AllenLowe

boy, I go away for a few days and miss the whole seminar - we need S.I. Hayakawa. Better still - buy the book and CDs and then we'll talk.

I should add that the passage he cites, much as I deeply appreciate that review, is not really cringe- or wince-worthy. I think he may have misunderstood.

Let me check to make sure the book is in the queue - email me your address - allenlowe5@gmail.com thanks thanks, I was not aware. I shudder....to think of all the ways it has been misused.......

I have sold so many since the review, my wife and I are working day and night to fill orders. and why might that be?

‘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.

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.

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.

some day; it's very labor intensive. When I get better maybe I'll show some samples.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/16/ercot-texas-electric-grid-failure/

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.

exactly.

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.

just got mine

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."

for me it's Booker's vibrato - a hard blast followed by a slow, yawning, shake.

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.

just ordered; Julius has always been a big inspiration to me; particularly now as I try to prepare some comprehensive final project. I have never felt a musician's soul like his. It's just there in every breath. Just love the guy.

I love Booker Ervin, and though it has been alleged he cannot play chord changes real well, check this out:

Yes, I have done this many times.

with the right digital eq you can do incredible things - I re-did the Morton from the BMG box and Larry Gushee, sitting in my basement, was absolutely astounded, saying he had never heard it sounding so good.

I have to admit that I take some satisfaction in just being able to make stuff sound like it should. But the insanity is that, with these Ellingtons, it's not just a matter of making them sound better but like completely starting from scratch. It is idiotic.

the Columbia issue CD transfers are actually fine, but extremely poorly eq'd. Which means that the sound is all there but needs, yes, to be restored. Which is crazy if you are a consumer but amusing and fun if, like me, you are fond of showing what idiots the engineers on these major labels have been (this, btw, is also true of the much hated Jelly Roll Morton BMG box; I can make that thing, with digitial eq, sound fantastic. Larry Gushee was amazed).

I used to have 5 or 6; never had it down to the kind of science that John R.T, Davies had it down to. Have pretty much divested most of my 78-related equipment however. Very labor intensive.

this is very variable. I use, primarily, my ears, and it is hell when sources are so variable, I tend to put it all on a pair of decent speakers and then sit back; the goal is to not have to constantly adjust levels as one listens back. Sometimes I take the lazy way out, and measure peaks to about -2. But if you do that you have to take into account that very noisy sources are going to read much different than those with less surface noise. Other than that it's all by the seat of my pants.

when I saw the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band in the late '60s Richardson and Jerry Dodgion use to come up front and exchange solos. It was very exciting and dynamic.