Allen Lowe

Allen Lowe is a Connecticut-based saxophonist, composer, scholar, sound engineer, and programmer. His entire career stands as a challenge to inherited ideas about American music history, culture, and its many intersections across genres and styles. This is reflected in the diversity of his recordings from the beginning, including New Tango 92: After Astor Piazzolla (Or, The Second Assassin) and Woyzeck's Death in 1995 with Roswell Rudd -- a jazz adaptation of the Georg Buchner play Woyzeck. He has composed and recorded blues, funk, gospel, and avant-classical music, all colored with a jazzman's lens. In 2011 Blues and the Empirical Truth was released. Lowe issued five albums on his Constant Sorrow label in 2015, among them are We Will Gather When We Gather, Ballad for Albert, and A Day in Brooklyn. Following an eight-year recording hiatus, he released America: The Rough Cut on ESP-Disk and the wildly diverse three-disc In the Dark, both in 2023. The following year, Lowe released the two-volume, four-disc, musical labyrinth titled Louis Armstrong's America. Lowe was born and raised in Massapequa, Long Island, in 1954 (composer Phillip Johnston was a high school classmate). During his teens, he began playing saxophone as well as teaching himself to play guitar and even a bit of banjo. Lowe played in jazz and rock bands and saw various jazz legends play, including Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman. During his twenties, while still considering a vocation, he played occasional gigs with jazz players. He also wrote criticism, organized festivals, and taught jazz history in addition to working a variety of non-music-related jobs. Lowe attended the Yale School of Drama for a year but dropped out and moved to Brooklyn, where he completed a master's degree in library sciences (1982) from St. John's University. In 1983, Lowe moved to New Haven, Connecticut, and dedicated himself to playing original music. There he became active in the local jazz scene with musicians including bassist Jeff Fuller and drummer Ray Kaczynski. Originally an unreconstructed bebopper, Lowe gradually became more interested in "new music" and began composing, performing, and recording more actively in that idiom. From his days in New York, Lowe was in regular contact with musicians like Julius Hemphill, Don Byron, David Murray, Doc Cheatham, Roswell Rudd, Loren Schoenberg, Jimmy Knepper, Marc Ribot, Matthew Shipp, and others -- all of whom played or recorded with Lowe's various bands. During this time, Lowe founded Fairhaven Records and issued three albums between 1988 and 1992, including At the Moment of Impact (featuring Byron and Hemphill alongside Kaczynski and Fuller) and New Tango 92: After Astor Piazzolla (Or, The Second Assassin) recorded by his Orchestra X that included Hemphill and Cheatham. In 1992, the composer and bandleader released his first Armstrong tribute, Mental Strain at Dawn: A Modern Portrait of Louis Armstrong on Stash. It featured Cheatham and saxophonists David Murray and Loren Schoenberg, and garnered notice internationally. 1995's Woyzeck's Death appeared on Germany's Enja. A collaboration with trombonist/composer Roswell Rudd, it accompanied a stage presentation of Georg Büchner's play that inspired Alban Berg's early 20th century opera Wozzeck. The lineup included his longstanding rhythm section, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, and pianist/keyboardist Andy Shapiro. In 1994, Lowe released Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground: The American Song Project for Music and Arts (with Rudd), performing what turned out to be the first jazz interpretation of Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground," as well as standards such as "Blue Moon" and Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman." Lowe's records were -- and remain -- critically acclaimed across the globe, but the relatively esoteric and individualistic nature of his music has apparently worked against him from a commercial perspective, but it hasn't daunted or deterred him. In 1996, he and his wife Helen moved to South Portland, Maine, where there was little interest in his music, given that the local arts scene was dominated by folk music, grunge, and indie rock. Out of boredom, Lowe took up the guitar and began composing again; he also taught himself the technique of sound restoration. He did the mastering work for Michael Feinstein's radio series on the music of George Gershwin, and for the nine-CD set American Pop from Minstrel to Mojo: On Record, 1893-1946 in 1998 with an accompanying nine-disc set; he also authored the accompanying book