AllenLowe

here we go: I actually like Java the best,

better hurry, only 9 left of each - and there's a local convention arriving this week of jazz fan octuplets.

so, maybe I can come out of hiding?

spray is variable - wind conditions, etc.

well, Pete C, I've met both Adolf Zukor and Martin Luther King.

now, this is fun: to quote Groucho as J Cheever Loophole: I have an agreement with the houseflies; they don't practice law, and I don't walk on the ceiling.

just talking about the ACL performance. It is genuinely not good. Sorry to throw a rock in the machine. And honestly, looking around at various things, listening, viewing, I don't see him as that great a perforrner; the only things I've liked are his Professor Longhair things - which are fine, but hardly epochal. Not more significant as a composer/producer? though something tells me there will be some disagreement here.

wait, I though Konitz and Marsh WERE the same guy, Like Prez and Allan Eager.

meaning: Bird, Elvis, DW Griffith, and WEB DuBois.

best singer alive, IMHO,

I have nothing in common with him, though I have determined recently that I am connected to every major musical and political development of the 20th century -

that's ok; I own a copy of Without Feathers.

look, when someone writes something like that about you, it doesn't matter what else he does in the book. actually, I though it was a very good book, but, since I'm one of his subjects, I don't think my opinion is really objective; so I would disqualify myself,

hmmmmm.....not a particularly good pianist; bad voice. Not made for live performance. Has writ some good songs, however.

I still have multiple copies of this Japanese issue of two cds - both are excellent, in decent sound, and represent some of the best later work of these two players: Art Pepper Live In Toronto Naked City Records Bud Powell Lausanne 1962 Naked City Records each is $5 plus shipping ($3 in the USA; $8 to Europe with the new increased USPS rates) - my paypal is alowe5@maine.rr.com I have about 10 copies of each -

he's got Zorn and Charlie Rouse in there - must be typos.

well, as I mentioned before - go right to Weatherbird. On the last box there's CEDAR distortion right near the beginning.

sorry I missed that; as for Bley, above, playing Gregorian chants, well, as far as I'm concerned Paul can do no wrong.

I'd go stir crazy.

I don't know how I feel about this one; I like a lot of action. Too much space and I doze off. I like a musician who sounds like, if he doesn't get it all out, he may die. but I do like: Baker, Fruscella, Haig, Evans, Konitz, Sharkey Bonnano, Johnny Wiggs, all players on the cooler side. But that's a different kind of cool; real heavy, if-you-look-closer-they-are-really-angry cool.

well, I have no problem with your suggestion that I get more specific - I was just perusing his web site; really the first time I have listened to him after hearing him praised to the skies by rational people; so I was surprised I found his work so soporific. it had almost a new-age veneer, though it was superior new age. No edge, no sense of deep search. Just a very competent skimming of the surface. also, just to add, per Pete C, above, I can't stand Mabern's playing either; I don't like pianists who play with their palms.

to me he always sound like he's playing solo. are they sure he came out of that coma?

well, at least I can stay out of that retreat:

