Blues And The Empirical Truth

featuring jazz greats Roswell Rudd, Marc Ribot, Matthew Shipp, and Lewis Porter

Allen Lowe

Though Allen Lowe has gigged only sporadically over the last fifteen years--especially since relocating from New Haven, Connecticut to Portland, Maine, a dogpatch whose live music scene is as cliquish as it is marginal, at least as Lowe describes it--he's hardly been "away" from music during that time. Along with switching from tenor to alto, teaching himself guitar, and periodically recording new compositions, he's channeled his energy into compiling, and writing exhaustive companion texts to, the 9-CD American Pop: An Audio History--From Minstrel to Mojo: On Record 1893-1946; the 36-CD That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History 1895-1950; and the still-in-progress 36-CD Really the Blues: A Blues History 1893-1959--monumental anthologies that stretch the terms "pop," "jazz," and "blues" to the breaking point and end where they do only because of copyright laws. Ironically, this magnificent obsession of Lowe's has won him the sort of favorable notice that has so far eluded him as a music-maker; in The Believer, for example, Greil Marcus devoted an entire "Real Life Rock Top Ten" to Really the Blues?, describing it as "a forest to get lost in, tree by tree or even leaf by leaf." So while Blues and the Empirical Truth reflects Lowe's urge to reassert himself as a player and composer in a big way, it also grew out of his immersion in vintage and obscure blues and country recordings in his capacity as a kind of bootstrap digital historian.

Price: $63.98

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