Lester Bowie

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Insert included. No obi.

1981: Lester Bowie takes The Platters' doo-wop classic and stretches it into a side-long epic of smears, growls, gospel choir and pure trumpet theatre - reverent and hilarious at once, which was always the Bowie specialty. Nobody else in the music could deploy irony and deep feeling in the same phrase this way; the man in the white lab coat treated the entire Black musical past as one continuous, living joke told with absolute love, and the joke always landed because the chops and the heart were never in question. The ECM production gives his huge vocabulary of brass effects - the half-valve moans, the whispered asides, the sudden operatic climbs - room to bloom in full detail.

A landmark of his solo career and one of the most purely entertaining records the eighties avant-garde produced, here on a Japanese pressing with the surface quality this music's dynamic range deserves. Serious fun, with real weight under it.