the course of his career released a number of albums, at least one of which, 1977's Funky Donkey, is considered an underappreciated classic and was reissued in 2006.

While there's much less video documentation of Luther Thomas available online, before he passed, he did set up a YouTube channel, on which he posted the next clip, a short excerpt of a performance by his Dizzazz Quartet that he described thusly: "This is MY personal blend and what TRULY think that I sound like: an OliverLake LesterBowie Dolemite NiggahsWithAnAttitude LesterYoung SunRa TyroneDavis MartinLutherKing RoscoeMitchell & PTBarnum COCKTAIL, mixed and blended ON the SPOT."

That's followed by an excerpt from a show at the 2008 Copenhagen Jazz Fest by Thomas' QuartetDK, with Nils Davidsen on bass, Jeppe Gram on drums and Mikkel Mark on piano. The final video also is from the 2008 Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and features Thomas mixing it up with guitarist Eugene Chadbourne, Davidsen and drummer Kresten Osgood.

It looks as if might be enough remaining BAG-related video material for one more post in this series next week, but if not...well, you'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, you can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...