The 5th Power

Trumpeter Lester Bowie’s 1978 album, recorded live in Europe, features Arthur Blythe on alto sax, Amina Claudine Myers on piano, Malachi Favors on bass and Phillip Wilson on drums. It starts out in a relatively straightforward jazz zone, including a version of “New York Is Full Of Lonely People,” which the Art Ensemble of Chicago would record on 1982’s Urban Bushmen, but the album’s heart is the 18-minute workout, “God Has Smiled On Me,” on which Myers’ singing and playing take the music to ecstatic heights even before the music shifts from gospel groove to free jazz eruption, with Bowie and Blythe squalling and sputtering across the stage at each other as Myers pounds the keys with greater and greater fervor.