"Angular, sly and funky, Jews in Hell is a bona fide wake up call from the avant garde."
– Jonathan Lethem

"Allen Lowe is an American master. I was absolutely astonished b Jews in Hell. The CD blew me away – the compositional transitions, the liner notes – Allen Lowe is a great writer. It’s hillbilly music but it’s trans-national. Allen Lowe is one of the few musicians doing anything new today.

He is the tradition. I’m a big fan of Allen Lowe and I think as a musician and a scholar he is very important and I think he is deeply misunderstood because he doesn’t hate himself."
-Anthony Braxton

Allen Lowe's guitar playing is unprecedented
- Larry Kart

from: Signal to Noise Fall 2007
"The same iconoclastic wit and intelligence that shape That Devilin’ Tune are evident in Lowe’s latest work as a musician, Jews in Hell: Radical Jewish Acculturation. Lowe is an accomplished saxophonist who has previously populated his CD with performers like Roswell Rudd and Doc Cheatham, and his interests in musical history manage to inform his sometimes abrasively contemporary work. In 2001 Lowe took up guitar, and it’s as a guitarist and singer of a rough-cut post-modern blues that he primarily appears here. It’s raw music, a kind of alienation-celebration of the acculturation suffered by baby-boom Jews growing up in America in the 1950s and 1960s. For Lowe, no ax is too small to grind. The liner booklet has him referring to his high-school vice principal “a cretin named Floyd Kenyon.” One sub-title is "All the blues you could play by now if Stanley Crouch was your uncle," while the other refers to a local Portland, Maine venue called the Space Gallery that won’t give him work. The Velvet Underground are a central theme and influence, with songs about Nico and Lou Reed: “Walk on the Wild Side” turns up in “Where’s Lou Reed?” with “And all the white girls go…LouLouLou LouLou…” Elsewhere Frank Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia” gets referenced in “Failure”—“Failure is my face in the mirror.” Lowe summons up real power on songs like “Goyishe World,” a rock-driven tune on the hoary subject of Christ-killing, and his themes and music possess more power than the petty grievances might suggest. It’s a compound world populated by Doc Boggs, Blind Willie Johnson, Doc Pomus, Lenny Bruce and Delmore Schwarz—at times it feels like Trout Mask Replica, but done by a vastly inferior lyricist and a much better saxophonist. Marc Ribot is a guest, turning in a couple of superb unaccompanied solos on Lowe compositions, but he’s also a key to the Lowe guitar style, a blues-rooted sound, but full of sudden surprise, whether it’s a bend, a note choice or a sudden key shift. Matt Shipp appears as well to contribute unaccompanied piano, while there’s a fine wind trio composed of Lowe on alto saxophone, Randy Sandke on trumpet and Scott Robinson on contra-bass clarinet. Their “I licked Bird’s Blood” (the background description of Joe Albany might have made its way into That Devilin’ Tune) sounds like a Dolphy tune. Lowe’s extended alto solos overdubbed over minimal keyboard accompaniments are sweetly luminous interludes, though the liner booklet provides darkly comic film treatments for them to accompany (the most beautiful playing occurs on “Soundtrack Theme from the Film Jews in Hell”). The liner notes possess the same interest as the end-notes to “That Devilin’ Tune,” managing at one point to connect Bix Beiderbecke and Dadaist word games. Anyone preferring live mind to dead mind (I think the phrase is Ezra Pound’s) will welcome Lowe’s work. "
- Stuart Broomer

from: all about jazz - Allen Lowe: Jews In Hell: Radical Jewish Acculturation - Spaceout Records - 2007

Art critic Clement Greenberg once offered a useful explanation of the task of modernism. To paraphrase rather liberally, Greenberg wrote that a modernist work must engage and self-criticize its own basic tenets and those of its chosen medium—not as an affront to its place in the art world, but as a way to “entrench [it] more firmly in its area of competence.” In other words, the emphasis on two-dimensionality as qualities of paint and canvas are both an affirmation of and a criticism of the nature of painting.

