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AllenLowe

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Posts posted by AllenLowe

  4. Whither Allen Lowe?

    in Forums Discussion

    Posted · Edited by AllenLowe

    hi everybody, sorry I missed this earlier. Much appreciated. It's been a nightmare of a year, and for about the first half I had to struggle just to retain my sanity and figure out if it was worth going on (thanks to my wife I stayed in some control). Basically, I didn't sleep from January - July except in short bites of 15, 30, 45 minutes, and the nightly struggle almost pushed me over the edge. Things started getting better in July and I can now make 2 or 3 hours of sleep at a time.

    I had a very rare case of sinus cancer, and the surgery to remove the tumor plus the chemo and radiation just beat the hell out of me. Basically I am now suffering from radiation poisoning, my face is a mess, but we found a plastic surgeon in Boston who is supposed to operate the end of this month and do facial reconstruction. I still have trouble breathing, but it is much better. After this surgery I should be more functional, with 2-3 more surgeries in the next 2-3 years. But I am playing and composing again. And I have had about 5 scans which show the cancer is gone.

    Been thrown a bit to find out that Ken Peplowski, the nicest guy on earth, has multiple myeloma, and that my bass player, Kevin Ray, had a massive heart attack last month; not to mention that one of my closest friends has Parkinson's. Still, we go on. Hopefully I will be recording again by next Spring; ESP has a 2 CD set of mine coming out in November that I am very proud of. So things look semi-hopeful.

    Love to everyone.

  8. Under-appreciated Pianists: Hugh Lawson/Richard Wyands

    in Recommendations

    Posted · Edited by AllenLowe

    I have oblique connections to both these guys. I studied keyboard harmony with Hugh back in the late '70s; Wyands I always admired and I first booked him into the West End Cafe around the same time. Nobody was calling him so I just looked him up in the book. Nice guy, dry sense of humor. Hugh was a unique and blunt personality, and boy could he play the shit out of the piano.

  11. Review of Turn Me Loose White Man, WSJ

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted

    4 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

    Linguistically inclined, I checked several online sources, including the Cambridge dictionary  (trying to find a definition of the difference) but find that definitions of their meaning (of wince on the once hand and of the - in most cases - "informal use" of cringe on the other) are very much the same. I am aware of both words and their use and while I'd take your word for your reasoning, could it be that "the horse done left the barn" a long time ago?

     

    Anyway, back to the topic, good to see that the review has had its effect. I am more than ever looking forward to receiving my copy of Part 2 of the book that accompanies the CD set.

     

    Let me check to make sure the book is in the queue - email me your address - allenlowe5@gmail.com

    thanks

    5 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

    Linguistically inclined, I checked several online sources, including the Cambridge dictionary  (trying to find a definition of the difference) but find that definitions of their meaning (of wince on the once hand and of the - in most cases - "informal use" of cringe on the other) are very much the same. I am aware of both words and their use and while I'd take your word for your reasoning, could it be that "the horse done left the barn" a long time ago?

     

    Anyway, back to the topic, good to see that the review has had its effect. I am more than ever looking forward to receiving my copy of Part 2 of the book that accompanies the CD set.

     

    thanks, I was not aware. I shudder....to think of all the ways it has been misused.......

  13. Review of Turn Me Loose White Man, WSJ

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted

     ‘Turn Me Loose, White Man’ Review: How to Listen to American Music

    An idiosyncratic project peers into the creative ferment before genres like jazz, blues and country fully diverged.


    By Larry Blumenfeld

    April 2, 2021 11:54 am ET

    •  

    As a saxophonist, composer and bandleader, Allen Lowe has recorded albums of impressive scope and ambition with musicians who span generations and communities. The unruly beauty of his music is grounded in tradition yet also consistently blurs styles and eras.

    His approach is well stated in an introduction to his two-volume, self-published book “ ‘Turn Me Loose, White Man,’ or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music, 1900-1960”: “Where does one start with American music, and where does one end? There are some obvious musical signposts . . . that serve well as beginnings,” he writes. “There are less clear endings, places that mark the discontinuation of styles, sound, and movements. Sometimes certain things seem to disappear, only to reappear as something else or something that seems like something else.” And, more than 200 pages later: “The sequence of musical events which drives studies like this are often lessons in why music is not history and history is not music.”

