AllenLowe

she's very good; I have long had a debate in my head about what makes a jazz singer, but certain ones fall into the cracks. She's one of them. One of the criteria is phrasing the other is emotional; she does do the phrasing thing, but sparely, as though to drop in a "jazzy" variation, but it's extremely subtle. Emotionally she is very direct, lacks the artistic detachment of singers like Holiday; which isn't a deal killer but which always sends me back to rethink the whole question. She is a little emotive for my tastes and I sometimes wish she would back off. But this is not an exact science.

whoops, wrong citation - see what I said, above.

your work as posted here is extraordinary. I haven't compared it to the Archeophone, but one thing I did notice with that set was that the EQ could have been improved (which I was able to do myself with relative ease). Please consider doing more of these.

sale over. Christmas came early this year. And a humbug to you all.

thanks for saying that. It's been a difficult Fall; lotsa rejection, therapy, a few holes I felt like crawling into. But it always helps to hear things like that.

Francis Davis called this project "a revelation" and considers it the top CD of 2024. Dusty Groove writes: "A stunning project from the great Allen Lowe – an expansive array of sounds that's way different than you might expect from the title – as it's not a portrayal of the America during the years in which Louis Armstrong walked this planet – but a pastiche of past aesthetics, present performance, and future-thinking combination of elements! Lowe's always been way more than just a jazz musician – and the set shows the way he often operates with more of a larger artistic vision – not exactly as a composer, but maybe with the energy of a visual artist – part creation, part collage – with a sense of aesthetic interplay that really comes through in the project!" Phil Overeem has said of this project: "No important music chronicler has ever composed and played this well." We performed it to two standing ovations for Yale University's Duke Ellington Fellowship Series. So what're you waiting for? I will never be able to do this kind of work again. It was like a race against death. So far I am only slightly ahead. Both volumes, 4 CDs, for $30 shipped in the USA. This price will hold until Christmas. My paypal is allenlowe5@gmail.com

had to because of the high-intensity radiation I had on my jaw in 2019. My embouchure died at that point; still having some trouble.

I agree but they really both helped create the style. As did Earl Bostic.

does he talk about predecessors? Louis Jordan? Pete Brown? Horsecollar Williams? I somehow doubt it, but those three - at the least - should be in a book like this.

I haven't read, and probably won't - I think this deserves more of a magazine article than an entire book - but I do worry about the anti-art and anti-intellectualism of books that seem, from the description, to create straw man arguments. I know this is probably promo written by a third party, but dumb stuff like: "The New Thing,” as personified by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and a few others." doesn't help the cause; "a few others" - ? no, hundreds of others of musicians who were feeling a certain way in the 1960s. Or: "Avant-garde jazz, made by musicians indifferent to public perception" is just total crap. Many of the avant garde-ists had a very populist perspective, and saw the music as addressing a deeper and much more direct kind of musical reality. There was a strong black nationalist bend to the new music, and any book that ignores it is only worthy of contempt. These musicians - like Hemphill and BAG - saw themselves as community organizers. So this book, instead of breaking new ground, is trying to reinvent a perspective that has already been expressed. Write about it - but don't try and sabotage musicians who were also in the middle of if all. Include it all. And if you really want an alternative jazz history...well, read my book That Devilin' Tune, which shows there is an entirely different perspective that most jazz writers have ignored.

I wasn't aware of that, thanks, I just have to insist, on aural evidence, that what Pullman thinks was '49 sounds, ballad-wise, nothing like Bud from that year.

well, not ready for prime time.

I find Melle's soloing on the Blue Notes and Prestiges to be....well, a bit amateurish. I don't think he was at the level he wanted to be at.

as all the 1947 Roost recordings - with Curley and Max Roach.

new picture? I would like to hear that; I don't think his Blue Note era stuff has held up well, but when I talked to him (I think it was the '90s) he was most proud of the soundtrack/synth work he had done. And I think this one is pretty cool:

Yes - but it is because of the ballads (I Should Care, for example) - his ballad approach is significantly different than what it would become in the next year or two, a little more decorous and even lush. Compare a ballad from '47 to those from '49 and I think you will hear the difference. Also - and it is less scientific - but I had some long talks with Curley Russell about these sessions, and though I did not ask about the year (this wasn't an issue back in the 1970s when I knew him) he always sounded like those Roosts were from the same session.

well, that's not a good idea, to think differentiating the time period is unimportant. Bud was an amazing figure, and his development as a musician is an amazing and essential thing to witness - and he was a different player in 1947 than in 1948 through, perhaps, 1953, which were his peak years. To say the time period is unimportant is like also saying it might as well have been 1956, when he was audibly deteriorating. Or that what a writer wrote is unimportant to recognize, even if his early work is different than the later. In 1947 Bud is playing great, but he does NOT have the depth to his playing that he has in '48 and '49. How can this be unimportant? It is important because Bud is changing, deepening, expanding. BUT MOST IMPORTANT: How can you trust a writer who cannot differentiate between different sounds and approaches, especially one as clear as this? To me this shows how poor Pullman's judgement is, and it tells me NOT to trust any other musical observations he makes - because the difference in Bud's playing is plain and obvious. And if you yourself don't make the distinction, you should go back, because it is so artistically blatant, and it will lead you to appreciate Bud even more. As for Paudras, I knew him a little, and you seem to be dismissing him. He was a great guy who really saved Bud's life. He deserves better treatment.

He growled at me once, but I still like his music. I hit him over the head with a newspaper and he went away.

always glad to see something about Bud, but I am not a fan of Pullman's bio. Aside from one very bizarre discographical error (he is definitely wrong about some performances which he claims were not recorded in '47 - and clearly they were), he does not write very well. I don't think I ever finished the book, and I am a Bud fanatic.