Understanding what a painting is (not what it is “about” or “contains”) is crucial to the art of painting. Greenberg’s modernist self-criticism didn’t come out of nowhere though. It can be related to the long tradition of Jewish self-criticism, rooted in intellectualism; the study of what it means to be a Jew in order to understand one’s place in the culture and to be better-equipped to move that culture forward. Like modernism, Jewishness is a constant process of self-understanding, re-evaluation and regeneration.

What’s particularly interesting about this take on Jewishness vis-à-vis modernism is that, for guitarist, saxophonist, composer, engineer and author Allen Lowe, Jews are the first post-modernists. The idea of Jews as a rootless people, since time immemorial without a true homeland but, in spite of it all, with a strong sense of community in disparate surroundings (whether the suburbs, Brooklyn, or Maine), begets a “post-modern” ethos. In being uprooted, one also finds that, in order to continue culturally, new materials must be engaged and new connections made.

If such an idea is self-criticism on a shoestring, so be it. For example, saxophonist John Zorn’s fusing of free jazz, no-wave punk energy, film music and traditional Jewish melodies is a radical and post-structural approach to creating art while maintaining ties to one’s cultural idiom. Is this rootless condition for self-criticism one reason that jazz has had an attraction to Jews? Is the work of Zorn or Lowe that different from the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Great Black Music” ethos?

Questions like these might make it seem like Lowe’s Jews In Hell: Radical Jewish Acculturation is a concept record meant more to be thought about than listened to. Rather, this record, Lowe’s first since 1994’s Woyzeck’s Death, might better be thought of as his own self-criticism and summation of experiences thus far, told through the lenses of free jazz, bluesy skronk, and punk abandon.

Lowe’s guitar style is itself extraordinarily fragmentary, a disjointed and dissonant, non-linear approach that seems to creep out of nowhere on the solos of “Lonesome And Dead” and imbues the bent notes and wide intervallic relationships of “Tsuris In Mind.” It’s not the square-wheel rhythms of Robert Pete Williams or the perverse Company-weaned antics of Eugene Chadbourne, though Lowe’s musical landscape surely includes such precedents. His solo on the (sub-) title track may display a bit more logic, building from loose, raunchy blues to detuned Arto Lindsay-esque DNA madness, though the tension of escaping bar lines and rhythmic constraint is present from the beginning.

In a more jazz-based setting, there’s an entirely different side of Lowe’s music visible than punk-folk-blues would belie. The loose rhythms and broadly shifting cadences of his alto suggest an Eric Dolphy/Anthony Braxton approach, though his tone approximates earlier Charlie Parker disciples. In trio with Randy Sandke's trumpet and Scott Robinson’s contrabass clarinet, there is a kinship with the AACM’s drummer-less swing and bright, swaggering melodies.

There is a quiet honesty on the delicate “film version” of the title track (“Soundtrack Theme From The Film Jews In Hell”) and “I Come From Nowhere” that makes me look forward to hearing Lowe in a purely improvisational context. Though Jews In Hell offers settings for improvisers like pianist Matthew Shipp (including a piano-guitar duo with Lowe on “Shiva I”) and guitarist Marc Ribot, it would’ve been interesting, for example, to hear Lowe’s own take on multi-instrumentalist Jaki Byard’s post-modernism, despite the excellence with which Shipp approaches such work.

As the song titles suggest, and because there are experiential as well as philosophical underpinnings to the music, Lowe’s lyrics are of major importance. However, the vocals are frequently off-mike and in some cases are hard to decipher (“Suburban Jews,” an important track, is a perfect example). Sometimes, as on “Oi Death,” muffled and primal atmospherics make the point clearly, but at other times one wishes for a bit more vocal clarity. Then again, Charley Patton isn’t all that easy to decipher, either, though you get the feel of it.