    ‘Turn Me Loose, White Man’

    By Allen Lowe
    Constant Sorrow, two volumes, 768 pages, $29.95 each
    Two-book, 30-CD set, $175

    Nevertheless, Mr. Lowe stays devoted to music history. Among his four previous books, “That Devilin’ Tune: A Jazz History, 1900-1950” formed an essential counterpoint (or counterpunch) to, say, Ken Burns’s PBS series “Jazz.” Mr. Lowe likes subtitles upon subtitles. His secondary one here—“How to Listen to American Music”—indicates not another pop-culture guidebook but rather a consideration of American music’s glorious tangle for listeners of both aural and moral sensitivity.

    Is “Turn Me Loose, White Man” his treatise on 60 years of American music, plus a companion 30-CD boxed set? Or is it a lovingly curated recording project with the longest set of liner notes in history? Though these two volumes stand on their own, for Mr. Lowe the music and the analysis form a dialogue, an essential call and response, a set of philosophical arguments much like the commentary surrounding religious texts, “honed by a mixed sense of aesthetic worship and social consciousness” that, thankfully, never grows pious.

    Mr. Lowe’s website biography asks “Who is Allen Lowe, and why is he doing all these projects and why have you never heard of him?” Yet he’s hardly unknown. Francis Davis devoted a chapter to him in his 1996 book “Bebop and Nothingness: Jazz and Pop at the End of the Century.” There, Mr. Lowe lamented not “finding a place” as a jazz musician, not conforming as either “a neoconservative like Wynton Marsalis or a postmodernist like John Zorn.” The truth is more complex. Mr. Lowe, who has lectured and performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center, of which Mr. Marsalis is managing and artistic director, knows he is both outsider and not. That fluidity, that refusal to accept false dichotomies, is one great strength of his work as a cultural historian.

    All of which brings us to Mr. Lowe’s most potent subtitle, “Appropriating Culture.” “The making of American music is a febrile and contentious racial battleground,” writes cultural critic Greg Tate in another introduction. Mr. Lowe, he notes, digs into historical recordings that speak to musical vernaculars before those genres hardened into the “cages of formalized and racialized convention” now known as gospel, blues, jazz and country.

    Into this battleground Mr. Lowe marches. His opening pages reveal the source of his book’s title: “a recording, from 1902, which fits very neatly into what I would call the immediate pre-history of country music, by the white singing duo Cantrell and Williams, of a song called Mississippi River Song Tapioca, in which an obviously-white singer,” portraying a black character working on the Mississippi River, “yells out ‘turn me loose, there, white man.’ ” For Mr. Lowe, this moment represents “transference of the desire by a white man for artistic freedom onto the ‘other,’ the black man, in the guise of demanding cultural/expressive liberation. ‘Set me free,’ the white singer seems to be demanding, ‘by making me as black as I am pretending to be.’ ”

    Mr. Lowe then considers pianist Ben Harney (1872-1938), a “major figure” whose compositions “established a commercial beachhead for ragtime” and who “presented as white” but was almost certainly not; he wonders how assumptions about Harney’s race framed interpretations of his music. Mr. Lowe also describes the reaction among collectors to the discovery of an 1894 recording of “Haul the Woodpile Down,” by a black musician named Charles Asbury, who died in obscurity in 1903: “He couldn’t be black, some insisted, because the way he sang was too formal, the delivery too ‘white’ ”—a “racist assumption about sound and inflection” that ignores Asbury’s exceptional banjo playing.

    Mr. Lowe hears American music as “essentially a timeline of African Americans liberating themselves in sound, creating an alternative history to that which has been imposed on them.” He wishes to explore “an aesthetic merger” of black and white idioms, a musical give-and-take “in which blackness is clearly and profoundly victorious” but which “whiteness” survives by its “need to dominate,” absorbing and transmuting in genuinely creative ways that inspire further black innovation. Some may take issue with Mr. Lowe’s “assumption that a great deal, if not all, of American music is rooted in forms that derive in some way from Minstrelsy.” Yet the case he mounts, without condescension or apology and with a great deal of musical evidence, makes sense. As does his idea that “the strangeness of early jazz” has to do with “the slow and gradual removal of the minstrel mask from both white and black performers,” often revealing “an expression of perplexed, racial ambivalence, a sense that fantasy has replaced reality for so long that we no longer can determine precisely which is which.”

