Let’s start with the hyperbole: Allen Lowe’s massive, five-hour opus may turn out to be one of the most important recordings of the 2020s, if only more people well spend time with it. Lowe’s music is personal, deeply thoughtful, and addictively listenable. Lowe spends a great deal of time reading, writing, and thinking about jazz and the blues, their intersection, the influences that birthed rock and roll, and he’s taken all that and channeled into five hours of horn-drenched, witty and delightful music.
Casually listed, the roster is a massive who’s who:
Allen Lowe on tenor sax and piano; Aaron Johnson on alto and clarinet; Elijah Shiffer on alto; Nicole Glover on tenor; Frank Lacy on trumpet; Ray Anderson and Brian Simontacchi on trombone; Andy Stein on violin; Ursula Oppens, Lewis Porter, Loren Schoenberg, Matthew Shipp, and Jeppe Zeeberg on piano; Marc Ribot on guitar; Ray Suhy on guitar and banjo; Will Goble, Colson Jimenez, and Nick Jozwiak on bass; Ethan Kogan, Rob Landis, James Paul Nadien, and Kresten Osgood on drums; and Huntley McSwain on vocals.
But don’t be fooled by the credits: this isn’t a piano-and-drums-heavy big band performance. The 69 songs were recorded in a series of small-group, studio sessions, typically with sax, piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Lowe composed all the music, a mountain of output following his 2023 albums, the single-volume America: The Rough Cut and the three-volume In the Dark, a radical, deeply felt, and raw exploration of the time following surgical removal of a cancerous tumor in Lowe’s sinus. Louis Armstrong’s America, on the other hand, sounds like a reaffirming celebration of all that’s good about great American music. Armstrong is something of the mirepoix, with additional ingredients coming from Berrigan, Beiderbecke, Ellington and Strayhorn, Mingus and Byard—tracing a hundred years doesn’t stop only there, nods to Lou Reed and Steve Albini bring everything to the present. Lowe’s not interested in some kind of play-acting or creating museum pieces, the music here is lively and joyfully performed.
With so many individual tracks, a song-by-song review wouldn’t begin to cover the riches found inside. There’s a nod to John Cage featuring Oppens, a number of songs with long-time jazz player and teacher Schoenberg, a handful of phenomenal duets with Shipp, and a handful of breakaway takes from a session with an octet, featuring Johnson, Lacy, Suhy, Simontacchi, Porter, Goble, and Landis. Now, the answer to the obvious question: none of this works in isolation. Sessions kicked off in December 2023 and lasted through May 2024. There is method everywhere, and perhaps a bit of madness just to keep everyone on their toes.
Available in digital and physical formats
https://allenloweesp.bandcamp.com/album/louis-armstrongs-america
Note: The physical release comes in two volumes, but this should be considered a single album, less volumes one and two, more like discs one through four.
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