Customer Reviews

Le Stances A Sophie

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This is a live performance by AEC from 1970. It features Fontellla Bass, Lester Bowie's wife at the time, on vocals.

The music is great. It is mainly bluesy lines with very short bursts of free playing, and good solos. Bass' singing is agressive and soulful. The songs swing and never take themselves seriously--AEC were not purists, and musically, would go anywhere, anytime, usually on a bar's notice.

This is crucial, because AEC came at point when other free-jazzers were getting very heavy, and making musical choices out of ideology rather than the joy of playing. AEC lightens this up. These guys, and this gal, were masters, but masters who liked to have FUN.

If you like Jazz, Blues, or Fontella Bass, or just great music, this one is for you.


---I just want to add a postscript that has nothing to do with the internal workings of the album, but Les Stances a Sohpie does inextricably tie in.

I am a big fan of WFMU, the last great FM freeform station. FMU was one of the few New York metro stations not knocked off the air on 9/11/01. Its transmitor was in New Jersey in those days and I think it still is.

The DJs can play whatever they like, and the station decided to make a stand and stay on the air. They have no news service and decided continue at what they do best; play music. Some DJs acknolaged the attacks and then tried to do their shows as normal to provide a musical oasis. Other's tried to shape their shows around what was happening outside, a horrible challange; what is the RIGHT thing to play during the unthinkable.

The first track on this album was played. It is a challanging and defiant blues, yet a blues none the less. It just worked, for reasons I can't intellectually define. This is a great album on its own, but I am so proud of FMU for its tasteful use of material like this and for being so classy in the face of something no one could have been expected to be able to handle.


As one of the DJ's named their show that day, "walk tall, not stupid."

That is what this music, and WFMU, did for those of us around the new york area that day.

That one word says it all, buy this record. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Fontella and Lester together, you can't ask more.