‘Louis Armstrong’s America’ by Allen Lowe Review: An Original Tribute to a Titan The saxophonist and scholar leads a shifting and artfully unruly ensemble on this two-volume set, taking inspiration from Armstrong’s own omnivorous musical appetite. By Larry Blumenfeld Four cymbal strikes establish a march beat, and then an eight-piece ensemble kicks in. A melody, played in unison by horns and reeds, is punctuated by growling trombone. “Mr. Jenkins’ Lonely Orphans Band,” the first track of Allen Lowe’s “Louis Armstrong’s America Vols. 1 & 2” (ESP Disk, out now), might place us back a century in time. Yet, 90 seconds in, a trombone solo slides up to one ringing note, which gets promptly and precisely matched by the bent tone of an electric guitar. Soon enough, that guitar solos wildly, with distortion worthy of good blues-rock, as the rhythm shimmies. Mr. Lowe—whose brief tenor saxophone solo on that song displays his customary fluidity and humor—uses his Constant Sorrow Orchestra to bend senses of tone and time throughout this two-volume, four-CD release. That opening number is named for the Jenkins Orphanage, in Charleston, S.C., whose jazz band developed significant talents—including trumpeter Cat Anderson, of Duke Ellington’s orchestra—not too long after Armstrong, beginning in 1913, played in the Colored Waifs Home brass band in New Orleans. The unruly beauty of Mr. Lowe’s music has long been grounded in specific lineages yet also consistently blurs styles and eras. Here, his original compositions embrace, among other things, Ellingtonia, punk rock, the Bo Diddley beat, free jazz, gospel-blues and bebop. “But where does Louis Armstrong fit into all of this?” he asks in his liner note. Armstrong listened to everything: The handwritten playlists on his reel-to-reel mixtapes ran from opera to the Beatles, from far-flung folk music to all manner of jazz. Mr. Lowe isn’t alone in proposing Armstrong as “the first true post-modernist,” but the directive he draws from the trumpeter—“the past is the present, to be re-used and even abused”—is an entirely personal credo. Mr. Lowe is a noteworthy historian, whose books are both eccentric and essential. In the introduction to his two-volume “‘Turn Me Loose, White Man,’ or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music, 1900-1960,” he wonders: “Where does one start with American music, and where does one end? . . . Sometimes certain things seem to disappear, only to reappear as something else or something that seems like something else.” Case in point, his new composition “The Seven Foot Policeman,” which starts like a march yet slips easily into something like loft-era free-jazz without losing its essence. Mr. Lowe thinks on an absurdly grand scale. His most recent book was more than 700 pages. His new release presents 69 original compositions, spanning more than five hours. His “orchestra” is 14 different ensembles, from duo to octet, drawn from a cast of 23 musicians. Somehow, none of this music sounds gratuitous or disjointed. And it tells a story, however circuitous: one man’s version of tradition. Mr. Lowe isn’t the only historian on hand. Lewis Porter, who wrote the definitive biography of John Coltrane, plays both piano and Wurlitzer organ here, admirably balancing convention and invention on both. The piano playing of Loren Schoenberg, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem’s senior scholar, primarily known as a tenor saxophonist, is a shining revelation on several tracks, especially in duet with Mr. Lowe on “Under the Weather.” The roster of pianists here runs deep. Ursula Oppens, best known in classical circles, lends spare and strange beauty to “Aaron Copland Has the Blues.” On “Red’s Revenge,” Danish pianist Jeppe Zeeberg captures the sense of “accelerating tempo, even while the time remains unchanged,” of Speckled Red, a pianist Mr. Lowe’s book championed with such a description. Mr. Lowe’s playing is most affecting in duet with Matthew Shipp, a paragon of bold and searching modern pianism, especially on “The Sorrow Song: On the Cooling Board.” Guitarist Marc Ribot, a singular master, displays a range of blues expression, from pious to greasy to proto-punk, on several tracks. Ray Suhy summons admirable power on electric guitar, too, yet most entrancing is his elegant weirdness on banjitar (a six-string banjo), especially on “Bathing With Doc Walsh.” Still, this album’s real achievement is the variety of ensemble sounds Mr. Lowe curates—their combination of cohesion and ragged edges—and his ability to straddle eras. On “Calling All Freaks,” his octet conjures legacies of both Luis Russell’s swing and Charles Mingus’s bop. On “Mr. Harney Turn Me Loose,” he and Mr. Shipp fold shards of a ragtime hit within something John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner might have played. In books and social media, Mr. Lowe, who is 70 years old, gets cantankerous in response to lazy assumptions. Yet there’s a sweetness too, an earnestness—what Greil Marcus, in an introduction to “Turn Me Loose, White Man,” identified as his “mission” regarding the relationship “between people long dead and those listening to them now in disbelief that they could ever die.” The title of one new composition, “I Should Have Stayed Dead,” offered here in three distinct versions, alludes to Mr. Lowe’s own mortality: He recorded these tracks in between treatments and surgeries for sinus cancer. Yet this is the music of a wild-eyed optimist who shows no signs of slowing down.

bullshit article - not a single citation. And anyone who cites John Lincoln Collier and Ross Russell, two writers whose work was filled with distortions and errors, has not idea what they are talking about. Where is the evidence that Charlie Parker's kid died because he spent all of their money on drugs? Show us the medical records, doctors' reports. This is pure fiction. Shame on this story - and anyone who makes the statement that jazz had no more innovation after the 1960s is unqualified to write about jazz.

I like Nate but he has ignored my work for years; Turn Me Loose White Man should have been on that list.

well, there's a guy on here who, every time I say I don't like a particular musician, accuses me of saying it because they turned me down for a collaboration.