AllenLowe

I'm still wondering.

come and say hello. Sweating away like crazy on the music.

THE OUTSIDER Allen Lowe Against the Jazz Tradition by George Grella Fine arts and literature each have a well-established academic and commercial establishment that defines—through teaching, curating, buying and selling, and criticism—what it means to be working inside them. “Outsider Art” for them could be something as innocuous and tautological as a painting or a book that was created beyond the limits of what the establishment has set as normative. Instead, perniciously, condescendingly, the “Outsider Art” label has been attached to the fetishization and objectification of difference. The mental illness of someone like Henry Darger or Adolf Wölfli, not their work, becomes the point of fascination, so that what makes their work notable—the internal logic and values so different from the established consensus—is seen as an accidental byproduct of disordered thoughts, rather than the thing that matters. This is true in music, especially with Irwin Chusid’s shilling for kitsch and crap as “Outsider Music.” So the Shaggs, Tiny Tim, Farrah Abraham, plus the musical careers of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Crispin Glover—all are outsider-hip, because they’re easy to condescend to. The real outsider artists are the ones who find that their terms and goals are outside the mainstream consensus and pursue them with rigor and determination, holding themselves to an entirely different set of standards: Emily Dickinson, Charles Ives, Harry Partch, Charles Bukowski, Hasil Adkins, Banksy. Poetry, classical music, literature, rock-and-roll, painting—historically, these fields have chauvinistically asserted their right to decide what belongs and what doesn’t. You would think that jazz would be different, but jazz has an outsider problem too. The music, sitting at the margins of American cultural consciousness for decades, both proudly on the outside yet dearly wishing to be let in, is itself ambivalent about musicians who “play outside the changes,” literally and philosophically. Entry here, again, is via the sense that the musician has something eccentric about their thinking, so Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Charles Gayle, and Thelonious Monk are in the fold, although not entirely embraced for their music (jazz has rightfully placed Monk in the pantheon, but the predominant take on his music as just another part of the canon of standard tunes completely misses the value of his logic, which is defiantly outside jazz song form). The music of Ornette Coleman, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Miles Davis’s electric period, Keith Jarrett’s solo improvisations, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor continues to find opposition in the jazz world. The deep, consistent logic of all these “outsider” musicians creates its own aesthetic world that is of the world of jazz and the blues but not inside it, making perfect sense on its own terms. That is the key. Anyone willing to listen to what the music says, rather than what they wish it would say, can hear the logic—that’s the main reason these musicians have found audiences at the creative edges of rock, contemporary classical, punk, and improvised and world musics. The so-called “jazz police,” who sniff out any deviation from swing, the blues, and AABA song form are Zhdanov-ites who listen so furiously to where the cadence and the bass drum beat fall that they can’t hear the music. Then there’s Allen Lowe. As the great jazz critic Francis Davis writes in his book Bebop And Nothingness, “Through no fault of his own, Allen Lowe has become jazz’s quintessential outsider artist.” Another succinct way to think of him is through the first sentence in his official autobiography: “Who is Allen Lowe, and why is he doing all these projects and why have you never heard of him?” Born and raised on Long Island in the mid-1950s, weaned on jazz as a young saxophonist in New York City in the 1960s, he moved in and out of the jazz world and college through the 1980s, calling himself an “unreconstructed bebopper.” He found his way into what, for him, was “new music”: the playing and composing of saxophonist Julius Hemphill, clarinetist Don Byron, trombonist Roswell Rudd, and progressive traditionalists like saxophonist Loren Schoenberg, trombonist Jimmy Knepper, and trumpeter Randy Sandke. He put out a few records, held the job of Director of Jazz New Haven for a few years, then found himself, in 1996, in Maine. Working a day job. Lonely. “Aside from my day job,” he told me on the phone, “I have nothing else to do. Portland, Maine, despite its image