TopTen in Gene Seymour's Blog

[AllenLowe]

nice little thing from Seymour; I finished behind Sonny Rollins, but ahead of Muhal Richard Abrams - hope this doesn't go to my head (I've already ordered a fur sink):

4.) Allen Lowe, "Blues and the Empirical Truth" (Music & Arts) – Is it music or is it scholarship? Or musical scholarship? Is it criticism of the blues or just critical of them (or at least of what people say about them)? These and dozens of other questions aroused by "Blues and the Empirical Truth" are far more significant than any answers I or anyone else pretending to know more about music than Allen Lowe can cobble together. Lowe is a gnomic, compulsively idiosyncratic polymath who lives in Maine, plays a red-hot saxophone and has for years put together epic inquiries into the history and nature of American music and how it shapes – or doesn't – the national character. On this three-disc set, recorded over a two-year period, Lowe arranges, composes and plays "inside" and "outside" jazz as well as such makeshift forms as neo-gutbucket-progressive-punk (at least that's what I'm calling it for the moment.) He is backed by a typically eclectic guest list that includes guitarist Marc Ribot, pianist Matthew Shipp, trombonist Roswell Rudd and Lowe's fellow musicologist Lewis Porter, contributing here and there on keyboards. Along the way, tribute is made to civil rights activists Pauli Murray and Ella Mae Wiggins, forgotten or obscure musicians such as saxophonist Dave Schildkraft and pianist Blind Tom Bethune and…Doris Day, who should have been invited to Portland to jam with this crowd; except you have to wonder what she would have made of a song list with such titles as "Speckled Shaw Crippled Pete Boogie," "Blues in Transfiguration," "Elvis Died With His Sins Intact," "In a Harlem Ashram" and "(Bull Connor Sees) Darkies on the Delta." Guess it doesn't matter as long as no animals were harmed in the process.

Edited December 6, 2011 by AllenLowe

[jeffcrom]

Cool! How 'bout a link?

[AllenLowe]

here we go (I'm thinking of doing a little cut and paste, put my name at the top and Sonny's at the end):

http://seynah.blogspot.com/2011/12/gene-seymours-top-ten-jazz-discs-for.html

[Mark Stryker]

You made this list too: http://outsideinsideout.wordpress.com/

[AllenLowe]

thanks, Mark, had missed that one. Puts us on 5 top tens, if I am counting correctly -

[cih]

I didn't realise you were gnomic - you can't tell from the photos

[AllenLowe]

yeah, that's one I've never been called before - though one other review said I was "mad."

[Mark Stryker]

yeah, that's one I've never been called before - though one other review said I was "mad."

Mad as in "crazy" or mad as in "pissed-off" (or, perhaps, both ...)

Edited December 8, 2011 by Mark Stryker

[AllenLowe]

well, when I sent an email they indicated that it was intended in the sense that Hamlet was mad -

if you ask my wife, she'd probably say "both." As for me, I feel like the voice inside Tony Perkins' head at the end of Psycho - I think everyone else is nuts; this is all normal to me.

it probably seems a little silly, but the worst thing about getting such nice reviews with this project is that with the next one (which is very much in the works) it will be very difficult to match the quality. But my plans are to do that (which is also along the lines of an American song thing) and one more and then take a rest.