this just in: preview of the new project

[AllenLowe]

Ken Shimamoto is a Texas musician and writer with a very broad expertise in American music. Our new CD project (actually 3 cd) should be out toward summer, and I sent Ken a burn of the project; here's his review (re-printed with permission):

Allen Lowe’s “Blues and the Empiricle Truth”

If living well is the best revenge, then making a great jazz album

can’t be far behind. Just ask saxophonist-guitarist-composer Allen

Lowe, whose last recording, 1997’s double CD Jews In Hell: Radical

Jewish Acculturation, was a response to his inability to get a jazz

gig in Portland, Maine, where he currently resides. According to

Lowe’s lengthy, informative, and hilarious liner notes to his new

triple CD Blues and the Empiricle Truth, his latest work was inspired,

at least in part, by a young drummer who insulted him and challenged

him to a fight after being lambasted via email for missing a

rehearsal. (For what it’s worth, the specific tune occasioned by this

encounter, “Old Man Blues,” is the best modern day evocation of Jelly

Roll Morton since Mingus paid tribute via “My Jelly Roll Soul” and Air

revived “King Porter Stomp.”)

I’ll call Lowe, for want of a better term, a maximalist – not just

because he produces such sprawling, epic musical statements on his

own, but because of the protean work he’s done as an author,

historian, archivist, and sound restoration engineer whose work covers

the whole length and breadth of recorded American music (four books,

two of them unpublished, one accompanied by a nine CD set, another by

a 36 CD set, and a more recently compiled 36 CD set with 80,000 words

of notes) – all, he emphasizes, without any institutional aid or

funding. He’s a great thinker about music whose insights often swim

against the tide of conventional wisdom. His own music restores my

hope in the continuing vitality of jazz in the 21st century – not just

in Europe or historic centers like Chicago and New York, but even in

American backwaters (where, Lowe the historian would likely point out,

the unprecedented availability of recorded sound via the internet

makes easily accessible the latest developments from the music’s

far-flung outposts).

Lowe’s performed sporadically over the years, in between spells

working as a teacher, music journalist, playwright, and arts

administrator, among other day gigs. Originally a self-admitted “bebop

nazi,” he expanded his vision in the ‘80s enough to work alongside

such forward-looking lights of the new music as Julius Hemphill, Don

Byron, David Murray, and Roswell Rudd. He was introduced to Rudd, the

Yale-educated Dixieland trombonist who made his name in the ‘60s

playing free jazz with Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, and

John Tchicai, via writer Francis Davis, who’d found Rudd working in a

Catskill resort band. (Lowe and Rudd are the subjects of consecutive

chapters in Davis’ worthwhile anthology Bebop and Nothingness, through

which your humble chronicler o’ events first became aware of Lowe.)

Rudd’s probably the best known of Lowe’s collaborators on Blues and

the Empiricle Truth. Another is Matthew Shipp, the brilliant pianist

who made his name in the ‘90s playing in what seems in retrospect to

have been the last great free jazz band, with saxophonist David S.

Ware and bassist William Parker. Shipp previously appeared on Jews In

Hell, as did avant-guitarist/Tom Waits sideman Marc Ribot, who’s also

present here. One difference is that for BATET, Lowe actually traveled

to Brooklyn to record with Rudd, Shipp, and Ribot (unlike the earlier

release, where he dueted with Shipp on one tune and the pianist and

guitarist performed solo interpretations of Lowe’s tunes).

One of BATET’s most sublime pleasures is listening to Lowe, Rudd, and

Shipp intertwining their sounds, often with the leader on guitar -- on

which he’s wont to push the tonal envelope in the manner of Joe

Morris, one of Captain Beefheart’s guitarists, or that guy down the

hall from you in college who sort of knew how to play and sort of

didn’t -- and Shipp on Farfisa organ, that signifier of ‘60s

garage-rock cheese, which he uses to evoke the sound of the church on

“Manhattan Moan” and “Ras Speaks 1” (both vehicles for Rudd’s muted

growls and speech-inflected lines), or Sun Ra on the Albert

Ayler-inspired “The Lost.” The shade of Thelonious Monk is present in

the melody of “Entrance No Exit” (reminiscent of “Ask Me Now”) and in

Shipp’s Monkian spareness on “Blue Interlude 1” (where Lowe flutters,

Bird-like), while “Blue Interlude 2” has some marvelously intimate

muted playing from Rudd, where you can hear the saliva in the

mouthpiece.

As for Ribot, he conjures freewheeling solos from thin air and sculpts

the notes until they form things of rough beauty. On “Blue Like Me,”

he explodes out of the gate in a blaze of brawny atonality, like early

Blood Ulmer splicing genes with a battalion of lower Manhattan “No

Wave” guys. On the first version of “No 5 No Flats No Sharps Blues” –

several of Lowe’s tunes appear in multiple versions which are

different enough to justify their inclusion -- he gets further down in

the alley than you’ve ever imagined him, then goes all the way off,

with a searing intensity that will make you sit up in sheer

astonishment. The second version is more slinky, sexy, and

groove-oriented.

None of the above is intended as a slight to Lowe’s Maine-based

musicians. The rhythm section of Jessie Hautala and Jake Millet on

electric bass and drums respectively is particularly meritorious,

inasmuch as their instrumentation is bound to piss off the acoustic

jazz purists, while listeners with an ear for black street music will

delight in the way they lock it in the pocket on “Huh/Sublime and

Funky Love Pt. 1.”

