AllenLowe

for the many of you Organissim-ites who attended our last NYC concert, we will back in the land pf the sinking Sun on May 9, a Monday night, with our blues project, part of the Evolving Music Series. The Place is called Local 269, it's somewhere the hell downtown, just ask anybody and they'll point you in the right direction. One set, 8 o'clock, featuring our Maine contingent, PLUS: Lewis Porter on piano and Steve Bernstein on trumpet. Should be an interesting night.

I'm waiting for Swedish Jazz Week in Albania.

aren't there any WOMEN conductors? I never even hear them considered.

like "Relaxin' in Cameroon" ? or "Yardbird Sweats" or "Daisy's Atmosphere" ? btw, was listening to some of the Dial stuff on a collection recently, and can't remember the tune, but there's a Barney Kessel intro that sounds just like Giant Steps. I'll try and find it.

try Max Harrison's old guides - not complete but they are to Yanow what Sonny Rollins is to Kenny G. Yanow is dishonest - no one can review that much with any accuracy and/or consistency, and it shows.

" I got to tell him how much his music meant to me. He signed several of my CD booklets. That was less than two weeks before he died" AHA! so it was Murder!

well, these were Sonny's searching years - I saw him at Town Hall in '69 with something like 20 bass players - he played for about 10 minutes and then walked off the stage.

I put a little Kerosene in the drier - works every time (just watch out for the fireball)

you got it

I know some people find these to be the holy grail of '60s Sonny, but to me it's really Sonny the indecisive in one of his supremely insecure periods - and Stan Tracey's playing drives me up the wall. I like the RCA studio sessions better, much better. so, this can be yours - it's brand new, 2 CDs, mint. $14 plus shipping. My paypal is alowe5@maine.rr.com

they need to be aerated - find a willing nurse.

isn't he copying the whole "Lazlo letters" thing (I think that's what it was called; it was a bunch of letters sent by the guy who played Guido Sarducci)?

just to reiterate my point (and thanks, Tom, for clarifying this), there was a fascinating quote somewhere by Jimmy Garrison, in which he expresses insecurity about playing changes after playing in more open forms for so long (and actually I know exactly what he means from personal experience; it's a much different kind of discipline). So Margaret, as usual, sees only what she wants to see. I was simply pointing out that things don't always jell if there are stylistic conflicts.

the MC5 film will be out soon - Kramer has relented,

thanks paps - also, I'll have some CDRs out to you this week -

thanks, Larry - fortunately it's not a comedy album......

