An Avant Garde of Our Own

Saxophonist/guitarist/composer/music historian/ provocateur Allen Lowe spans the history of jazz in his music in a way that few besides Jaki Byard, Beaver Harris, Steven Bernstein, and Air have ever done, intertwining blues, early jazz, bebop, and the avant-garde. A prolific composer who was incorporating American roots music into his jazz decades before it was hip, he has led project bands featuring a broad array of jazz greats ranging from Doc Cheatham, Randy Sandke, Joe Albany, Don Byron, Ken Peplowski, and Percy France to Matthew Shipp, Julius Hemphill, Marc Ribot, Roswell Rudd, David Murray, Gary Bartz, Nels Cline, Ray Anderson, DJ Logic, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, and Hamiet Bluiett. With two notable but out-of-print exceptions, most of his work has been released on his own Constant Sorrow label. ESP-Disk' has long admired his work and is happy to partner with him on the career-spanning An Avant Garde Of Our Own: Disconnected Works 1980-2018, which consists of four CDs (3-6) of previously unreleased material and four thematically arranged CDs (1-2, 7-8) collecting a wide variety of material that was mostly previously - but not widely - available.