Frank Lowe - R.I.P.

[JaSt]

Past away last night - September 19, 2003.
Was lucky to hear him at the Vision in May.
A wonderfull musician.

[Uli]

RIP, Mr. Lowe.

[Captain Hate]

Lowe and behold. Sorry to have this happen.

[Jonny Miner]

This kind of knocked the wind out of me. I never saw the great man play, but I'm a fan. A guy like Lowe won't ever get the notice of a Strummer or Cash, but I'm just glad there are people recognizing the passing of a great, great, improvising musician. He will be missed.

[Dennis Gonzalez]

Oh, whoa...I am devastated. Oh my Lord.

[Sergio Zamora]

Very sad news. He was a tremendous musician.

[LeMo]

Very sad news. I've seen him few times in the seventies and he was absolutely astonishing.

[Brian Olewnick]

Very sad. Thanks and farewell, Mr. Lowe.

[shrugs]

What a loss. His music will be passed down for sure.
The Flam and Valve No. 10 go on this evening.

[hornplayer]

This is very sad news.

RIP Frank Lowe.

[Pete C]

Very sad. And I salute his courage for continuing to make music after his surgery.

RIP

[Gary Sisco]

Oh, man. What Pete said. And also I salute him for his being so friendly and open with people at Vision, since I guess he must have been feeling pretty rough inside.

Well, he made others feel good inside many times, and his great spirit came through in his records, and will continue to.

RIP, Mr Lowe.

[David Gitin]

When I saw him in July, I told him of hearing him with Alice Coltrane in Berkeley in the sixties, and he said it was his "first gig," and continued down the street happily repeating that. He will be missed. A big loss.

[Ellery Eskelin]

Originally posted by David Gitin
When I saw him in July, I told him of hearing him with Alice Coltrane in Berkeley in the sixties, and he said it was his "first gig," and continued down the street happily repeating that. He will be missed. A big loss.

David,
Yes, that's when you and I were sitting and chatting at the sidewalk cafe on 43rd Street. A number of musicians walked by that afternoon and David was able to tell each of them when and where he first saw them. I think Frank was really charged that you remembered that.

Being neighbors, I saw Frank pretty regularly here on 43rd Street and occasionally we'd get into a serious discussion about music and life, sometimes on the street, on the telephone or up at his pad. Other times it'd be a quick salutation or a short catch up on things. But no matter what, I always felt like he was making that moment, no matter how short, an important connection - person to person. He was never glib, always real.

Frank was very serious about the music, knew his history and was very much current on who was playing on the scene both in the US as well as in Europe. And was always thinking about his place in the music. He spoke often about how avant garde music need not always be about full out energy and that his expression combined certain elements from way back in the history of the music, ancient to the future...

Along with Harold Ashby this makes two saxophone playing friends and neighbors who have passed on this year. Those guys were both very inspiring to me, as musicians and as people. They will be missed but not forgotten.

[Captain Hate]

Originally posted by Ellery Eskelin
Frank was very serious about the music, knew his history and was very much current on who was playing on the scene both in the US as well as in Europe. And was always thinking about his place in the music. He spoke often about how avant garde music need not always be about full out energy and that his expression combined certain elements from way back in the history of the music, ancient to the future...

Thanks for sharing those memories, Ellery. I think his last two releases on CIMP, as well as his playing on Bang's Vietnam, illustrate your last sentence. I hope Frank is remembered well by people, but how many people were really listening.

I'll be interested to see if the Times runs an obit on him. I doubt that the mooks that write for either of the two "alternative presses" around here have even heard of Frank; the only chance would be if Harvey Pekar pens something. I would expect the Voice to have something and probably the Chicago Reader.

[SEK]

I've been dreading this news, since I heard (very late) of his failing health a couple of weeks ago, but I feel like some wind has been knocked out of me. Frank Lowe has played on many of my favorite recordings for the past 30+ years, but I never got to see him in person... I hope that his legacy will endure for as long as people will enjoy this music.

[Gary Sisco]

Thanks for those memories, David and Ellery.

While I only chatted with him once, his humanity came through as well as it does on his records, which I very much love. He really made you feel like he was talking to you, not just shaking hands as he passed through on the way to the stage. A great man and a great loss but also great contribution to the music.

[Gentle Giant]

I'm glad his suffering was short, even as his influence is long.

RIP

[Joe Milazzo]

A player of great depth -- "soul", if you will -- and originality.

This loss feels so personal to me, especially as I think about where I was (metaphysically speaking) when I first encountered Frank Lowe's music.

Best to Frank's family and friends.

[Frisco]

I used to see Frank just about every time I went to Jazz Record Center.
It was years since the last time we spoke. I remember him being
extremely distraught over the murder of his good friend and drummer
Phillip Wilson. It hurt to see Frank struggle in recent years.

[Zephyr]

Frank Lowe: The OFN Interview

http://www.onefinalnote.com/issue5/lowe_interview.html

[MRS]

Is that the Derek Taylor who posts here? Great interview. . .sad, sad news.