Coupled with the broken rhythms, isolated phrasing and distant-thunder twang of Lowe’s guitar (“Other Bodies Other Souls”), a clear psychological picture of alienation emerges—but it isn’t without the affirmation of humor and wry, life-giving musicianship. Allen Lowe has, with Jews In Hell: Radical Jewish Acculturation, created a complex musical landscape through a summation of experiences and meditation on their integration. It’s self-criticism amid satire, applied both to the musician and the craft of music making, and a vision well worth sharing in.
- Clifford Allen

American Pop From Minstrel to Mojo is a Harry Smith Anthology for the 21st Century.
-Frank Scott, Roots and Rhythm

If you have even the most cursory interest in American vernacular music, then run, do not walk, to buy Allen Lowe's spectacular work, "American Pop From Minstrel To Mojo: On Record, 1893-1946," a 9CD landmark effort that may be, arguably, the best thing of its kind ever assembled. Strong words perhaps, but they do apply.
-Lawrence Cohn - Sony Music, producer of the Robert Johnson boxed set

… Allen Lowe’s heroic 9 CD set anthology, American Pop From Minstrel to Mojo -
-Greil Marcus in The Old Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes

If American Pop...is a daunting book, it’s primarily because of the scope of its ambitions - the origins of all pop. The range of musicians considered underscores Lowe’s greatest strength: finding the common threads shared by country, ragtime, blues, jazz and mainstream dance music. Ultimately Lowe may come closer than any other historian to uncovering the true essence of American pop
-Will Friedwald author of Sinatra! The Song is You: A Singer’s Art and Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices from Bessie Smith Smith to Bebop and Beyond.

(With American Pop) Lowe has produced what may stand for years to come as the most exhaustive and – at the same time – iconoclastic look at how we progressed from the stiff quaintness of turn-of-the-century barbershop quartets to the first chaotic heartbeats of rock’n’roll…the result is stunning. It is the best and only of its kind, the closest depiction of how America sings.
-Steve Braun - Blues Access

What is this mess called American music? That's the question posed by this sprawling set (American Pop From Minstrel to Mojo) . Allen Lowe, musician and historian, has collected nearly 11 hours of music, black and white, from the country and from the city, religious and secular, starting at the end of the last century and running through the first half of the century. And he has tossed it all in the air, to see what happens.... for anybody interested in where we come from, the set is invaluable.
-Peter Watrous, NY Times

The only thing certain about early American popular music, as evidenced by ‘From Minstrel to Mojo’, is that it was in constant evolution. The bluesy a cappella that made the Unique Quartette's "Mama's Black Baby Boy" (1893!) special would be overshadowed by the syncopated sounds of Arthur Collins's "Bill Bailey" (from 1902). And soon, a blackfaced Bert Williams was conveying real emotions into his singing Fast-forward a handful of decades later, and America was going crazy for the sexy sounds of vocalist Peggy Lee ("I Don't Know Enough About You"). But what makes this set of American pop from 1893 to 1946 so special isn't just the hit recordings by big-named vocalists, it's all the offshoots American pop took as it accelerated toward the era of radio and, later, LPs. It's quite a trip and well worth hearing.

From the shocking "The Bully," a 1907 "coon" song by white actress May Irwin, to the ominous blues classic "Devil Got My Woman" by Skip James, to the slick of Sinatra ("She's Funny That Way"), with plenty of aural forays into jazz, swing, early country, and bluegrass, Minstrel to Mojo covers a lot of ground exceptionally well. Consider it the advanced course to Harry Smith's primer, Anthology of American Folk Music. Great liner notes from compiler Allen Lowe, great tunes, and incredible remasterings make these cuts seem simply timeless. For anyone interested in the roots of jazz, R&B, country, or rock music, this set is worth owning.
-Jason Verlinde, Amazon

