It was the late and very truly great trumpeter Lester Bowie who coined the AACM slogan "Great Black Music - Ancient into the Future," and it's a credo that defined his life's work. From the Afrocentrism of the Art Ensemble of Chicago to the R&B flirtations of his Brass Fantasy, Bowie sought to establish a continuum through African and African American music.
But while the AECO in their heyday were simply one of the best jazz groups ever, the Brass Fantasy were inconsistent at best. The army of trumpets and trombones (generally nine or ten in toto), backed by tuba and percussion, were unfailingly exciting live, but rarely made records that carried that energy (in fact, they only did once, and that was a live recording).
The Brass Fantasy was, more than anything else, Bowie's chance to showcase his talents as an arranger. Like scores of previous instrumental groups (the JB Horns, the Love Unlimited Orchestra and MFSB, to name a few), Bowie's group thrived when they were interepreting hits, which they did from Billie Holiday to Whitney Houston. On this new disc (recorded two years before his death in 1999, during the same sessions as Odyssey of Funk and Popular Music, Vol. 1, also on Dreyfus), they switch the formula around, giving up the jazz pretense and playing pure rhythm and blues. Both of the records from that session were programmed by Bowie's daughter Zola, then 15, but the songbook isn't all that different from past recordings. Where we once got Sade and Michael Jackson, now we get TLC Bob Marley, Biggie Smalls and Babyface. (And while the agenda has always been "Great Black Music," that's never been the whole of the project; Bowie also covered Willie Nelson, the Spice Girls and "It's Howdy Doody Time.")
The move to pure groove works well. When the Spirit Returns might come off as formulaic to many Bowie fans, but in a sense it is by definition. This is the closest Bowie came to making a pop record; it's well played, but screaming solos aren't in the program. Instead he added a soulful singer (Dean Bowman, who has worked with Don Byron and Uri Caine) and pulled together a record seemingly for no one but himself. It's far from his best (a list too long to consider here, but which would include the AECO Parisian and ECM sides, the Fantasy's The Fire this Time and The Fifth Power, All the Magic and The Organizer at minimum), and it unfortunately repeats a track from the previous disc - P Diddy's "Notorious Thugs" - but in a sense it brings at least a part of Bowie's mission full circle, from R&B-influenced jazz to jazz musicians playing R&B. For that it's a worthy release.
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