StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Serious fun with Lester Bowie

This week, let's continue with another in our occasional series of posts featuring the work of St. Louis' best-known jazz musicians, this time with some videos featuring the late trumpeter Lester Bowie.

Bowie, who died from liver cancer in 1999, would have turned 79 this month. He was born in Maryland, but spent most of his childhood and young adult years and first learned to play the trumpet here in St. Louis. He also met his first wife, the singer Fontella Bass, here while both were working with saxophonist and producer Oliver Sain's band, and atill has relatives, including a couple of his children with Bass, living in the area.

He first gained wide attention in the late 1960s as a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and as a result, many jazz listeners thought of him primarily as an avant-garde musician. But Bowies's musical approach also was shaped by his time in St. Louis, especially his work as a sideman with blues musicians including Sain, Little Milton, Albert King and others, and by his sense of humor. Those influences were prominent in his best-known solo project, the band Brass Fantasy, which used instrumentation similar to a New Orleans brass band and frequently performed arrangements of pop, rock, and R&B songs. Bowie sometimes referred to the band's approach as "serious fun," which wound up as the title of one of their albums (and this post.)

Those diverse influences also are evident in today's first video up above, which documents a 1983 performance by a Bowie project called "From The Roots To The Source" that featured Bass and her brother, singer David Peaston. As the name suggests, the group had an eclectic repertoire including songs from a number of different styles and eras of Black music.

After the jump you can see a show by Bowie and The Brazz Brothers - basically an alternate version of Brass Fantasy with mostly European musicians - recorded in May, 1996 during the Jazz Ost-West Festival at the Großer Saal der Meistersingerhalle in Nürnberg, Germany. For this gig, Bowie brought organist Amina Claudine Myers and the Art Ensemble's percussionist Famoudou Don Moye along from the USA to provide the foundation for the ensemble, which also included trumpeters Jarle Forde and Jan Magne Forde, French horn player Runar Tafjörd, trombonist Helge Forde, tuba player Stein Erik Tafjörd and drummer Egil "Bop" Johansen.

The third video features Bowie's Brass & Steel Band, another variation on the Brass Fantasy concept featuring the addition of steel drummers Anthony Trebuse, Denzil Botus, and Wilfred Kieal, recorded in 1996 at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy.

After that, you can see a set from Bowie's New York Organ Ensemble, recorded in 1992 at the Jazzaldia festival in San Sebastian, Spain. The group could be considered as Bowie's take on a hard-bop type of sound, and along with the leader, features fellow St. Louisan Kelvyn Bell on guitar, Myers on organ, and Moye on drums, plus the veteran trombonist Julian Priester and, in an early high-profile gig that helped make his reputation in the jazz world, a young James Carter on tenor sax.

The last two videos feature Bowie as part of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, with Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman on an assortment of reed instruments, Malachi Favors Maghostut on bass, Famoudou Don Moye on drums, and all the group's members doubling on percussion and "little instruments." The penultimate video was recorded in October 1991 at the venue Fabrik in Hamburg, Germany, and the final video is from July 1987 at the Jazzaldia festival in San Sebastian, Spain.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...