[Bill Barton]

Yes, sad news indeed. Unfortunately, I never had the chance to hear him in performance or speak with him, but his spirit comes through loud and clear on the recordings. It turns out that Exotic Heartbreak - one of my favorites - was in the CD changer on the 19th...

RIP

[Brian Olewnick]

Obit by Ben Ratliff in today's NYT.

[Jimmy Cantiello]

NYT Obituary

[Joe Milazzo]

Jimmy -- thanks for the link.

I found no mention of Carmen Lowe -- Frank's wife (?) and the creator of the quilts that appear on the covers to EXOTIC HEARTBREAK and DECISION IN PARADISE -- in the obituary. Is she too deceased?

[Derek Taylor]

This news hit me pretty hard. I only heard him in person a handful of times, but each one was memorable. He had this magnetic intensity & exuded this feeling that each performance was a ‘go-for-broke’ affair, with failure a possibility, but through visible will & concentration, not a probability. He always seemed to me a musician in a state of flux, comfortable caressing a melody or just as easily abrading his tone in ways that hearkened back to his R&B roots. The player on BLACK BEINGS being quite different from the one on say SHORT TALES or VISION BLUE.

Zephyr, thanks for posting that interview link & Michael, thanks for the complimentary word. Joe’s triple review from that same issue of OFN: http://www.onefinalnote.com/issue5/lowe.html offers a lot of insight IMHO. I posted something over at the Bagatellen site yesterday & thought it might be a good place to share memories of Frank. The site seems to be down at the moment, but should be up again soon.

[Zephyr]

Derek, you have the same as I. "The page cannot be found"....anymore.
I read it before posting. Now it's gone (????) , like yours.

[Derek Taylor]

That is strange. I’m guessing the server account on the site finally expired. Here’s the text of Joe’s article (apologies for the length):

Frank Lowe Duets Across Jazz History – Joe Milazzo

There's a strange and beautiful humility in Frank Lowe's music. On Billy Bang's Valve No. 10 (Soul Note, 1987), the tenor saxophonist takes a solo on John Coltrane's "Lonnie's Lament" whose form is never smeared or obscured by the long shadow the composer has cast over three subsequent generations of improvisers. It is a supremely moving, soulful solo Lowe plays all the same, abstract yet lyrical, blunt but nuanced in its slow articulation, and expressed with a timbre that can be as dense and dark as cast iron, as tough as sinew and still somehow breathy around the edges. Lowe is one of the great communicators in improvised music, as anyone who has heard his Exotic Heartbreak (Soul Note, 1981) can attest. Like any dedicated listener, Lowe sounds as if he is engaged with his own awe at the forces music can unleash. His playing often evokes the response: "Yes, he's one of us." Few figures in the history of the music express the hard-won verities of their experiences with the dignity, intelligence and passion that Lowe can muster at his best.

Three new compact discs place this sensitive but unsentimental player in duet settings. Far from being simply intimate, all three recordings explore and explode the ramifications of inwardness. Short Tales is Lowe's third recorded meeting with Algerian / French bassist Bernard Santacruz -- Latitude 44 (Bleu Regard, 1995); After the Demon's Leaving (AA, 1996) -- and the first made by both men absent the company of the late master drummer Denis Charles. As the title suggests, these pieces are almost parable-like in scope. Santacruz is very much a bassist in the Wilbur Ware / Charlie Haden (not to mention John Lindberg) tradition, with his own highly individual concept of "walking" and "a groove." This is most apparent on a quietly stunning version of Don Cherry's Old and New Dreams favorite "Mopti," which achieves a pleasantly unorthodox swing. Santacruz's broad tone and broad rhythmic gestures make for a stimulating contrast with Lowe's own often complicated, starkly demarcated rubato strategies. Many of the pieces here follow a common format, as the two players begin with a unison statement, pursue their own paths of exposition, and return to state a sympathetic denouement. Lowe probably reaches the peak of his eloquence on Santacruz's jauntily melancholic "Walk in Matosinhos," although the tenor saxophonist's own brief (57 seconds) "Nothing but love" is a masterful example of melodic concentration, communicating a profound emotional experience with the most circumscribed of means. In fact, the performance could almost be heard as a trio performance, with Lowe transforming his tenor into both a baritone and a soprano in order to say what has to be said. Short Tales is further evidence that Lowe continues to sharpen his considerable abilities, and that, despite the size of his oeuvre, he has really yet to repeat himself.

