Rope-A-Dope

Two years after Fast Last!, with the Art Ensemble of Chicago still on hiatus, trumpeter Lester Bowie summoned two of its other members — bassist Malachi Favors and drummer Famoudou Don Moye — along with his trombonist brother Joseph, second drummer Charles Bobo Shaw, and under-recorded violinist Raymond Cheng (aka “The Wizard” on Frank Lowe’s Black Beings). A freer album than its predecessor, Rope-A-Dope clatters and lurches here and there, with Favors’ bowed bass a deep drone at its center. Bowie’s sense of whimsy and barbed love of the jazz tradition, and the Art Ensemble’s flair for guerrilla theater, emerge on a version of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” parenthetically labeled “(Chicago Style).”