Ken Shimamoto is a Texas musician and writer with a very broad expertise in American music. Our new CD project (actually 3 cd) should be out toward summer, and I sent Ken a burn of the project; here's his review (re-printed with permission): Allen Lowe’s “Blues and the Empiricle Truth” If living well is the best revenge, then making a great jazz album can’t be far behind. Just ask saxophonist-guitarist-composer Allen Lowe, whose last recording, 1997’s double CD Jews In Hell: Radical Jewish Acculturation, was a response to his inability to get a jazz gig in Portland, Maine, where he currently resides. According to Lowe’s lengthy, informative, and hilarious liner notes to his new triple CD Blues and the Empiricle Truth, his latest work was inspired, at least in part, by a young drummer who insulted him and challenged him to a fight after being lambasted via email for missing a rehearsal. (For what it’s worth, the specific tune occasioned by this encounter, “Old Man Blues,” is the best modern day evocation of Jelly Roll Morton since Mingus paid tribute via “My Jelly Roll Soul” and Air revived “King Porter Stomp.”) I’ll call Lowe, for want of a better term, a maximalist – not just because he produces such sprawling, epic musical statements on his own, but because of the protean work he’s done as an author, historian, archivist, and sound restoration engineer whose work covers the whole length and breadth of recorded American music (four books, two of them unpublished, one accompanied by a nine CD set, another by a 36 CD set, and a more recently compiled 36 CD set with 80,000 words of notes) – all, he emphasizes, without any institutional aid or funding. He’s a great thinker about music whose insights often swim against the tide of conventional wisdom. His own music restores my hope in the continuing vitality of jazz in the 21st century – not just in Europe or historic centers like Chicago and New York, but even in American backwaters (where, Lowe the historian would likely point out, the unprecedented availability of recorded sound via the internet makes easily accessible the latest developments from the music’s far-flung outposts). Lowe’s performed sporadically over the years, in between spells working as a teacher, music journalist, playwright, and arts administrator, among other day gigs. Originally a self-admitted “bebop nazi,” he expanded his vision in the ‘80s enough to work alongside such forward-looking lights of the new music as Julius Hemphill, Don Byron, David Murray, and Roswell Rudd. He was introduced to Rudd, the Yale-educated Dixieland trombonist who made his name in the ‘60s playing free jazz with Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, and John Tchicai, via writer Francis Davis, who’d found Rudd working in a Catskill resort band. (Lowe and Rudd are the subjects of consecutive chapters in Davis’ worthwhile anthology Bebop and Nothingness, through which your humble chronicler o’ events first became aware of Lowe.) Rudd’s probably the best known of Lowe’s collaborators on Blues and the Empiricle Truth. Another is Matthew Shipp, the brilliant pianist who made his name in the ‘90s playing in what seems in retrospect to have been the last great free jazz band, with saxophonist David S. Ware and bassist William Parker. Shipp previously appeared on Jews In Hell, as did avant-guitarist/Tom Waits sideman Marc Ribot, who’s also present here. One difference is that for BATET, Lowe actually traveled to Brooklyn to record with Rudd, Shipp, and Ribot (unlike the earlier release, where he dueted with Shipp on one tune and the pianist and guitarist performed solo interpretations of Lowe’s tunes). One of BATET’s most sublime pleasures is listening to Lowe, Rudd, and Shipp intertwining their sounds, often with the leader on guitar -- on which he’s wont to push the tonal envelope in the manner of Joe Morris, one of Captain Beefheart’s guitarists, or that guy down the hall from you in college who sort of knew how to play and sort of didn’t -- and Shipp on Farfisa organ, that signifier of ‘60s garage-rock cheese, which he uses to evoke the sound of the church on “Manhattan Moan” and “Ras Speaks 1” (both vehicles for Rudd’s muted growls and speech-inflected lines), or Sun Ra on the Albert Ayler-inspired “The Lost.” The shade of Thelonious Monk is present in the melody of “Entrance No Exit” (reminiscent of “Ask Me Now”) and in Shipp’s Monkian spareness on “Blue Interlude 1” (where Lowe flutters, Bird-like), while “Blue Interlude 2” has some marvelously intimate muted playing from Rudd, where you can hear the saliva in the mouthpiece. As for Ribot, he conjures freewheeling solos from thin air and sculpts the notes until they form things of rough beauty. On “Blue Like Me,” he explodes out of the gate in a blaze of brawny atonality, like early Blood Ulmer splicing genes with a battalion of lower Manhattan “No Wave” guys. On the first version of “No 5 No Flats No Sharps Blues” – several of Lowe’s tunes appear in multiple versions which are different enough to justify their inclusion -- he gets further down in the alley than you’ve ever imagined him, then goes all the way off, with a searing intensity that will make you sit up in sheer astonishment. The second version is more slinky, sexy, and groove-oriented. None of the above is intended as a slight to Lowe’s Maine-based musicians. The rhythm section of Jessie Hautala and Jake Millet on electric bass and drums respectively is particularly meritorious, inasmuch as their instrumentation is bound to piss off the acoustic jazz purists, while listeners with an ear for black street music will delight in the way they lock it in the pocket on “Huh/Sublime and Funky Love Pt. 1.” Instead of playing one of those kits like Denardo Coleman uses, Millet uses floppy discs and pushes buttons, rather than striking pads, to get his sounds; that said, his beats are live-sounding and responsive, once you get used to their electronic timbre. On “I Hate Blues,” an oblique homage to obscuro NYC punk band the Mad (anybody else remember Screaming Mad George?), he works his virtual kick drum as furiously as Stefan Gonzalez going all Gene Krupa-on-steroids on Yells At Eels’ “Document for Toshinori Kondo.” It’s an impressive feat, enough to make all but the most doctrinaire neo-cons reconsider what “really playing” means. His “cymbal” work is also noteworthy. To these feedback-scorched, guitar-centric ears, the big news here is axe-slinger Ray Suhy, a young player whom Lowe says had never played a jazz gig prior to their acquaintance. While I’m not generally a fan of jazz guitarists’ dry, muted sounds and absence of vocalized effects, this Suhy guy is definitely Something Entahrly Other, from his reverbed-out surf/Morricone tone on “Twilight at Terezin” to the skronky storm he churns up on “Pauli Murray, at the Back of the Bus, Suddenly Realizes She Has the Blues” (titled after a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and precursor of Rosa Parks). There’s a lot of Sonny Sharrock in Suhy’s voice: his slide on “The Children of Ella Mae Wiggins” sounds like an unholy amalgam of Sonny and Billy Gibbons, while the net effect of “Blues In Shreds” is something like Last Exit if only Sharrock was going completely apeshit. All in all, Suhy’s contributions constitute a mighty impressive debut. As a saxophonist, the leader’s playing is exploratory, but with an awareness of tradition, as though he breathed in the entire history of blues and jazz (which I suppose, in a way, he has) and is now blowing it out through the bell of his horn. Lowe burns with incandescent fire on uptempo numbers, cries the blues a la Ornette on “(Bull Connor Sees) Darkies on the Delta,” flexes his muscles to show off his range and fluidity on “No More Blues (the Sins of the Mother),” and even comes across like one of those freedom-drunk, fire-breathing ‘60s guys on “Pete Brown’s Blues,” “In a Harlem Ashram,” and “One Trane Running.” (No slouch, either, is Texas-born altoist Spike Sikes, who plays Pharaoh Sanders to Lowe’s Trane on “Elvis Died With His Sins Intact.” I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention pianist-academic-Coltrane biographer Lewis Porter, who tickles the ivories in an exemplary manner on three tracks.) Lowe’s always a composer first, and plays through “actual chord changes” like those on the Ellingtonian “In Da Sunshine of Your Love” or “My Confession: Ode to Doris Day (The Last Embrace)” with lyrical elegance and grace. His tunes almost always come with a back story, with titular or musical allusions to jazz and Civil Rights pioneers, Richard Hell, Richard Strauss, the Carter Family, minstrel shows, the Regular Old Baptists – he avers that he listens to nothing but gospel music – Salvation Army bands, an obscure post-Beat poet, and the Velvet Underground, to say nothing of the album’s Oliver Nelson-inspired title. BATET only includes a couple of vocal features. On the slow shuffle “Carnovsky’s Blues/The Whores’ Dance,” the terrifying slavery-days narrative “Cold Bed Blues,” and the ominously relentless “Blood on the Mirror,” engineer Todd Hutchisen intones Lowe’s lyrics like Colonel Bruce Hampton singing from the bottom of the ocean, which is actually an improvement on the author’s sub-Lou Reed croak on Jews In Hell. No one does all things equally well. There’s much to be amazed by in this cornucopia of sounds. I know I’ll still be digesting this by summer, which makes BATET an early candidate for my record of the year. And again, hearing this outpouring gives me hope. If creativity this robust can survive and thrive in the Maine woods, who knows what other pockets of thrilling, individuated compositional and improvisational excellence are lurking out there in the backwater burgs of America? (Or, if a masterpiece drops in the woods, does anybody hear? Visit http://www.allenlowe.com/ for the answers to this and many other questions.)

