Search - Lester Bowie :: The Odyssey Of Funk & Popular Music

You could've called Lester Bowie a pop-music Odysseus a long time ago, what with his awesome Great Pretender and almost all his other solo albums (and even some of the Art Ensemble of Chicago CDs). But this recording seeks more than the others to get a snapshot of the musical present and filter it through a charged, multihued brass mix that stays amazingly keeled in both the blustery low end, with Bob Stewart's big tuba, Vincent Chancey's French Horn, and a trio of trombones, and also the leaping high end, with Bowie and three other trumpeters. The Spice Girls' "Two Become One" is a sleepy, mournful tune in Bowie & Co.'s hands, just as "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" is a study in extended melodic lines and colorfully blue harmonies. And if the combo of Spice and (Tim) Rice aren't enough, there's also a romping Marilyn Manson that is turned to a low-brass party and even Puccini's "Nessun Dorma." Along the way, you can catch a paean to Notorious B.I.G. and a smoldering take on Cole Porter's "In the Still of the Night." Taken with the Brass Fantasy catalog and Bowie's New York Organ Ensemble CDs, The Organizer and Funky T Cool T, this release deals us a new Odysseus, home, we hope, for a long spell. --Andrew Bartlett