    I agree with Mr. Lowe that the ascendance of the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band as the first jazz group to make bestselling, mass-marketed phonograph records was “a matter of white supremacy,” but disagree that the group was distinguished by “innate and consistent musicality.” I wince as he wanders into passages such as this: “Blacks stay, as usual, creatively just out of reach in terms of cultural originality and newness, one clear step ahead of their white followers, like runaway slaves.” Or when he rushes headlong into asserting that “African American arts are not, in their essence, political.” Yet the fascinating mass of music that Mr. Lowe gathers—and then discusses with ingenuity and force—persuades in both original and necessary ways.

    Mr. Lowe celebrates obscure figures that connect musical dots. Whether or not Harmonica Frank (1908-1984) is, as Mr. Lowe claims, “one of the most significant American musicians of the 20th century,” his music does exhibit “a surface lightness of being” and “a series of profoundly telling musical gestures” that, yes, “predicts both Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan.” Mr. Lowe also draws a convincing line—via, among other things, a “rollicking yet very conservative gallop . . . creating a sense of accelerating tempo, even while the time remains unchanged,” and “uneven trills with uncertain tonality”—from pianist Speckled Red (1892-1973) to Thelonious Monk.

    He writes with enlightening precision about famous musicians, too. Duke Ellington’s “Koko” is notable less for some monolithic aesthetic and more for “violating the norms of conventional expectation.” Jelly Roll Morton’s “Tiger Rag” evokes “a distant musical past through the surface of a porous musical present.” Fats Waller’s music sounds like the pianist is “looking at life from under a table, peeking out at the strange goings on.”

    Without making too much of it, there is poignancy and more to the fact that Mr. Lowe was battling throat cancer as he wrote about “the life of black creativity and its struggle against the death knell of white power.” This book carries an urgency that befits both his own personal and our larger American moment. He gets cantankerous, even downright nasty, in response to lazy assumptions or incorrect facts put forth by music critics. Yet there’s a sweetness too, an earnestness—what Greil Marcus, writing about Mr. Lowe, identifies as a “mission” to honor the relationship “between people long dead and those listening to them now in disbelief that they could ever die.”

    —Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz and Afro-Latin music for the Journal.

     

  14. Life in Eb The Phil Woods Autobiography

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted · Edited by AllenLowe

    16 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

    Gotcha.

    P.S. As for the studio, Raney probably wouldn't avoid, say, Bob Weinstock or Ira Gitler or Teddy Charles. Any idea about the nature and origin of Haig's anti-Semitism?

    I just gotta add, re-Haig's supposed anti-semitism, that we were very close friends and that I am Jewish. I think we gotta understand that all this crazy stuff that Haig got in the middle of was due to his acute alcoholism. It's a vicious disease with a lot of Jekyl-and-Hyde characteristics. Bird's death messed up a lot of players who, in the words of Barry Harris, "didn't know what to do next." But Al was not a racist or an anti-semite that I saw in any way, shape, or form.

  15. Culture War, Young Lions & Trend Manufacturing

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted · Edited by AllenLowe

    as a would-be gigging musician, I think jazz is just lost these days - and I get this from much more successful musicians (who were working before the pandemic). Gigs didn't lead anywhere any more; this was a change from the old days when one good gig could put you on a trajectory.

    And the music is age-ist with a vengeance. I played Dizzy's in 2018 and sold the house out on a Wednesday night in February. People went nuts. Will they book me back? No, and they turned me down in a very insulting, yes, age-ist, way as well. To get into Dizzy's you now have to be young OR famous, and I am neither.

    The small venues are run by young kids who will only book other people their age. They treat musicians like shit, are non-responsive (and to much more famous people than myself).

    The music has little future for most of us without subsidy. And yet there are zillions of musicians and plenty of venues. But it's all like an escalator that's going sideways.

    As for the Young Lions and that era; look where we are now with this new, niche-jazz. Jazz has its lowest market share ever. I guess Wynton's attempts at resuscitation were unsuccessful.

    As for other considerations, it's a good thing I had a day job all those years. I still believe jazz is an art form, and that's what I try to do.