What makes this nine-CD set (American Pop From Minstrel to Mojo) essential is its broad context. By placing Jazz together with the other genres of music alongside which it evolved, the music's character is thrown more sharply into focus than it is in collections that segregate it from its larger environment. Virtually every nook and cranny of American vernacular music is represented here, from hillbilly to minstrel to military bands to rhythm and blues. Equally impressive is the quality of the transfers from the original recordings and the accompanying text, both done by the set's producer, Allen Lowe. This is a must-have for any serious student eho wants to understand Jazz's true significance.
-The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz - 50 Essential Jazz CDs (from the book by Loren Schoenberg)

The book (American Pop From Minstrel to Mojo) …begins with several brilliant essays by Mr. Lowe. Mr. Lowe has succeeded better than anyone else thus far in analyzing the many streams that make up American music and organizing it into a cohesive body of work. His writings are lively and opinionated pieces full of interesting anecdotes that make for engaging reading.
He carefully charts the growth of country music as it moved from the minstrel tradition into mountain and hillbilly music-its cross-pollination with black music and its formation into what we now call country music.
As you can see from this overview, Allen Lowe has done a dazzling job in outlining the schematic of American Popular music. All the major players are present and the recordings are well chosen. The sound is excellent thanks to Mr. Lowe's skills as a recording archive engineer. But it is in Mr. Lowe's essays and commentaries that his work really shines...Lowe goes on to tackle the issue of race in American music better then anyone I have ever read.
This book and CD set should be required study for any person interested in American music. This set will no doubt form the underpinnings of many a college course on American Music. Absolutely Essential and Highly recommended.
-Peter Riley, Amazon

No one has ever attempted anything like (American Pop From Minstrel to Mojo) before . . . these are the streams and tributaries that have fed the river of American music in this century, and it is an amazing experience to sit back and listen to them as they flow together.
- Elijah Wald - Boston Globe

There can be few better guides (than American Pop From Minstrel to Mojo) to the varied, fascinating, and vastly influential music of the United States than this.
-JohnClarke - Times of London

There has never been such a fascinating collection of reissued vintage records (as American Pop From Minstrel to Mojo) . . . nor one that gives such an overview of American popular song.
-Philip Elwood - San Francisco Examiner

American Pop…is one of the most powerful testimonials to the diversity of American music during the first half of the century.
-Jeff Tamarkin, Discoveries Magazine.

BOOK REVIEW
Allen Lowe: That Devilin' Tune : A Jazz History, 1900-1950 - (Music and Arts Programs of America) - January 2002
In 1958, Sonny Rollins wrote this about his Riverside recording Freedom Suite:
"America is deeply rooted in Negro culture: its colloquialisms, its humor, its music. How ironic that the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America's culture as his own, is being persecuted and repressed, that the Negro, who has exemplified the humanities in his very existence, is being rewarded with inhumanity."

Diction aside, in a mere two sentences, Rollins expresses the central tenets of what was come to pass—and what we've become accustomed to as—jazz criticism in the past 40 some-odd years. Perhaps Ken Burns was right when he diagnosed jazz intellectuals with chronic inability to arrive at civil consensus on even the most trivial musical facts. But Burns mistook the symptom for the disease, and missed completely that jazz criticism still suffers from a hereditary weakness, a lack of collegial trust that stems from perceptions of race and power. Whether Sonny Rollins, since typecast as modern jazz's most lasting enigma, ever envisioned or currently approves of the racialist ideologies of Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch is something which we will perhaps never know. But Rollins' statement, like so many of profound cast, presents truth and obfuscation in equal measure. It's up to us to separate them, to see what justice time has meted out to them, and to peel back the layers of paraphrase and misinterpretation that now cling to these ideas.