of itself, is culturally dead. So basically I have had nothing to do since the late 1990s.” As he writes in the description for his 2007 album Jews in Hell, which was prompted by his inability to book a gig in Portland, “Out of sheer boredom […] [i did] pick up the guitar, retreat to my basement, and practice, practice, and practice some more. […] I started writing songs. […] I was becoming interested in punk rock and some other things. […] I also started playing an alto sax, part of my new identity in what was beginning to amount to membership in the Musician Protection Program.” He also taught himself sound restoration. “[Lowe] spent like three years in [his] basement, picking and choosing, mastering” the early jazz and pre-jazz sides—some 6,000—he collected. In those three years restoring sound, mastering, and compiling, he wrote one book, That Devilin’ Tune: A Jazz History 1900-1950, with a companion 36-CD compilation of early jazz; wrote another book, American Pop from Minstrel to Mojo, with a nine-CD collection; put out Really the Blues? A Blues History, another 36-CD set with 80,000 words of notes; and wrote two more books, still unpublished: God Didn’t Like It: Electric Hillbillies, Singing Preachers, and the Beginning of Rock and Roll, 1950-1970, and The Lost Generation: Jazz of the 1950s. All on his own time and his own dime (the published works were brought out by Music & Arts Programs of America; much of the music can be found on the after-market, as downloads or cobbled together through streaming services; and everything is available at allenlowe.com). The quantity, and quality, of the work is daunting. As Lowe explains, “What else do I have to do up here?” What else was to make his own records. He began playing and recording again in 2001. Two of his key collaborators on Jews in Hell—an enthrallingly strange mix of blues, country, punk, and everything else that comes off as a learned man abandoning language to recover his barbaric yawp—were guitarist Marc Ribot and pianist Matthew Shipp. In 2011, he put out a three-CD set, Blues and the Empirical Truth. Something prompted him to send me a copy, or I never would have known what he was doing. It’s an astonishing recording, one of the best of that year and, once heard, impossible to forget. Lowe, Ribot, Shipp, Rudd, and pianist Lewis Porter, joined by what seems like a cast of thousands, play the tunes—all originals—like they are inventing a new tradition as they go along, one that just happens to collide with the historical freedom and development of jazz. The closest thing to Lowe’s career is that of the imaginary title character of Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Borges’s story is literary criticism in the form of a fictional narrative in which Menard’s identical (yet original) Quixote is superior to Cervantes’s own because Menard knows so much more about the world and history. Lowe’s jazz, coming directly out of the music’s most primitive roots, sounds both more traditional and more avant-garde because of his own immersion in the timeline of history. There is really no term for it; he’s best described as a performing musicologist, though with neither affiliation nor Ph.D. “Jazz [has] trouble accepting people who have a serious intellectual approach and a serious musical approach,” Lowe told me. “Many other art forms have a tradition of critic and creator”—Hector Berlioz was an important critic as well as a great composer, to cite an example from classical music—but “[there’s] a bit of an anti-intellectual tradition in jazz.” A polemicist to the core, “almost all my projects are an argument with something or someone.” His latest, the four-CD set Mulatto Radio: Field Recordings 1-4, is the extension of an argument that began six years ago with Wynton Marsalis. The dense, fascinating booklet Lowe wrote for the release describes “a strange encounter with Wynton […] in which […] he attempted to shut me down with the hammered insistence of his disapproval.” The subject was “hip-hop and his dislike of that form, which he and Stanley Crouch have labeled ‘the new minstrelsy.’” What Lowe was thinking, and hearing, was the “music of the Minstrel Diaspora,” the origins of “American song of all form, shapes, and sound.” “But since it felt personal, I also began to compose and then record,” first Blues and the Empirical Truth, now Mulatto Radio (there’s at least three albums worth of related material he hopes to release). Like Blues, and like Menard, the music sounds like it began right where Tom Turpin and Irving Berlin first found themselves, then followed the same journey and ended up in the same place, but one more real and vivid: surreal. That’s the