     

     

     

  18. Life in Eb The Phil Woods Autobiography

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Teasing the Korean said:

    If you can trust the book's index - and as Kurt Vonnegut reminded us, never index your own book - there is not a single mention in the book of either Kenyon Hopkins or "The Hustler."

    Could you imagine being the primary soloist in an iconic film like "The Hustler," and having the honor of playing music written by someone as great as Kenyon Hopkins, and not even mentioning these things in your book?

    No Hopkins, no sale.  

    because Vonnegut was rich and could afford to pay an indexer. Not so for most of us. I just indexed 4 of my own books.

  20. RIP Chick Corea

    in Artists

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Mark Stryker said:

    Disagree: I don't think it's at all true that Chick entered the scene as a fully formed player. Perhaps that's a chimera created by his first records as a leader in 1966 and '68.

    But Chick came to New York at age 18 in the fall of 1959. His first record dates (Santamaria & Bobo) were not until three years later, and if you listen to Chick on "Stitt Goes Latin" -- try the "Amigos" linked below -- from 11/63 (four years after arriving in NY) he's still a LONG way from being fully formed. There's still undigested Bud in here and his time feel is way behind the beat, whereas mature Chick is much more on top of the time. He starts recording more in 1964 and certainly by July of that year when he records "Chick's Tune" with Blue Mitchell, he's well on his way to being himself -- that quick flick of the wrist and rhythmic stutter at the start of the piano solo is unmistakably Chick. But even on the shuffle blues "March on Selma" with Mitchell a year later in July '65, the piano comping and soloing sounds like it's part McCoy and part Herbie in their down home modes.

    The big leap forward to me judging by the records is between 1965 and '66, because by the time you get to his debut as a leader, "Tones For Joan's Bones" in Nov '66, what you're hearing is Chick Corea as we know him. But that record is a full 7 (!) years after coming to NY. Contrast that with Tony Williams, who really did sound fully formed at age 17, when he made his first records in the winter and spring of 1963 with Jackie McLean, K.D., Herbie, and Miles. Or Joe Henderson who is already fully formed on first recorded appearance on K.D.s "Una Mas." (The track "Straight Ahead" is already peak Joe.)

    It is true that "Tones For Joan's Bones" is an astonishing debut record, even in an era of remarkable debuts, and the one-two punch of "Tones" plus his sophomore record "Now He Sings, Now He Sobs," might be unequaled in terms of the  authority, vision, and maturity of  the first two records as a leader out of the gate in the LP era.. (I'd be curious to hear who folks feel would also be on this particular short list of the first two records as a leader.) 

     

     

    whatever the argument is here, it's fascinating to me that when I listen to two particular pianists whose careers veered all over the place - Kieth Jarrett and now Corea - I find their earliest work the best. It's as though they could hear and play too much, and in their early days they just did what they felt without getting so self conscious about it. But this Corea solo is extraordinary - actually reminds me of late '40s Hank Jones. And I am not a big Corea fan.

  22. Art Pepper

    in Artists

    Posted · Edited by AllenLowe

    to paraphrase myself from a few years back (above):

    I spent a memorable day with Pepper in Boston, must have been '76. Nicest guy in the world, though I eventually figured out he was having me help him drive around town looking for a drug connection. As for his playing - that night he stuck to his bebop guns and and he was brilliant. His whole attempt at being "contemporary" was a classic older musician miscalculation, a complete misunderstand of Trane's chromaticism, of modalism, of the whole way in which scales could be used instead of triads as a way of sounding vertical instead of horizontal. I have heard other players do this - even Jackie McClean one night got stuck in a very futile cycle of fifths before finally seeming to say "the hell with this" and just playing. I can remember Frank Morgan trying to play a Wayne Shorter tune and sounding a bit like Pepper, simply playing little ineffectual runs and flurries of notes.

    I know this sounds harsh and know-it-all, but I have just seen too many older players struggle to be "contemporary."

     

  24. Booker Ervin

    in Artists

    Posted

    when I worked for Don Schlitten in the middle 1970s he just went into a feeling of....joy? Complete happiness, or whatever else,  whenever Book's name came up. And I agree, as there are maybe a handful of other horn players with that level of soul.

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