Lester Bowie

CD version. The Great Pretender is the first album Lester Bowie made for ECM as a leader, recorded in June 1981. The trumpeter, already on the label with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had roots in R&B, the blues and carnival music, and here he explores them with good humour. The centrepiece is a reading of the Platters' hit that runs almost seventeen minutes, with two guest singers adding doo-wop backing.

The core band is a quartet: Bowie on trumpet, Donald Smith on piano and organ, Fred Williams on double bass and electric bass, and Phillip Wilson on drums. On the title track they are joined by Hamiet Bluiett on baritone saxophone and by the singers Fontella Bass and David Peaston. The session took place at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, with Martin Wieland as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. Bowie wrote Rios Negros and Rose Drop, and the closing Oh, How The Ghost Sings is credited to the band together with Eicher and Wieland.

Buck Ram's The Great Pretender opens slowly over Smith's piano, with Bass and Peaston supplying doo-wop backing and Bluiett taking a heady baritone solo over a swampy rhythm section. The record also has room for whimsy, as in the two minutes of It's Howdy Doody Time. When The Doom (Moon) Comes Over The Mountain becomes a wild chase over Williams's popping electric bass, with Smith moving to electric keyboard. Bowie's Rios Negros starts from a familiar Latin riff and opens into long improvised passages.

Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews places it second perhaps only to Bowie's 1978 The 5th Power. He concluded that "the material on The Great Pretender is all great and lacks a single pretender". Michael G. Nastos of AllMusic described "a mix of funk and humor, gospel and jazz", hearing echoes of Dizzy Gillespie, early doo-wop, James Brown and Sun Ra. Nastos also judged that it falls just short of The 5th Power, but not by much.

This CD is the Touchstones reissue of ECM 1209, first released in 1982. Touchstones is ECM's mid-price series of classic catalogue albums.