This new release from ESP features the Frank Lowe Quartet in unreleased tracks that didn’t make it onto Lowe’s 1973 ESP release Black Beings. As a free-jazz set, The Loweski is distinguished by its silences, one helping each, at the beginning and end of the set, where the ensemble ventures a few tendrils into the air, then settles and relaxes down into the ambiance of the live-concert setting, letting seconds tick by, breathing deep, synching the listener to the enormous distances between heartbeats. Last chance for reflection, for the next hundred miles, they seem to say. Then, naturally, all hell breaks loose in classic free-jazz style. Even through such onslaughts, the two horn players, Lowe and Joseph Jarman of The Art Ensemble of Chicago, maintain artful and even lyrical grandstanding, never losing track of what the other is doing as they swoop toward almost unisons and break away in ferocious counterpoint. When Raymond Lee Cheng, a.k.a. The Wizard, comes in on violin, we’ve reached the city limits. His pizzicato summons the pointillism of the Manhattan telephone book, and his arco flows all those names together to summon Manhattan. A pity he never recorded again. But he left behind an electric map and a pulsating territory.
Andrew Hamlin was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, USA, where he resides today. He attended the Evergreen State College in Olympia where he wrote and edited arts coverage for the Cooper Point Journal. He began writing professionally about music and the arts in 1992. He is the film critic for the Northwest Asian Weekly, and his work has appeared in the Village Voice, Rolling Stone Online, Seattle Times, San Diego Reader, Goldmine, Seattle Weekly, The SunBreak, and other publications.
He has still never found anyone who loves the Happy Flowers nearly so much as himself.