LESTER BOWIE
Genres: Avant-Garde Jazz, Eclectic Fusion • United States

Lester Bowie,   (born Oct. 11, 1941, Frederick, Md.—died Nov. 9, 1999, Brooklyn, N.Y.), American jazz musician who , played trumpet flamboyantly, with broad, sweeping gestures, and created extraordinary timbres, from full, rich tones to human-sounding growls, whimpers, and mock-laughter, in his melodies. His innovative sounds and free-wheeling sense of rhythm yielded musical lines that encompassed a range of expression rare for jazz; comedy and tragedy as well as abstraction came within his scope. At an early age Bowie, from a talented musical family, studied trumpet in St. Louis, Mo., and practiced with his horn aimed out the window, in the hope that Louis Armstrong would pass by and hear him; bebop trumpeters were his other early inspirations. After serving in the army, attending some college-level music classes, and accompanying touring rhythm-and-blues stars, among them his first wife, Fontella Bass, he lived in Chicago (1965–69) and began his three-decade read more...