sound of historical knowledge, of working through newer ideas of rhythm and harmony than Turpin and Berlin had, then using the same materials they did. His series of three CDs from early in his recording career, Mental Strain at Dawn, At The Moment of Impact, and Woyzeck’s Death, are a search into his own formative influences. Lowe was consciously trying to shake off the influence and rigid dictates of bebop and hard-bop and learn from peers like Hemphill and David Murray. Mental Strain is a reimagining of Louis Armstrong as an avant-gardist (which he was, within the bounds of diatonic harmony); At The Moment of Impact is a dip into 1980s compositional formalism; and Woyzcek’s Death, his take on the Büchner play, is the sound of a growing musical personality. The last recording before the exile to Maine was Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground - The American Song Project. This is the disc where Lowe found himself, the core of his sound and his imagination. Retrospectively and metaphorically, this is when he first opened the basement door. A compelling exploration of the dark and bright heart of Americana through song, it opens with the title track, which Lowe points out is the very first alternate version of the chilling Blind Willie Johnson gospel-blues song. It’s just Lowe playing saxophone in his kitchen, accompanying himself via overdubbing with guitar—played with a kitchen knife—and the throbbing whistle of a whirling hose. The expression combines curiosity, wonderment, frustration, desperation, reverence, and irreverence. His work sounds like a first cousin to what Tom Waits has been doing ever since Swordfishtrombones, great American music, ancient to the future. Lowe is conscious that he is traveling fraught territory, the racial origins of American popular music and the racist country to which the music was born. “Arguing about what is the heritage of jazz, the black-white thing, is pretty much a constant,” he says. Jazz, blues, and rock have origins in African-American culture and also European-American culture. Jazz comes directly out of slavery and emancipation, and as a music it is also constructed out of European marches, French songs, and Cuban rhythms, and any time spent listening to proto-jazz music—like James Reese Europe’s band, ragtime, or Louis Moreau Gottschalk—makes this clear. And while it may be socially unfortunate that the all-white Original Dixieland Jass Band waxed “Livery Stable Blues” in 1917 before any black musicians could, the ODJB was there at the origins of the music, along with King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. Minstrelsy is the most difficult subject of all, but Lowe is neither the first nor the only one to point out that minstrelsy is the means by which “African-American entertainment came to dominate the culture of the USA.” He’s also clear about the necessary but uncomfortable position of certain white patrons vis-à-vis the Harlem Renaissance, the entertainers “first perverted and then oddly nurtured through the Caucasian midwifery, promotion, exploitation, and the loving—if often condescending—sponsorship.” Isolation is not usually healthy for an obsessive thinker and tinkerer, and perhaps his almost-naïve honesty means he will never sit down to dinner with Marsalis and Crouch, but he is personable, good-natured, and continues to attract talented musicians to his projects. “For better or worse,” he says, “I’ve developed a reputation, my projects are known to be difficult and high quality!” He’s active on Facebook, where he’s connected with players. The roster on Mulatto Radio includes clarinetist Ken Peplowski, dynamic young saxophonist Noah Preminger, and star classical pianist Ursula Oppens, and was the last recording session for the late, great tenor player Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre. He’s bringing the whole project to Spectrum on the Lower East Side for a show on May 3rd. The band will include Shipp, Porter, saxophonists Bobby Zankel and Hayes Greenfield, bass-clarinetist Paul Austerlitz, brass players Brian Simontacchi and Christopher Meeder, guitarist Ray Suhy, and bassist Kevin Ray. “I’m writing a bunch of new things, a new piece I hope to debut, ‘Meditations on Disintegration,’ my thoughts on Mingus. I don’t think we solved the problem [that continues to plague jazz] on this recording, of the whole head and solos thing. If I had more time, I’d like to develop something more like Mingus. Mingus is a great model, it takes very much for me to not consciously model him.” If he had more time—“There’s no limit to the timeline,” and no end to the past, he says. But—“there’s a limit to how much I can compose.”

