Jazz Articles about Allen Lowe

Allen Lowe: A Love Supine: Ascension into the Maelstrom

by Karl Ackermann
October 31, 2021

There is an exhaustive property to the body of Allen Lowe's work. Composer, saxophonist, sporadic guitarist who composes on piano, and the author of several noteworthy music histories, he has released nearly two dozen albums. Lowe is a member of the quartet East Axis with Matthew Shipp, Gerald Cleaver, and Kevin Ray. A Love Supine: Ascension into the Maelstrom is an ambitious double-disc collection recorded in four sessions in 2018. The eighteen tracks were all composed by Lowe. The sessions ...

East Axis: Cool With That

by Karl Ackermann
June 22, 2021

Free improvisation has a special place in a polarized world. It accepts and rejects jazz culture in an ebb and flow of unprompted ideas. On the album Cool With That we get the essence of the music's history from the inside, out. The quartet East Axis is new in name but the unit has been in place for several years and its members are well-known. Pianist Matthew Shipp, saxophonist Allen Lowe, bassist Kevin Ray and drummer Gerald Cleaver are at ...

Allen Lowe: Blues and the Empirical Truth

by Troy Collins
December 16, 2011

Operating on the fringes of the jazz establishment since the early 1990s, under-sung saxophonist Allen Lowe has earned meritorious praise for his distinctive efforts. It is his academic writings documenting the history of American folk music that have garnered him the most widespread critical acclaim however. Lowe's first foray into roots music, his 1994 album Dark Was the Night--Cold Was the Ground (Music & Arts), reconciled modernism with tradition, consequently inspiring his interest in scholarly dissertations like American Pop from ...

Allen Lowe: Jews In Hell/Radical Jewish Acculturation

by Clifford Allen
May 27, 2007

Allen Lowe Jews In Hell: Radical Jewish Acculturation Spaceout Records 2007

Art critic Clement Greenberg once offered a useful explanation of the task of modernism. To paraphrase rather liberally, Greenberg wrote that a modernist work must engage and self-criticize its own basic tenets and those of its chosen medium--not as an affront to its place in the art world, but as a way to “entrench [it] more firmly in its area of competence. In ...