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In Paris, Aries 1973
For decades, this live album was a rare artifact. Saxophonist Oliver Lake, trumpeters Baikida Carroll and Floyd LeFlore, trombonist Joseph Bowie, and drummer Charles “Bobo” Shaw all traveled from St. Louis to Paris in late 1972, spending several months there. They recorded this album, and self-released it when they got back to the US. It contains just four tracks — the long “Echos” and “Re-Cre-A-Tion,” and the shorter “Something To Play On” and “OLCSJBFLBC” (the band members’ initials) — all of which are very much in the vein of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, with plenty of raucous interplay between the horns and all sorts of percussion, from congas and woodblocks to various hand-held shakers and rattles. Periodically, there are dramatic whispers and stagy effects, since BAG were always a multi-disciplinary organization that blended out jazz with avant-garde theater, radical poetry, free-form dance and abstract painting. In recent years, In Paris, Aries 1973 has been reissued, again on vinyl, but it’s never been available digitally or streaming.