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Allen Lowe
Allen Lowe: A Love Supine: Ascension into the Maelstrom
by Karl Ackermann
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 ...
read moreEast Axis: Cool With That
by Karl Ackermann
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 ...
read moreAllen Lowe: Blues and the Empirical Truth
by Troy Collins
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 ...
read moreAllen Lowe: Jews In Hell/Radical Jewish Acculturation
by Clifford Allen
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 ...
read moreAllen Lowe's Three-CD Gigantisaurus "Blues and the Empirical Truth"
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Gapplegate Music Review by Grego Edwards
Allen Lowe is a provocative, original cat. He has strong ideas about the music, its history and his place in it. Now up in Portland, Maine, spending time working on some comprehensive musical anthologies and no doubt occupying more than one brown study thinking about it all, he re-emerges with a heady three-full-CD set devoted to the Blues and the Empirical Truth (Music & Arts 1251). First off, there is a great deal of music to digest. It doesn't hand ...
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