By Lee Rice Epstein
Let’s start with the hyperbole: Allen Lowe’s massive, five-hour opus may
turn out to be one of the most important recordings of the 2020s, if only
more people well spend time with it. Lowe’s music is personal, deeply
thoughtful, and addictively listenable. Lowe spends a great deal of time
reading, writing, and thinking about jazz and the blues, their intersection,
the influences that birthed rock and roll, and he’s taken all that and
channeled into five hours of horn-drenched, witty and delightful music.
Casually listed, the roster is a massive who’s who:
Allen Lowe on tenor sax and piano; Aaron Johnson on alto and clarinet;
Elijah Shiffer on alto; Nicole Glover on tenor; Frank Lacy on trumpet; Ray
Anderson and Brian Simontacchi on trombone; Andy Stein on violin; Ursula
Oppens, Lewis Porter, Loren Schoenberg, Matthew Shipp, and Jeppe Zeeberg on
piano; Marc Ribot on guitar; Ray Suhy on guitar and banjo; Will Goble,
Colson Jimenez, and Nick Jozwiak on bass; Ethan Kogan, Rob Landis, James
Paul Nadien, and Kresten Osgood on drums; and Huntley McSwain on vocals.
But don’t be fooled by the credits: this isn’t a piano-and-drums-heavy big
band performance. The 69 songs were recorded in a series of small-group,
studio sessions, typically with sax, piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Lowe
composed all the music, a mountain of output following his 2023 albums, the
single-volume America: The RoughCut and the three-volume
In the Dark
, a radical, deeply felt, and raw exploration of the time following
surgical removal of a cancerous tumor in Lowe’s sinus.
Louis Armstrong’s America,
on the other hand, sounds like a reaffirming celebration of all that’s good
about great American music. Armstrong is something of the mirepoix, with
additional ingredients coming from Berrigan, Beiderbecke, Ellington and
Strayhorn, Mingus and Byard—tracing a hundred years doesn’t stop only
there, nods to Lou Reed and Steve Albini bring everything to the present.
Lowe’s not interested in some kind of play-acting or creating museum
pieces, the music here is lively and joyfully performed.
With so many individual tracks, a song-by-song review wouldn’t begin to
cover the riches found inside. There’s a nod to John Cage featuring Oppens,
a number of songs with long-time jazz player and teacher Schoenberg, a
handful of phenomenal duets with Shipp, and a handful of breakaway takes
from a session with an octet, featuring Johnson, Lacy, Suhy, Simontacchi,
Porter, Goble, and Landis. Now, the answer to the obvious question: none of
this works in isolation. Sessions kicked off in December 2023 and lasted
through May 2024. There is method everywhere, and perhaps a bit of madness
just to keep everyone on their toes.
Available in digital and physical formats
Note: The physical release comes in two volumes, but this should be
considered a single album, less volumes one and two, more like discs one
through four.