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Music: The Frank Lowe Quartet

Frank Lowe, who died in 2003, was an undersung tenor saxophone master

The Frank Lowe Quartet

The Loweski

(ESP 4066)

Born in Memphis in June 1943, Frank Lowe, who died in 2003, was an undersung tenor saxophone master.

He started on his instrument as a 12-year-old, was much influenced by his early years playing with bluesmen like BB King and working for the R&B label Stax - which had an attached record shop where he first heard the epochal horns of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman.

From studying at the University of Kansas he moved first to San Francisco, where he met such avant-garde spirits as Sonny Simmons and Donald Garrett, and then on to New York, where he played with the Sun Ra Arkestra. He moved back to California to study classical music at the San Francisco Conservatory before returning to New York to join powerful free jazz virtuosi like Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Leroy Jenkins and Rashied Ali.

He was also drafted to Vietnam, where he listened to records of Coltrane so close to the front line that they kept him sane and enabled him to survive psychologically.

Lowe made many momentous albums from the rasping Black Beings of 1973, through his years with the Black Doctors Quartet and records such as Intensive Care, through those he made for the Italian Soul Note label like Exotic Heartbreak (1983) and Decision in Paradise (1985). One of his final albums was the beautifully conciliatory Vietnam Reflections made with a group of Vietnam veterans led by violinist and frequent confrere Billy Bang.

He made several albums for the CIMP label during the '90s, recorded within the glorious acoustics of the Spirit Room in up-state New York, his final session being Lowe-down and Blue with its moving and quiescent version of the Willie Nelson ballad Crazy, in which Lowe re-engages with the tenor saxophone's long-established balladic tradition, made so sublime by veteran tenorists like Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Lester Young.

Nothing could be so contrary to that as the recent reissue of Lowe's 1973 ESP album made during the same sessions that produced Black Beings and called The Loweski.

ESP was a courageous label which defied all forms of musical conservatism, recording music that the major record companies and even some of the more audacious labels would not go near, and which proudly emblazoned its watch-words on all its albums: "The artist alone decides what you will hear on ESP-Disk."

With Lowe were altoist Joseph Jarman, recently arrived from Paris where he had been performing and recording as part of the avant-garde Art Ensemble of Chicago, the rampant violinist Raymond Lee Cheng - or The Wizard, to give him his jazz sobriquet - and the future giant of the free jazz bass William Parker. The Earth-inspired drums were struck by Rashid Sinan.

The Loweski is divided into five uninterrupted sections and from the very first notes it's a battlefield, with Lowe's first lonesome, adenoidal screech and quivering solo phrases.

You wonder if the blood and agony of Vietnam is still gripping his valves and pouring out of his horn. He sounds close to the rasping fire of Albert Ayler, yet there is also a strangely alienated complexity to his sound as a distant studio conversation wafts into its spaces while he picks up pace and a pained extremity of upper pitch.

As the bowed instruments and Sinan's drums enter during the second section the perceived agony only intensifies, and the third brings in The Wizard for an extraordinary half-plucked, half-bowed and sawn violin solo, scorching the tapes and seeming to seethe with passionate ire.

In the fourth section Jarman blows a fierce solo of excitation and response, before the two saxophones lock into a duet of exuberant colloquy continued into the final section which finally concludes with a long, bowed bass solo by the young and mighty Parker, which when you hear it now sounds like a deeply resonant stringed prophecy of all the surging free improvisation that was to break out in Chicago, London, Paris, Berlin and in the New York lofts during the four decades after, even until now, when Parker's sheer depth of artistry still seems so unsurpassable.

Yet all those years ago and Frank Lowe was one of its beginners. The Loweski shows us how.

 

Chris Searle

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