Instead of playing one of those kits like Denardo Coleman uses, Millet

uses floppy discs and pushes buttons, rather than striking pads, to

get his sounds; that said, his beats are live-sounding and responsive,

once you get used to their electronic timbre. On “I Hate Blues,” an

oblique homage to obscuro NYC punk band the Mad (anybody else remember

Screaming Mad George?), he works his virtual kick drum as furiously as

Stefan Gonzalez going all Gene Krupa-on-steroids on Yells At Eels’

“Document for Toshinori Kondo.” It’s an impressive feat, enough to

make all but the most doctrinaire neo-cons reconsider what “really

playing” means. His “cymbal” work is also noteworthy.

To these feedback-scorched, guitar-centric ears, the big news here is

axe-slinger Ray Suhy, a young player whom Lowe says had never played a

jazz gig prior to their acquaintance. While I’m not generally a fan of

jazz guitarists’ dry, muted sounds and absence of vocalized effects,

this Suhy guy is definitely Something Entahrly Other, from his

reverbed-out surf/Morricone tone on “Twilight at Terezin” to the

skronky storm he churns up on “Pauli Murray, at the Back of the Bus,

Suddenly Realizes She Has the Blues” (titled after a friend of Eleanor

Roosevelt and precursor of Rosa Parks). There’s a lot of Sonny

Sharrock in Suhy’s voice: his slide on “The Children of Ella Mae

Wiggins” sounds like an unholy amalgam of Sonny and Billy Gibbons,

while the net effect of “Blues In Shreds” is something like Last Exit

if only Sharrock was going completely apeshit. All in all, Suhy’s

contributions constitute a mighty impressive debut.

As a saxophonist, the leader’s playing is exploratory, but with an

awareness of tradition, as though he breathed in the entire history of

blues and jazz (which I suppose, in a way, he has) and is now blowing

it out through the bell of his horn. Lowe burns with incandescent fire

on uptempo numbers, cries the blues a la Ornette on “(Bull Connor

Sees) Darkies on the Delta,” flexes his muscles to show off his range

and fluidity on “No More Blues (the Sins of the Mother),” and even

comes across like one of those freedom-drunk, fire-breathing ‘60s guys

on “Pete Brown’s Blues,” “In a Harlem Ashram,” and “One Trane

Running.” (No slouch, either, is Texas-born altoist Spike Sikes, who

plays Pharaoh Sanders to Lowe’s Trane on “Elvis Died With His Sins

Intact.” I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention

pianist-academic-Coltrane biographer Lewis Porter, who tickles the

ivories in an exemplary manner on three tracks.)

Lowe’s always a composer first, and plays through “actual chord

changes” like those on the Ellingtonian “In Da Sunshine of Your Love”

or “My Confession: Ode to Doris Day (The Last Embrace)” with lyrical

elegance and grace. His tunes almost always come with a back story,

with titular or musical allusions to jazz and Civil Rights pioneers,

Richard Hell, Richard Strauss, the Carter Family, minstrel shows, the

Regular Old Baptists – he avers that he listens to nothing but gospel

music – Salvation Army bands, an obscure post-Beat poet, and the

Velvet Underground, to say nothing of the album’s Oliver

Nelson-inspired title.

BATET only includes a couple of vocal features. On the slow shuffle

“Carnovsky’s Blues/The Whores’ Dance,” the terrifying slavery-days

narrative “Cold Bed Blues,” and the ominously relentless “Blood on the

Mirror,” engineer Todd Hutchisen intones Lowe’s lyrics like Colonel

Bruce Hampton singing from the bottom of the ocean, which is actually

an improvement on the author’s sub-Lou Reed croak on Jews In Hell. No

one does all things equally well.

There’s much to be amazed by in this cornucopia of sounds. I know I’ll

still be digesting this by summer, which makes BATET an early

candidate for my record of the year. And again, hearing this

outpouring gives me hope. If creativity this robust can survive and

thrive in the Maine woods, who knows what other pockets of thrilling,

individuated compositional and improvisational excellence are lurking

out there in the backwater burgs of America? (Or, if a masterpiece

drops in the woods, does anybody hear? Visit http://www.allenlowe.com/

for the answers to this and many other questions.)

[Larry Kart]

Congratulations, Allen. Well deserved.

[AllenLowe]

thanks, Larry - fortunately it's not a comedy album......

Edited February 26, 2011 by AllenLowe

[jlhoots]

Very interesting.

I guess I didn't know that Joe Morris played with Capt. Beefheart.

[Guest Bill Barton]

Very interesting.

I guess I didn't know that Joe Morris played with Capt. Beefheart.

I think that you missed the comma...

Man, I'm really looking forward to hearing this, Allen! That's a helluva review.

[papsrus]

Very nice. Congratulations Allen. Looking forward to all of this.

[AllenLowe]

thanks paps - also, I'll have some CDRs out to you this week -

[jlhoots]

Very interesting.

I guess I didn't know that Joe Morris played with Capt. Beefheart.

I think that you missed the comma...

Man, I'm really looking forward to hearing this, Allen! That's a helluva review.

OOOPS!!