Lowe the composer is even better represented on another recording of miniatures, Don't Punk Out; the discovery here of his heretofore unknown "Inner Extremities Suite (for solo guitar?)" qualifies as a major one. Recorded in 1977, this recording finds Lowe in the company of a very young Eugene Chadbourne. The session's original producer, Martin Davidson, has fleshed out the original release with previously unheard solo performances by each participant, Chadbourne's from 1979, Lowe's from this year. As a writer, Lowe is capable of loosely-jointed tunefulness in the manner of Monk, Coleman and Lacy. The opening track here, "Composition for David Murray" is so effective precisely because it is so candid and song-like in ways the dedicatee rarely is in his own work. Don't Punk Out is actually made a better listening experience by virtue of its slightly clattery mix, as it helps to foreground Chadbourne's contributions, most of which are made on an unamplified instrument. His gnarled, bottleneck flourishes and jagged strumming on a reading of Albert Ayler's "Ghosts" fall just short of complete and delightful irreverence. "Ghosts" is a key track here, as Lowe requested its inclusion. His interpretation juxtaposes licks that reference bop and hard bop harmonies as well as tricks out of a rhythm-and-blues bag with Ayler's essentially aharmonic rapidity of articulation. But even in the relatively tight confines of a two-and-a-half minute free duet such as "At Reel's End" (literally cut short by the tape's running out), Lowe and Chadbourne map out some fairly expansive spaces. The events recounted in "Fright," while hardly specific, are all the more uncanny for being so. Both men resort often (if tastefully) to the spontaneous extraction of non-tempered sounds from their instruments, and yet these performances are remarkably uncluttered. This is cerebral, even at times "cool" music, more experimental than Short Tales but also, at times, more insecure. (Then again, even the friendliest of proximities can be somehow awkward.)

There's nothing tentative about Duo Exchange, one of several re-issues of sessions originally produced by drummer Rashied Ali for his Survival label during the loft jazz, DYI heyday of the 1970's. Duo Exchange dates from 1972 and reveals Frank Lowe still in the process of purging the overt Coltrane-isms from his improvising. The two collectively extemporized compositions here are not mere sequels to the cosmological visions of Ali's 'other' saxophone-drums duet record, Coltrane's own Interstellar Space. If anything, "Exchange Part 1" and "Exchange Part 2" are less orchestral, less unrelenting, and less flowing than the performances from that earlier record. The scale of Duo Exchange is more human; though there are moments of anguish and triumph commensurate with those on Interstellar Space, the context here is very, very different. Of particular interest in these performances is just how Lowe responds to Ali's virtuosity, his split-second ability to free-associate shards of metric patterns and his kaleidoscopic sense of percussive coloration. Lowe often lets go of his phrases such that his notes somehow fall in those small open cells of silence in Ali's otherwise overpowering detail. The more closely one listens, the more it becomes obvious that Lowe is assembling a steady beat from the wailing pull of his tenor sax against the coruscating push of Ali's kit. In this setting, Lowe is the chorus -- the rueful and wise narrative agent -- and Ali the flamboyant actor personifying the tragically incongruous circumstances that befall the individual as they follow the trajectory of hubris. It is clear even from this brief recording (barely over half an hour in length) that Frank Lowe is one of the most unique of "free" players, as his playing demonstrates how deeply he comprehends the serious risks involved in his aesthetic. Frank Lowe's art is a super-realistic one, because it is an art open to life and life's endlessly proliferating decisions, each of which is possessed of an integrity and gravity that is to be honored.


Short Tales
Tracks: Jabulani (3:45) / Gepeto (3:03) / Walk in Matosinhos (4:33) / Alarm (5:54) / Mopti (3:10) / Zoom Tipski (3:52) / Asian Bird (4:52) / Fuschia Norval (3:36) / Thinking of you (3:05) / Fight Song No.2 (3:44) / Nothing but love (0:57) / 43rd West (2:50) / Watusi Egyptian March (4:11) / Bass Space (2:06)

Personnel: Frank Lowe (tenor saxophone) / Bernard Santacruz (bass)

Recorded March 19 1999, Studios la Buisonne à Pernes les Fontaines, France

Don't Punk Out
Tracks: Composition for David Murray (1:49) / If It Should Happen (4:06) / Fright (4:23) / At Reel's End (2:33) / Bobo Did It (2:33) / Ghosts (4:17) / The Clam (0:55) / Fire Down There (1:30) / Phantom to Tower (1:30) / You Were Right In The First Place (2:45) / 45 1st Ave [take 1] (0:20) / 45 1st Ave [take 2] (2:31) / There's No Place like Home (2:52) / Doctor Too-Much (2:45) / Don't Punk Out [take 1] (1:49) / Don't Punk Out [take 2] (1:13) / Inner Extremities Suite 1 (5:07) / Inner Extremities Suite 2 (5:16) / Inner Extremities Suite 3 (2:56) / Cascades (4:12) / Manhattan Cry (3:17) / Open Vision (2:18)

Personnel: Eugene Chadbourne (acoustic and electric guitars) / Frank Lowe (tenor saxophone)

Recorded October 19 1977 and Autumn 1979, NYC; April 2000, Pernes les Fontaines, France

Duo Exchange
Tracks: Exchange Part 1 (13:30) / Exchange Part 2 (15:09)

Personnel: Rashied Ali (drums, percussion) / Frank Lowe (tenor saxophone, Japanese flute, percussion)

Recorded 1972, Watts Studio, NYC

As a side note, if anyone is interested in obtaining a CDR of OFN issues #1-11, I can talk with Frank Rubolino about making them available (the whole thing easily fits on a single cd).