the Membrans (am I spelling it right?) that I have heard are some of the worst, over-processed things, in existence. Better to stick with JSP and Proper, both of which have gotten pretty consistenly good.

to me it's like a work of fiction, but I don't mean that in a good way. Sort of 'a sociopathic history of American music.' I really have come to find it that repulsive.

not any more.

why listen to Charlie Parker, when you can READ about him?

From Michael Steinman's Jazz Lives: ESCAPING THE BOX Posted on March 27, 2014 | William Carlos Williams: “Forcing twentieth-century America into a sonnet—gosh, how I hate sonnets—is like putting a crab into a square box. You’ve got to cut his legs off to make him fit. When you get through, you don’t have a crab any more.” Robert Frost: “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” Younger, I would have sided with Frost: too much freedom leads to chaos. But I celebrate Williams’ position (even though his metaphor makes me wince) more as I age, feel, and listen. Tidiness is a wonderful thing in the kitchen cabinets, but it might lead to the slow death of creative improvising. In that spirit, I present the latest works of saxophonist / composer / historian / scholar / seeker Allen Lowe, a four-CD set of original compositions with one exception, a spoken-word piece by the novelist Rick Moody. JAZZ LIVES readers will be familiar with many of the names on that cover; others will provide engaging and sometimes quizzical surprises in listening and emotion. Lowe’s works don’t seek to present snapshots of particular eras; they don’t offer “styles or schools.” Rather, his imaginations are intense, deep, yet unfettered. FIELD RECORDINGS, Lowe says in his liner notes, grew out of an argument he had with Wnton Marsalis — during Lowe’s attempt to interview Marsalis. Disagreeing about “minstrelsy,” Marsalis characterized Lowe — in Lowe’s words — as “merely another in a long line of deluded white academics.” Lowe spent the next six years immersing himself in “early entertainments of every racial persuasion,” which led him to compositions — song forms — that reflected what he had heard and experienced. He also plays and improvises on many of these performances heard in this CD set. More details here. Lowe writes, “There is a tradition in certain kinds of writing in which the writer takes past works and puts them to his own use for very specific philosophical and artistic reasons. Brecht called this copien, as in the use of older texts as a means to something new and different, as a method from which to challenge prior ideas and forms. This project was done in exactly this spirit, as a way of altering certain received ideas of popular and jazz song. It is also a challenge to certain formal and intellectual assumptions.” I haven’t heard more than one quarter of the set, but found the music so inspiring that I wanted to spread the word about it. The performances weren’t always easy to listen to — Lowe, as composer and player, doesn’t shy away from improvisation’s rough edges, but he doesn’t run into harshness for its own sake. What I appreciate most about the music — I was listening both with and without the benefit of Lowe’s commentaries — was its depth of feeling and innate ability to surprise. The surprises weren’t ones I could predict (I know that sounds like an illogical paradox, but listening to many of the great musicians, I feel I know “where (s)he might be going” in the next chorus). Rather, I felt the ground shifting under me in the best sense of the metaphor. Over and over, I felt beautifully startled, gently lifted out of my expectations and planted somewhere else, experiencing the sounds from a different perspective. Each voyage was a fascinating series of what Emerson calls “zig-zag tacks.” I heard echoes of New Orleans polyphony and street parade, dark unrequited blues, ensemble questing that echoed Mingus and freer improvsations, with searching, winding melodic lines, unpredictable harmonies that felt good as soon as they found my ears. Language has a hard time describing music in the best of circumstances, and words are particularly inadequate here. One must be a creative listener to feel Lowe’s many musics, but they are well worth the investigation. He is honest, inquiring, and sly — as is his work on these four CDs. But beware! This set is not ear-cushioning, to be listened to in conjunction with household chores, nor is it meant to be heard as one hears some discs: seventy-five minutes of supple protection from the world. I predict that the listener wise and brave enough to purchase the FIELD RECORDINGS will approach the music as one does a new book of poems: a poem or two at a time, rather than as an artistic devouring of it all. As a measure of the breadth and often witty depths of Lowe’s imagination, I would list some of the names he calls in his notes and compositions: Bunk Johnson, Tony Jackson, Roswell Rudd, Ernest Hogan, Mantan Moreland, Willie “the Lion” Smith, Lennie Tristano, James Reese Europe, Wilbur Sweatman, Thelonious Monk, Zora Neale Hurston, Jelly Roll Morton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Varese, Dave Schildkraut, Bud Powell, W.E.B. DuBois, Frank Melrose, Paul Whiteman, Bill Challis, Harry Barris, George Bacquet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James P. Johnson, Albert Ayler, Ran Blake, Henry Mancini, Sun Ra, Mezz Mezzrow, Pete Daily, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Bill Triglia, George Gershwin, Frank Teschemacher, Jess Stacy, Bix Beiderbecke, Arizona Dranes, Bert Williams, George Wheeler, Barbara Payne, Clyde Bernhardt, Ma Rainey, Anthony Braxton, Joe Jordan, Jaki Byard, Fess Manetta, Lester Young, Duke Ellington . . . and more. The curious — and I hope there are many — will listen to samples here and then plunge in — this set costs less than two CDs and is wonderfully lively. You can also learn more at Allen’s website and blog (called EVERYTHING ELSE IS POST MODERNISM) — where Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon and Norman Mailer, compelled to share a subway seat, eye each other with suspicion. I admire Allen Lowe’s courage, range, and audacities. The music is often, on first hearing, “weird,” but that’s a compliment. A little weirdness is like good seasoning: so much missed in the music we are sold, so richly enhancing in the right proportions. And to return to the austere Robert Frost. My letter to him, unsent and unread, is as follows: “Dear Mr. Frost. If you removed the net, you might not have tennis, but you certainly would have an engaging dance.”

