2023 Latest Projects — Allen Lowe

Letter to Esperanza

is a collection of Allen Lowe’s critical writings over the last ten years, on race, jazz, the blues, rock and roll, cultural equity, cultural appropriation, Maine, anti-Semitism, and white and black country music.

If I Don’t Live Forever It’s Your Fault

Compiled and edited by Fredda Gordon, this book begins in 2019 and ends in 2021, spanning COVID lockdown, an important election year, and the appearance of cancer in Lowe’s life. Because of the social media algorithms, not every post is always visible so some may be missing. Fredda cut much of the music writing since that can be found in Lowe’s book, Letter to Esperanza. All photos are courtesy of Allen Lowe and this book has been published with his permission.

In the Dark is a commemoration (sic) of the worst time of my life – a period of time during which, having been operated on to remove a cancerous tumor in my sinus, I slept for only brief periods of time.

At some point during this ordeal I started composing again. To my surprise – because I felt blank and near-death – the music poured out of me, and the result is this recording. I don’t know why it all happened like this, but I am reasonably sure that I will never be this prolific again, that I will never again produce this much good music this quickly.

America: The Rough Cut, is my statement not only on American music and American song, but also my commentary on the way American musicians of all styles handle that old time music and those old song forms.

I live in a musical world (mostly in my head) in which the sacred and the profane are two sides of the same coin, and in which the blues is more effect than cause. As for most revivalists and folkies, well, they tend to sound (like most but not only jazz musicians) overqualified; there are some very satisfying exceptions to these rules, and I have tried to reflect that in this CD.