When this reviewer first read on page 13 of tenor saxophonist, arranger, composer and scholar Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History, 1900-1950, about the "deep African and African-American roots of all [emphasis mine] American culture", a tiny bit of despair entered into the reading experience. But what quickly becomes obvious over the course of the next 250 pages or so is that Lowe is perhaps the most rational writer to attempt a project of this subject and scope. Take, for example, just these few sentences on Thelonious Monk's career: "Who was Thelonious Monk? No one really seems to know, though toward the end of his life (he died in 1982) the pianist was revered as the last of jazz's great eccentrics and offered large amounts of money (which he refused) to perform in public. The very things which had once made his music so difficult and incomprehensible to many—the odd melodic turns of phrase, the percussive primitiveness of his touch, the unresolved dissonances, and, most of all, his reputation for inscrutable eccentricity—were now, in a more modern and tolerant age, the stuff of marketer's dreams... From his earliest days as a professional musician Thelonious Monk had gone his own way... Though his stance—his absolute refusal to do anything but play his music in his own way, without compromise—was seen by many as heroic, it was more likely the only choice he had. In truth, Monk had a kind of artistic tunnel vision, something which was to his and jazz's benefit, though he was lucky to have a built-in support system—his wife and, later, record companies, promoters, and booking agents—that allowed him the luxury of such a principled life." (193)

The personal, the political, the musical—there it all is in a package that is not so tidy as to be smug, but tight enough to withstand the jostlings and pryings of dissent and rebuttal. Incorporating historical investigation (sometimes impertinent, but most questions are), discographical detective work, personal interviews, and, most crucially, often pithy and memorable musical analysis—such as his likening of Frankie Trumbauer's C-melody saxophone playing to "a painter using only straight brush strokes" (112)—Lowe combines the best features of the musicological and (often "amateur" or "enthusiast", as Terry Treachout defined in an essay from last year's Nation) jazz critical traditions.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of this book is that Lowe returns to the notion that jazz is a popular music, with all the wonderfully fascinating and difficult complexities that entails. His consideration of the music's growth and transformation during the first half of the 20th Century yanks jazz out of its isolation as "art music", an aesthetic phenomenon only, without confusing the music's socio-historical context for its actual and sole meaning. Citing Richard Gilman, Lowe views "artistic creation... [as a] counter-history, the generation of a psychological and aesthetic alternative to the prevailing artistic and social order". (176)

Yes, this book could be five times its current length, and it sometimes moves too swiftly, especially when one is not all that familiar with the recordings under discussion. But That Devilin' Tune is criticism of the best sort. It does not evaluate, rank, or taxonomize—it elucidates and makes relevant to the way we perceive the totality of the music, the way we recreate these sounds in our own imaginations. It is a perhaps the first real jazz morphology; in That Devilin' Tune, jazz is a musical attitude, a loose alliance of very different kinds of information, that manages to cohere and flow through any available circuit, and across any geographical and anthropological borders: "We've discussed in earlier chapters... issues of musical black and white, acknowledging jazz's roots in the techniques and experiences of 19th century black America. That truth notwithstanding, jazz could not long be contained in one community, so strong were its powers of musical persuasion, and so tempting and attractive were its expressive elements—as a matter of fact, an argument can easily be made that jazz's racial and multinational proliferation was a tribute to the genius of its African American inventors. They had devised cultural and musical strategies that were so irresistibly populist and ingeniously community-based, while still amounting to great art, that jazz itself held, in the very essences of its aesthetic and mass appeal, the key to its racial and commercial dispersal, to those very things which would aid and abet its separation and ultimate flight from the African American community." (147)
Aside from it's dramatic irony, this thesis points toward Lowe's other major achievement in That Devilin' Tune. Suppose we do as he has done, and we consider early jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw, 1920's cornetist Thomas Morris, swing-era saxophonist Rudy Williams, and European band leaders Ray Noble and Spike Hughes? Or, as Lowe himself writes: "And then there are those groups and musicians whose impact and visibility is like that of a hit and run driver, who are here one day and, though sometimes traceable by label (rather than plate) number, nearly gone the next, having vanished into the fog of the jazz and dance band's world of economic uncertainty." (106)

