Allen Lowe’s short bio says that the veteran saxophonist and guitarist ‘spans the history of jazz in his music in a way that few have’. While sharing bebop idioms and offering an especially gritty take on the avant-garde, some of his earliest records incorporated not only roots music in the form of nascent jazz and blues but tango theatrics after the innovator Astor Piazzolla, where Lowe was accompanied by the great alto of Julius Hemphill, while he tackled the catalogue of Satchmo for the first time with other frequent collaborators in David Murray, Loren Schoenberg and Doc Cheatham on Mental Strain at Dawn: A Modern Portrait of Louis Armstrong.
A music historian and specialist in sound restoration, Lowe has a unique ability to not only quote or echo but resuscitate the past in his work. On the first of two albums which he released last year, In The Dark found him surveying the worst time of his life, as he suffered from the lingering effects of peripheral neuropathy following surgery to remove a cancerous tumour in his sinus, with Lowe joking wryly about kicking the bucket and sloughing off the stupefying gaze of the morning sun as his rhapsodic airs, featuring Ken Peplowski on the clarinet, Aaron Johnson on clarinet and alto saxophone and Lewis Porter on the piano, paid 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 on America: The Rough Cut he diagnosed the failing state of the blues, getting back to basics as he invoked 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, all of these strains came to bear on the album closer ‘At a Baptist Meeting’, where saxophone squalls snatched and chafed towards spiritualism, tethered by rowdy percussion and the brio of live performance as he captured a special moment on stage with his longtime friend and musical partner, the late trumpeter Roswell Rudd.
His latest undertaking is even more ambitious, a two-volume collection with his Constant Sorrow Orchestra which purports to pay tribute to old Satch. In fact Louis Armstrong’s America uses the trumpeter and vocalist as a kind of Derridean spectre, a gravitational force which remains tantalisingly and even tormentingly out of view, in the manner of Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man or Marlon Brando as Kurtz in the torrid reverse pilgrimage of Apocalypse Now.
Instead of tackling some of Armstrong’s most cherished tunes or offering riffs on his legacy, over a staggering sixty-nine original compositions Lowe touches upon everything that went into and came out of Armstrong’s music or else ran curiously alongside. He pitches us right into the ragtime and swing of the early twentieth century, when jazz was just entering into American life ‘as did almost all forms of American vernacular music, astride the ghosts of minstrelsy’, and winds a course through detours, jumping-off points and apparent irrelevancies, from Albert Ayler who described Armstrong’s music as ‘a rejoicing’ to oddities like Captain Beefheart and Steve Albini, the anti-corporate music producer and acerbic voice behind the minimalist rock band Shellac. Describing his everything and the kitchen sink approach, Lowe writes:
I think that Louis Armstrong may have been the first true post-modernist, picking and choosing between a hierarchy of personal and public musical sources and tastes, but without any concern for the way in which hierarchy acted on all of this in terms of class and even, ultimately, race (e.g. think of Armstrongās reverence for opera and the way it effected his broad and classically expressive method of phrasing). So he fits all the definitions of post-modernism, even as a kind of anachronistic vessel for so much that was still to come not just in jazz but in all of American popular music, in particular but not only through the mediation of black life and aesthetics. Black song, vernacular and popular, is amazingly flexible in its ways and means of expression, lyrically, rhythmically and sonically.
Still no description of his goals or methods can capture the experience of listening to all of this music, which extends in all directions with a profligate and riotous force of will. The opening piece refers to the Jenkins Orphanage bands which nurtured the trumpeters Cat Anderson and Jabbo Smith and the swing guitarist Freddie Green, and already it seems to sway against the timeline of history, embodying a bit of ragtime and stride before prefiguring not only rock and roll but the overdriven amplifiers of the late sixties, then segueing into the brassiness of a marching band and settling into a staccato swing before the track returns to its opening vaudeville histrionics. ‘Aaron Copland Has the Blues’ features a twelve-bar progression on the bass, and Lowe with his ensemble then pays homage to ‘the truly great black rocker’ Bo Diddley.
