专辑简介

by Thom JurekRecorded in a Soundscape session in 1994, the criminally underrated saxophonist Frank Lowe brought an all-star band with him to literally wipe out the audience with his mélange of blues, rootsy R&B, free jazz, and gut bucket funk. With Amina Claudine Myers on piano, Wilbur Morris on bass, Butch Morris on cornet, and Tim Pleasant on drums, this is the record Lowe has been dreaming to make all of his life. Featuring four of Lowe's more well-known compositions, each stretched to its limits because of the diverse talents of his musicians, Lowe has the foundation here to take his deep blues explorations into the realm of gospel, modal music, and even early American classical music à la the works of Copland, Bernstein, and Stephen Foster for reasons known only to him. The most striking work here is "Exotic Heartbreak," which begins with a four-bar blues groove, slips into its muddy stride deep and wide, and allows Lowe to investigate the underside of that music's tonal colors and harmony, all the while keeping the framework together. Butch Morris punctuates every line as if to remind all the players where this music comes from, while Myers begins to unravel it from the inside, stitching chromatic patterns in counterpoint until she transforms melody and harmonic intervals to resemble a droning, open piece of early Americana and European folk song forms. As Lowe and Morris begin to take their in-the-pocket funkiness apart, exchanging arpeggiated glances of counterpoint along the way, it becomes obvious the listener has entered the musical universe Lowe always talks about, the one whose language cannot discuss boundaries because it acknowledges none. By the time the blues return at the end of nearly 23 minutes, Lowe has the band in full swinging dance form, enlarged by the experience of having drifted into new territory, and deeper in the foundations of the root tongue than ever before: a modern jazz classic.