The image, for this reviewer, immediately recall the Joe / Josephine and Jerry / Daphne of Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, musicians in dresses and heels madly scrabbling across boundaries not in self-conscious violations of taboo, but in search of some safe haven (and maybe a little fun). One of the most often-repeated tenets of early jazz research is the fact that we know so little. We have tall tales about Buddy Bolden, first-hand accounts of the brothels of New Orleans and we know that the Gennett studios were almost literally on the wrong side of the tracks, etc. But Lowe exposes this assumed paucity of knowledge for the canard it is. Throughout That Devilin' Tune, Lowe reminds us that, if we just open up the established canon of jazz recordings even the slightest bit—if we deign to turn critical attention to the likes of Wilbur Sweatman, Guy Lombardo, Raymond Scott, and Hank Garland—it comes to light that we know more than we expected we did. Recordings, for all their flaws (and early recordings may not be so much flawed per se as much as they are a different form of expression altogether) are the most important documentary resource we have. Working from these assumptions, Lowe is also able to devote much needed attention to musical styles that, existent—and in some cases, still evolving—parallel to jazz as it's canonically defined, both drew from and contributed to the music's vocabulary: The rural blues, minstrelsy, and Western Swing. Some may argue that his hunting for hints of jazz in the acetate dross of the early 20th Century is an attempt to pollute the music with allegations of influence that run counter to "the facts". But, consider, as Lowe does, the impact of the recording as a technology:
"Jazz and its categorical offshoot popular blues still largely emanated from the African-American community, but as soon as the music reached shellac and national distribution any proprietary ideas of ownership had to be abandoned." (73)

Doubtless it is no accident that That Devilin' Tune's final paragraph is dedicated to a quick, "coming attractions" appreciation of Sonny Rollins"[i]n everything he played there was a sense of a work in progress, of structures built to last yet still unfinished". (258) This very thing is what Sonny Rollins was trying to communicate to us in 1958; the punning overtones and sorrowful, indicting inflections that surround the words "humor", "people", "humanities" and "inhumanity" as Rollins employs them in his little annotation to Freedom Suite still ring clear and harsh today. Like any good jazz player, Lowe has the ear to hear it, and to know that, in many ways, the attempted remedies have been worse than the affliction itself. At times cauterizing, That Devilin' Tune cannot help but heal without hurting. With Lowe currently at work on a companion volume that brings us through the 1950's, another period that saw "white" and "black" forms of jazz sharply defined in the critical and popular imagination, we will see if his cure takes.
- Joe Milazzo

These nine CDs (That Devilin’ Tune) represent just one-quarter of a monumental four-volume compilation curated by music historian Allen Lowe, which seeks to recontextualize early jazz history, and with it the history of American pop music. (And, come to think of it, the history of America, period.) Lowe's bumptious, delightful, danceable mix of early pop, ragtime, jug band, and blues recordings presents a vastly expanded and more complicated picture of American musical roots, discovering hot rhythm and jazz-style improvisation in some unlikely places, like 19th-century marching bands and the "coon song" performances of vaudevillians like Stella Mayhew and Len Spencer. An essential historical document; also, a party-starter.
- Jody Rosen - Slate

(in That Devilin’ Tune) the discs and prose complement each other brillianly…Lowe does such a good job dealing with the popular music that jazz came from and sorting out the various genres…he never lets you forget the big picture…that jazz and pop are constantly in a state of flux. Lowe’s choices are …invaluable…(and of) interest to followers of…blues, R&B, Western Swing, in addition to mainstream jazz. Let’s hope he can find an audience to support his admirable effors.
- Harvey Pekar, author, American Splendor