there's actually a very nice passage on me in this book: "Jews in Hell is a Jewish jazz album that is not a Jewish jazz album in the sense that there are no obvious Jewish music influences on it. Jazz, as most people would understand it, accounts for fewer than half the tracks, many of which have a fractured country blues air. But the album is the work of a jazz musician and his anguished Jewish sensibility pervades all. The artist concerned is Allen Lowe. Jazz-wise he is a superb wide-ranging saxophonist, but he also plays laconically blistering blues, folk-roots and garage rock guitar and electric banjo. He extracts the most soulful sounds out of a synthesiser since Steve Wonder, composes ambient-evocative instrumentals, and songs with vernacular lyrics that stick in the mind like those of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Mose Allison or Lou Reed. Intellectually, Lowe's up there with Artie Shaw; just as angst-ridden too about his Jewish identity as Artie was, only combatively upfront about it. All this is packed into the thirty-eight tracks across the two CDs that comprise Jews in Hell. The titles of some of Lowe's compositions, followed by his sleevenotes, give a good idea of where he's coming from, for example: 'He Will Walk Across the Water (We Will Walk Across the Water)' — about which he says, "He, being Jesus, we being the Jews following Moses in the wake of the parting of the Red Sea. Expressing a very basic tension between Judeo and Christian systems of belief, with their alternate ways of looking at reality"; 'Leni' — "Hate song for an old Nazi (Riefenstahl)"; 'Goyishe World' — "More impotent outrage, with a nod to the Velvet Underground, via the great dobro-ist Stacey Phillips' story about getting beat up on the way home from Yeshiva on Passover eve..."; 'Soundtrack Theme From the Film Jews in Hell' — "The film, directed as part of his Community Service by Mel Gibson..." Lowe is having a dig here at the actor/director whose movie The Passion of Christbrought charges of anti-Semitism. Some Lowe compositions are tributes to his heroes, including 'Shiva 1' and 'Shiva 2' — a shivais the Jewish bereavement ceremony and these tracks are dedicated to the late Jewish blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield. Lowe says "... the dual spirits of Lenny Bruce and Mike Bloomfield hover, inevitably, over my intents and efforts, and on a daily basis." Another title is 'Jewtown Shuffle (Who's that Lovin' You Baby?)' — this inspired by the late blues musician Jimmy Reed and also by the "merchant section of Chicago where the Jews met the blues." Jewtown was the area in Chicago filled with pawnshops — so- called because the pawnshops were largely owned by Jews — where many blues musicians busked in the street. On several tracks Lowe performs solo or, on overdubbed recordings, plays all the instruments, vocalising in his vernacular manner. Elsewhere, some wonderful guest musicians contribute, among them pianists Matthew Shipp and Dr Lewis Porter, trumpeter Randy Sandke, guitarist Mark Ribot, contra bass clarinettist Scott Robinson and singe Erin McKeown. Porter, who is Jewish, (and who is founder and director of the Rutgers University's jazz history and research masters degree, and a jazz writer), plays solo on the instrumental 'To Dance Beneath the Cuban Sky'. The latter, Lowe explains is, "A piece I wrote trying to evoke the great New Orleans composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk." Lowe, who is also a music historian, comments in his extensive sleevenotes for Jews in Hell, "Jewish musicians, from Louis Moreau Gottschalk to Doc Pomus to Mike Bloomfield to Dave Schildkraut, represent a movement of permanent post-modernism (our version of the permanent revolution ... a vernacular hybrid musical Fourth Stream of memory, obsession, and aggressive self-interrogation ... often mis- taken for self-hate). We/they are a cult without a leader, freelance wise-asses without portfolio." Schildkraut, who died in 1998, is the alto saxophonist Dan Morgenstern described to me as very gifted. He is one of the bebop generation active in American jazz, but performed little after the 1950s. Lowe, who knew him, told me, "Schildkraut had, as Lee Konitz once commented, 'a Yiddishe soul'. He was a complete genius and virtuoso — Dizzy Gillespie once told me 'he was the only alto player who captured the rhythmic essence of Bird', and Bill Evans told me there were only two alto players from that era who did not copy Bird— Konitz and Schildkraut. Dave had the most amazing time of any player I have ever heard, and he was a good friend as well. Pan-reli- gious in his personal beliefs — told me he believed in all religions. Davey was rarely active after the 1960s, but did work for wedding bands and also did the occasional concerts." In reference to Jews in Hell, Lowe explains in his liner notes, "Thematically I am thinking of Jews in the post-WWII era, some born of the so-called baby boom generation, and some who fall just outside of it. Agreeing with the pianist Anthony Coleman, what I find inter- esting is not the conventional ethnicity of these Jews but their (often very Jewish) response to all that American and world culture had/has to offer. It's not just Klezmer, but also black and white country music, jazz, the blues, American pop, rock and roll, et al. Jews have always been natural post-modernists, open to virtually anything in cultural influence and reference, and (hopefully) largely free of pretentious fusions of same. I ... posit a recurring theme of the Jew as permanent outsider, though in some ways well assimilated, always feels the need to struggle and prove him or herself. The Jew I am describing regu- larly suffers a vision of himself and in THEIR image, of the fish out of water, the odd duck..." In Lowe's case, the feeling of being a fish out of water is accentuated by his having been stuck out in Maine. He moved there with his fam- ily around the mid-nineties and found little support from the local cultural establishment for a jazz musician of his creative vitality. Originally from New York, Lowe performed there at The Knitting Factory and Sweet Basil. He worked with David Murray, Doc Cheatham, Don Byron, Julius Hemphill and Loren Schoenberg, and recorded six albums in his own name. But Jews in Hell, released in 2006, is his first recording for some fifteen years. Jews in Hell stands out from most of the product that has been churned out by record companies in the last forty or so years. Anthony Braxton, (vanguard African-American saxophonist/composer) said about it, "I was absolutely astonished by Jews in Hell ... Allen Lowe is one of the few musicians doing anything new today." He's right, but the chances are that Jews in Hell will do little to endear Lowe with the Maine grandees. "

actually, I just heard Nellie McKay is getting the part. it's between her and Paris Hilton.