Bill was nuts, in the nicest possible way, and in my opinion one of the two or three best bebop pianists of his generation (had a very interesting style that seemed to combine Al Haig/Bud Powell/Hank Jones). Also had a lot of private tapes he made on a good reel-to-reel, only a few which have been issued (he was house pianist for a time at Birdland and apparently had some great stuff with Sonny Rollins). He survived a terrible kamikazee attack on his ship during World War II (I always though part of his nuttyness was PTSD), can be heard to perhaps best advantage on the Mingus/Debut thing with Knepper and Joe Maini (he's also on the Schildkraut CD I put out; plays great, though he had lost some depth through his years of lounge work). I have an interview of him which I may, if I have enought time, transcribe. He remembered everyone and everything (never touched alcohol or dope) and his memories were regularly confirmed by third parties. Played with Lester Young, too - and had an INCREDIBLE story about working an Orthodox Jewish wedding where Bird showed up (the bass player was Wilbur Ware!) and played.

he sings like barf, but other than that he's great

I honestly don't think that victories for Herbie and Esparanza translate into anything broader for jazz - it's too much like the trickle down theory. It just encourages more of their kind of music (which may be fine; it just means something different than any real benefit for jazz) - as a matter of fact, we could hope the same thing for Marsalis, when in fact he has been the single biggest economic drain on the US domestic jazz booking scene in the history of that scene (meaning, his fees are so high that he regularly wipes out budgets; talk to a few agents) -

yes, Pres in Europe - great liners by Dan Morgenstern on the original LP

ahh, if those colostomy bags could talk -

I heard some of the Schildkraut date; Dave played a cassette for me a long time ago (musta been the late '70s?). I think it was Hod Obrien on piano, and Leroy Williams on drums, though I'm not sure. The rhythm section did not jell, and Dave was a hard guy to play with (he liked to turn the beat around and see if the rhythm could stay in the right place; sort of a musical game of chicken). I can't remember the bass player, unfortunately, and I don't think it sounded real bad, but that was 35 years ago. I wish somebody would bootleg it. (thinking about it - Ben Brown on bass? possibly....) I was also at the Dickey Wells date (Dick Katz was on piano) - weird thing about that was that they put out the lesser takes; Dickey sounded way better on the stuff they kept in the can.

amen - though I think Nora Jones sounds fine on folkie-type things. On jazz things she's very sad. And it makes me sad; what would Ravi say?

I had an alcoholic pianist once who kept running off the stage because he had to urinate repeatedly - different problem..............