(In That Devilin’ Tune) Lowe (is) blessed with a fine audacious ear and a rousing capacity for annoyance. Not for him the particularly reductionist view of Jazz that starts off with one ragtime recording (preferably the “Maple Leaf Rag”), moves to Oliver, Armstrong, Henderson, Ellington, Hawkins, etc., etc., at a breathless pace. These nine discs encompass a blistering variety of otherwise unknown performances, organized chronologically: singers White and Black, singing groups, vaudeville performances, ragtime played by brass bands, pianists, string instruments, brass bands, Latin orchestras, military bands, small improvising Jazz units, jug bands, “dance” orchestras. blues singers, banjo players, “pop” singers, and on and on. The collection, however, is far more thoughtful than just his favorite…old records, organized chronologically.…the familiar jazz masterworks still sound radically original, but they are heard as parts of a continuum of improvisations. Put another way: this approach takes nothing from the galloping grandeur and rocking fun of the Armstrong Hot Seven—how, after all, could it?—but only the most obtuse listener will not hear that recording afresh. That is a rare, irreplaceable pleasure, a Rod Serling experience, as if we were permitted to see three dimensions having lived in a flat world.…this little red box seems to me to be the most eye-and-ear opening package of Jazz reissues I have encountered since . . . when? Listeners like myself, secure, even complacent, in their knowledge of this period, will assuredly find marvel after marvel here. It will offer even more to those new to the genre and the period. Those who avoid it, for whatever reasons, deprive themselves of near-revelatory experiences.
-Michael Steinman

Cadence Magazine Allen Lowe’s study of jazz and the musics that contributed to it (That Devilin Tune) is well-researched and refreshingly free of agendas. This is a book that truly tries to understand jazz as a multi-racial, highly diverse cultural expression that grasped, in some vital way, the spirit of American life and values. A book worthy of the attention of both jazz fans and students of American popular culture.
-Gerald Early

Until That Devilin' Tune, jazz history was misunderstood. You must have this book. It's the best revisionist history of jazz ever written.
-Mark Gridley, author of Jazz Styles: History and Analysis

While such histories (as That Devilin’ Tune) have been attempted before, this one triumphs because of its breadth of vision, its scholarship and its ability to discover previously unheralded gems from a varfiety of sources including radio broadcasts and live sessions. Take, for instance, the final volume, in which Charlie Parker rubs shoulders with Western Swing star Rip Ramsey; Gerry Mulligan can be heard next to blues shouter Walter Brown, and Thelonious Monk shares space with Doris Day. The other volumes have a similar widespread appeal for those whose approach to jazz isn’t blinkered by convention. I doubt whether there will be a better reissue set this year.
-John Clarke - The Times of London

A review of Allen Lowe’s book That Devilin’ Tune and the first of four 9-CD boxes to accompany it appeared in Signal to Noise, Fall 2006, p.61. The succeeding three sets bring the total audio representation to 36 CDs, 851 tracks, about 45 hours of music, and it’s utterly unlike any other “history of jazz” on CD—it’s quirky and brilliant, frequently startling, dedicated to Lowe’s broadly-based, pluralistic view of jazz’s evolution that includes pop, western and ethnic crossovers and infusions, as well as a consistent attentiveness to the creative (and also the aberrant) edges. It’s disruptive and it’s fun, a fine counter to the Sunday school for slow learners run so dogmatically by Wynton Marsalis.

