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Joe Albany: Now's The Time
by C. Michael Bailey
Pianist Joe Albany (1924-1988) is a musicological artifact within an art form full of them. Most recently, Albany has garnered attention through the movie and soundtrack Low Down (Bona Fide Productions, 2014, directed by Jeff Priess) based on the bracing, stream-of-conscience memoire written by his daughter, Amy-Jo Albany. His is a story told many times: near-genius junkie brushes stardom but never achieves the escape velocity necessary to escape his desperate circumstances to make his mark. Central to any discussion of ...
read moreJoe Albany and Low Down
by C. Michael Bailey
Joseph Albani (1924-1988), better known as Joe Albany, is a footnote in jazz history. A monumentally talented pianist with an exceptionally fragile constitution, Albany, like the late Chet Baker pianist Dick Twardzik, was hampered by a self-doubt relieved by heroin. Albany differed from Twardzik in that, like Baker, he lived well beyond the average junkie lifespan to providing a glimpse of what the late-life sequale of chemical dependency--a brutal fade-out really looks like. Unlike Baker, Art Pepper, ...
read moreLow Down
by Victor L. Schermer
Low Down Directed by Jeff Preiss Screenplay by Amy Albany and Topper Lilien Oscilliscope Laboratories 2014 Low Down is an independent film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2014. It relates to the life of the late Joe Albany, a well accomplished if lesser known swing and bebop jazz pianist during the 1940s through 1980s. Albany performed with the likes of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and ...
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