Allen Lowe
| Allen Lowe | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Background information | |
| Born |
April 5, 1954 Massapequa Park, New York |
| Genres | Jazz |
| Occupation(s) | composer, musician, music historian, author |
| Instruments | Alto Saxophone, Guitar, C melody saxophone |
| Years active | 1964-1996, 2001-present |
| Labels | Constant Sorrow |
| Website | http://www.allenlowe.com/ |
Allen Lowe is a composer, musician, music historian, sound restoration specialist, and author. He plays alto saxophone, c-melody saxophone, and guitar, and has recorded with some of the major figures in Jazz, including Julius Hemphill, Marc Ribot, Roswell Rudd, Don Byron, Doc Cheatham, and David Murray among others. He has also produced a series of historical projects on American Popular Song, Jazz, and the Blues.
Allen grew up in Massapequa Park, New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He started playing saxophone in jazz groups at age 15 and had some of his first jazz experiences, as a teenager, at the legendary Lower East Side "Slugs Saloon," seeing Ornette Coleman’s band and Charles Mingus, among others. Coming of age at the end of the 1960s he also saw groups like Super Session (Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper), the Grateful Dead (at their first Central Park concert in 1967), the Mothers of Invention (at Columbia University, 1968). Not to mention Louis Armstrong at Freedomland, circa 1964. When his young band (with guitarist Joel Perry) was booked for a festival in Bedford Stuyvesant circa 1968, they turned out to be one of the opening acts for the comeback appearance of Eubie Blake.
Allen dropped out of the Yale School of Drama after one year of studying to be a playwright. He met and married his wife and they moved to Brooklyn where Allen completed a master's degree in Library Sciences (1982) from St. John's University.
After graducation, Lowe and his wife moved to New Haven, where Lowe returned to his saxophone and became active in the local jazz scene with musicians like the bassist Jeff Fuller and drummer Ray Kaczynski. Originally an unreconstructed bebopper, he gradually became more and more interested in what was then known as “new music,” and began composing, performing and recording more actively in the new idiom. Allen recorded his first LP, For Poor B.B.' in 1985 and quickly recorded a series of albums in collaboration with musicians like Julius Hemphill, Don Byron, David Murray, Doc Cheatham, Roswell Rudd, Loren Schoenberg, Jimmy Knepper, Randy Sandke. Allen recorded Mental Strain at Dawn live at the Knitting Factory with his Jack Purvis Memorial Orchestra and later recorded sessions for Enja and Music and Arts’.
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