love my PSBs but I am consolidating my studio to mix in a tight little circle; going to get the PSB powered speakers.

I think we need to get Definitive on the case.

cheaper than the Kindle Edition; and easier to rip up and burn.

new thread: The Definitiveness of Sleaze.

well, I give up on trying to sell some over-priced speakers; next, thinking of putting my PSB bookshelves up for sale....

like me; this is truly great playing: truly an endorsement for you kids to stay off drugs. Dexter was either not stoned or just right, this day,

actually, as an A to D, because it's 24 bits; I put my turntable into it analog, and come out digital - from which I go into my computer.

I take it that's a good thing? by the way, I will add that I am also willing to donate this thing to a non-profit.

I have a 900sl; I use it for direct transfers and as a front-end converter; works well for both; sounds good also on 'live' recordings, with a good mic pre-amp up front.

the dismantling of my studio begins (don't cry for me; this is part of my Maine escape plan); a Pair of Brentworth Sound Lab Type 1 speakers with the little bass modules which, I am told, are essential. I love these speakers; have mixed all my sessions and restored about 3000 recordings on them; if it sounds good on these babies it sounds good everywhere, I have found; of course, these are audiophile things, and audiophiles are notorious crazy (you know who you are); but I have the best ears of anyone I know (yes, that sounds vain, but I have really good ears; one of my view virtues) and I like 'em. A lot. but here's the rub; these suckers are expensive (about $5500 new); I will sell them for $2500; they are also BIG and HEAVY - so - if you want 'em it might be best to come pick them up - I'm in Maine - and I cannot even imagine packing these babies for UPS, USPS, FEDEX, or anything else. I figure it's a long shot; I may up trading them in; but would prefer cash - email me at allenlowe5@gmail.com and here's a link about them: http://www.northcountryaudio.com/systemscomponents-of-merit/components-of-particular-me/brentworth-sound-lab-speake.html

Stanley Crouch's little tome (tomb?) on Charlie Parker. this thing is for sale; has possibilities; I tried, but now it's up to you. $10 plus media shipping in the USA (about 4.00) or priority (6.95 I think); in good physical shape, hardly read, hard cover. email me at allenlowe5@gmail,com my paypal is alowe5@maine.rr.com

selling mine for $13 shipped media in the USA.

he's a pilot for Malaysian Air these days.

that's macho-stupid (or mucho-stupid) Crouch talk for people he'd like to sodomize. and btw, I do believe that Crouch expressed similar sentiments toward Gil Evans; unless he was confusing the two. But as far as I know, he never said anything bad about Phil Evans, Will Evans, Millie Evans, Dill Evans, or Evan Evans (Bill's son).

that's a nice piece, and Braxton is a favorite, both musically and personally, but I'm not sure that the :"outcast" label fits any more.

best Evans work, IMHO: 1)with Mingus (East Coasting, I think it was); 2) at the Half Note with Konitz/Marsh; 3) his first album (1956?); (brilliant adaptation of some of Tristano's ideas) 4) with George Russell; 5) with Cannonball on that Riverside, whatever it was called (maybe Know what I Mean?) 6) and the time I heard him in his living room playing Stars Fell on Alabama; away from audiences, recording studios, nothing to prove. Though I agree with some of Larry's points, I think he was a great pianist.

great set of discs; terrible notes.