On ‘Laughin’ with Louis’ he loosely transcribes what he portrays as a ‘stoned-out’ Armstrong solo, ‘weirdly boppish at times, yet basically a free improvisation’. There is a bit of compare and contrast as the band celebrate the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, whose tempered melodies were often juxtaposed with his contemporary Armstrong’s full-throated approach, and Dave Schildkraut, here reified through a rendition of ‘Saints’, whose sound on the saxophone sometimes saw him mistaken for Charlie Parker.
While the orchestra pay the requisite attention to the likes of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Lester Young, there is also a revisionist streak to Louis Armstrong’s America as Lowe seeks to recuperate such names as the Reverend Utah Smith, who he describes as the ‘greatest guitar evangelist’ and an unheralded forebear of rock and roll (and who chaired a ‘Negro revival meeting’ where he delivered religious messages with the aid of his electric guitar as one of a series of ‘Coffee Concerts’ at the Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 1941), plus James Reese Europe, the New York City bandleader of the 1910s, who Lowe hoists up as ‘the first great black musical liberator of the 20th century’.
In a similar vein we find the three-finger plucks and strummed resonances of Dock Walsh of the Carolina Tar Heels, an old time string band, and the ascent of Claude Ely, the Holiness Pentecostal preacher and recording artist whose tent revivals were attended by a young Elvis Presley. Yet at the same time when it is Steve Albini who is ascending the firmament, ‘at an angle of forty-five degrees like a shot off a shovel’, the opening cry of ‘One, two, one two fuck you!’ is redolent of The Ramones or Iggy Pop, who began ‘One, two, fuck you pricks!’ on a famous live rendition of his deliciously titled song ‘Cock in My Pocket’.
This is no tome of crabby historicism but a living and breathing record which has fun with all of its forms, and is willing to poke and prod or parody its targets even while embracing them as part of a shared culture. There is even what sounds like a reference to the ubiquitous ‘Baby Shark’ motif, which has itself been tied back to earlier twentieth century camp music.
The cast here includes some of Lowe’s recent collaborators like Aaron Johnson, Brian Simontacchi, Lewis Porter, Kreston Osgood and Ray Suhy, plus such standout names as Matthew Shipp, Loren Schoenberg, Ray Anderson, Marc Ribot and Ursula Oppens, with the leader playing tenor saxophone and piano. ‘Pleased’ channels the funk of James Brown, the thirty-sixth track ‘Apocalypse Next’ commences the second volume of the set with one of several interpolations of Jimi Hendrix, while ‘Dance of the Occupiers’ points its appendages towards the ‘Dance of the Octopus’ by Red Norvo and Benny Goodman, who combined according to the liner notes in 1933 to ‘present the very first jazz avant-garde’.
The ‘Middlebrow Blues’ which seeks to encapsulate William Grant Still ekes in the direction of DeBarge and Tupac Shakur, while ‘John Cage Turns the Page (Or 3:02)’ makes good on its title amid some snickering, bowed strings and plenty of rustling paper, and ‘Lewis Lewis’ traces a pathway from Richard Berry and The Kingsmen to the lustiness of Prince. ‘Sorrow Song: On the Cooling Board’ is a duet between Lowe and Matthew Shipp, with its burnished horn and sinking keys making for a lovely pastoral with blackened edges. Elsewhere Huntley McSwain provides a handful of winsome vocals.
Louis Armstrong’s America is about much more than jazz and its malcontents. B-movie actresses dot the parking lots and alleyways, LGBTQ icons like Gladys Bentley and Candy Darling also litter the scene and Lowe confides a personal pantheon of writers such as the Greenwich Village dadaist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the New York Intellectual vanguard Isaac Rosenfeld who for Lowe embodies both a distinctly linear brand of modernism and a Jewish sense of humour, which he locates as the conflux of compassion and ridicule, plus the Cleveland poet d.a. levy whose untimely death by self-inflicted shotgun wound is another of this record’s preoccupations.
