In January 1981, a year after the Art Ensemble had been here, they played several unforgettable nights at the Capitol Theatre, Lester wearing his perennial white lab coat: part ringmaster, part healer, part showman and, along with Miles Davis, one of the two most expressive trumpeters I've heard in the flesh. His band's singers, Fontella Bass (long after their marriage had ended), her mother Martha and her baby brother David Peaston, were joined by illustrious bassist Reggie Workman, bulldozing baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, pianist/organist Amina Claudine Myers and drummer Phillip Wilson.

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In the course of each night they touched upon blues, gospel, bebop, free improvisation, soul, Latin, circus and any other sort of music that had been part of Lester's life or the African-American experience more widely. Sometimes they were presented in discrete songs, but more often the demarcation was blurred, and one idiom morphed into another almost bar by bar, to become a crazy fantasia of the gamut of African American musical culture. Lester's point? It was all one.

While here he was my first-ever interviewee, and I was as nervous as a cat at the vet's. I needn't have been. He was the most charming, amusing, intelligent, willing subject imaginable. Yet, for all his zany light-heartedness, when, a few years later, Wynton Marsalis began espousing neo-con jazz propaganda, it was Lester who called him out. Five months after the Oz tour, and a year after the singers and band, minus Lester, had recorded an all-gospel album simply called From the Root to the Source, a slightly revamped line-up recorded The Great Pretender, offering a more rounded glimpse of what happened on those astounding nights at the Capitol.

The highlights were the title track, a 17-minute version the old Platters hit that unwinds to blazing solos and sews itself back together, and a Latin-flavoured Bowie original, Rios Negros, that contains some of his most moving trumpet playing, fuelled by Wilson's thrilling drumming.

A year later came the more consistent All the Magic!, which ranges across For Louie (a soulful tribute to the man Lester hoped would hear him through the open window), a rollicking Let the Good Times Roll and, above all, Peaston's angelic voice arching up to the heavens on the gentle Everything Must Change. Lester may not have been much of a church-goer, but he helped brew the best gospel music you'll ever hear. He died in 1999.

All the Magic! Streams on Apple Music and Spotify; on disc in the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles box set from Birdland Records