along with three others during the period. He served as an audio and historical consultant on Ken Burns' PBS documentary Jazz in 2001. That year he issued That Devlin’ Tune: A Jazz History 1900-1950, published by Music and Arts, accompanied by a 36-CD set that Lowe curated and produced. During this period he also wrote 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 -- the latter is unpublished. For the titles including box sets, Lowe handled all the mastering and sound restoration. It offered him a new way to make money while feeding his diverse cultural appetites. As a freelancer, he began doing sound work for Rhino, Shout, Rykodisc, Sony, Terry Gross (Fresh Air), and Venus Records. After an 11-year hiatus from recording, Lowe returned with Jews in Hell: Radical Jewish Acculturation on Spaceout Records. The double-disc effort showcased Lowe's electric guitar and banjo playing, and his blues, folk, and rock songwriting. His musical collaborators included Matthew Shipp, Marc Ribot, Lewis Porter, and Erin McKeown. 2011's three-disc Blues and the Empirical Truth included Shipp, Ribot, Porter, and Rudd. Two years later, Lowe enlisted saxophonist Gary Bartz, DJ Logic, Porter, Fuller, and others to record Man with Guitar: Where's Robert Johnson (A Soundtrack By), the debut release from the bandleader's Constant Sorrow label. The space age blues and jazz set was released as a 16-cut single album in 2015. That year, Lowe and his label released Ballad for Albert (with Shipp, among others). Lowe led his own quartet for Where a Cigarette Is Smoked by Ten Men. We Will Gather When We Gather, a deep dive into gospel and blues, appeared that year, showcasing a band that included baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, guitarist Ava Mendoza, trumpeter Matt Lavelle, and turntablist Jake Millett. His final album of the year, A Day in Brooklyn was a star-studded event that included participation from Ursula Oppens, Ken Peplowski, Kirk Knuffke, Mendoza, Schoenberg, and others. At its heart was the three-part composition "She Loved Him Madly/Mary Lou Williams." In 2019, Lowe signed with ESP-Disk, which compiled and released an eight-disc career retrospective Jews & Roots: An Avant Garde of Our Own: Disconnected Works: 1980 - 2018. It included four discs of unreleased material along with four thematically arranged CDs collecting a wide variety of material that was previously -- but not widely -- available. He continued to work on his massive Really the Blues? A Blues History 1893-1959 project and published several more books including Turn Me Loose White Man Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music 1900-1960. Lowe returned to recording in 2023 with America: The Rough Cut, with a cast that included alto saxophonist Darius Jones, Porter, drummer Kresten Osgood, trombonists Rudd and Ray Anderson, guitarist Ray Suhy, and bassist Alex Tremblay. He also released In the Dark, commemorating the worst ten years of his life. The year also saw the publication of If I Don't Live Forever It's Your Fault: Allen Lowe on Politics, Jazz, Cancer and More! edited with Fredda Gordon. Its essays begin in 2019 and end in 2021, spanning the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine and reflecting on the 2020 election and the appearance of cancer in Lowe's life. He also completed the four-volume Really the Blues? A Blues History, 1893-1959 (that he began in 2010). All told, it comprised a 36-CD set and 80,000 words of liner notes. With That Devlin' Tune, it is one of the largest independent projects ever made on the history of American music completed without outside or institutional support. At long last, Lowe also published his critical work, God Didn't Like It: Electric Hillbillies, Singing Preachers, and the Beginning of Rock & Roll, 1950-1970. In 2024, Lowe released his magnum opus: The two-volume, four-disc Louis Armstrong's America on ESP-Disk. While the sprawling project included no material Armstrong recorded, composed, or was associated with, Lowe's compositions reflect his theory of Armstrong as the first post-modernist, picking and choosing between personal and public musical sources and tastes filtered them through his life experience as a Black man, without concern for hierarchy. He subverted classic American problems of class and race across all of American popular music, offering an extended musical meditation on Black cultural life and aesthetics in America. Lowe also published Letter to Esperanza: Or: The Goyim Will Not Replace Me - Looking for Tenure in All the Wrong Places, a collection of essays from the 2010s. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi