Describing the worst time of his life, the saxophonist and music historian Allen Lowe circled the dark and brayed against the ravenous morning sun, unable to sleep or breathe then suffering from the lingering effects of peripheral neuropathy as he recovered from surgery to remove a cancerous tumour in his sinus. Somehow in the midst of all that he began to compose and the music poured out of him, culminating in two albums either side of a set of Wadi-Sabi ballads by Alan Sondheim for the experimental New York holdout ESP-Disk. Beyond its title and opening track, which wryly refers to kicking the bucket, onĀ In the DarkĀ the veteran jazzman swaps the quiet air of desperation for eloquent and rhapsodic compositions which sometimes break free of their moorings, featuring Ken Peplowski on clarinet, Aaron Johnson on clarinet and alto saxophone and Lewis Porter on piano, paying various ode to old Jews, Jelly Roll Morton, The Big Easy, Eric Dolphy and peasant life through the earthy tones and nubby forms of early Vincent van Gogh.
Meanwhile onĀ America: The Rough CutĀ the artist diagnoses the failing state of the blues, a form over which he has obsessed for many decades and which he defines for its ādisinterest in the polite trappings of (primarily but not only white) societyā and āimplicit rejection of basic tonal, sonic and harmonic rulesā. Getting back to basics, Lowe invokes the Funky Butt Hall of Storyville, the boisterous gyrations of the Holy Rollers and the attendant whoops and hollers of the Pentecostal church, running through a ragtag blend of jazz, honky-tonk and gospel, minstrelsy, medicine show irony and one-chord ruminations which prefigured the blues, culminating on the album closer āAt a Baptist Meetingā with saxophone squalls that snatch and chafe towards spiritualism, tethered by rowdy percussion and the brio of live performance recorded from a concert several years ago with the late trombonist Roswell Rudd.
