Bowie, Lester Jr.
Lester Bowie Jr.—a revered experimental jazz trumpeter, composer, and band leader—lived in Little Rock (Pulaski County) as a child for a short time while his father, Lester Bowie Sr., also a trumpeter, taught at Dunbar High School. Lester Bowie Jr. was born in Frederick, Maryland, on October 11, 1941, and, according to some obituaries, grew up in Little Rock and St. Louis, Missouri, where, after leaving Dunbar, his father was a high school band director for thirty years. Bowie’s mother was Little Rock native Earxie Lee Willingham Bowie. Bowie said that he had no memory of when he started to play trumpet, telling one interviewer that his father gave him a trumpet mouthpiece in the crib, and he set the “official” …