No review can do more than scratch the surface; in fact, Lowe’s book, now divided in four to appear as thick liner booklets, barely suffices. Whether you follow it closely track by track, scrutinizing each tune as it arrives, or just treat it like the richest jazz radio ever programmed, I think you’ll be engaged, even occasionally astonished. It’s a tremendous corrective to the “great man” approach to jazz, if only because it so often presents talents of the first rank whose names have almost disappeared from the chronicles. On disc 8 of Volume 3, there are two versions of “Tea for Two,” one a stunning piano solo by Cassino Simpson recorded in 1942. Simpson split his time between prison and the mental hospital after murdering his transvestite singing partner, but here he’s also the closest relative of Art Tatum you’re likely to hear (that manic pianism is heard, too, in Oscar Levant’s contemporaneous performance of Gershwin’s “Concerto in F”). “Tea for Two” also gets a marvelously swinging version with Ben Webster, Hot Lips Page and Clyde Hart. Including contrasting versions of the same tune is one of the things Lowe does best: “Stardust” gets several versions, from mandolin virtuoso Dave Appollon, trombonist Jack Jenney, Roy Eldridge and Mary Lou Williams. It’s a good demonstration of just how many ways material could be handled in the same era. Most of those tracks come from the same disc 8 which also has superb early work by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as well as obscure bands like the Harlem-based Buck Ram’s All Stars. Hearing a 1944 Jimmy Dorsey track arranged by Dizzy Gillespie might shift your view of the big swing band. Late swing and bop rub up against jazz-fuelled pop songs, Chicago-style stalwarts and ancient New Orleans discoveries. In the midst of it all, Harry “The Hipster” Gibson turns in a stride version of Bix Beiderbecke’s “In the Mist,” conveying Gibson’s depth in place of his usual kinetic comedy vocals (“Who put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?” turns up a couple of discs later—vintage Gibson film clips currently available on Youtube are necessary viewing). Violinist Eddie Rosner plays “St. Louis Blues” with a rhythmic vigor that’s likely derived from his Russian background rather than the song’s American roots. Amazingly, that’s Lowe’s portrait of jazz during the AFM recording ban.

While this collection covers 1895 to 1951 (shaped in part, perhaps, by the edge of European copyright when the track list was first assembled), it seems to press beyond that point through Lowe’s epic researches. Thus we get the earliest meaningful recordings of Charles Mingus (1946), Eric Dolphy (1949, with Roy Porter) and John Coltrane (1951, with Dizzy Gillespie). By the same token, Gil Evans arrives in 1939 with his “Strange Enchantment” recorded by the Skinnay Ennis band.

There is some inconvenience involved in using the set. There is a lack of detailed information about the tracks and you’re often left searching through the text to find information about a particular performer (It’s much easier if you also get the book, which has an index). There are likely to be many times when you want to know who a particular musician is, whether soloist or support, but that’s often not here. I wondered, for example, who’s the bass player on that Ben Webster recording of “Tea for Two.” It’s Charlie Drayton, but I consulted Tom Lord’s The Jazz Discography (version 3.3) to find out.

Whatever the inconveniences, though, Lowe’s is the liveliest history of pre-1950 jazz you’ll find and not just for the music. The end-notes to his text are often gems of speculation—he suggests in one that Lester Young, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell all suffered from the same disorder—or jazz history gossip—e.g., his description of Lennie Tristano’s mania for control of musicians (including referrals to his psychiatrist brother). But it’s the music that’s the main attraction, and if you’re at all concerned with the historical shaping of jazz, then you’ll likely spend months listening to these consistently lively discs. That’s not something I can say about most releases
-Signal to Noise

Jazz CD of the Week: That Devilin Tune
There have been some mighty fine box sets and smaller collections of historical jazz recordings in in the past, not least the sets and individual discs that accompanied Ken Burns’ TV series, but the best has just arrived.
-Peter Bacon - The Birmingham (UK) Post

I am truly astonished. When I first heard Lowe’s previous collection, American Pop from Minstrel to Mojo, I thought that it was the finest body of American pop music that I’d ever heard – both in terms of sound quality and choice of music. But now (with That Devilin’ Tune) he’s exceeded himself. This new collection is even richer and sounds even better. I know that I’m parroting Francis Davis but he’s right: Allen Lowe has “forced us to rethink everything we ‘know’ about jazz” - but I’ll add that he's also forced us to question what we know about pop, country, and the blues as well. He has historicized pop music brilliantly…and the fact that he did it, and not one of the “big” recording companies who are sitting on treasures of American music, is all the more astonishing. This collection should be in every household, or at the least in every library and school. Bravo! Encore!”
-John Szwed,author, Space is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra and So What: The Life of Miles Davis