Consumer Guide Album

Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra: America: The Rough Cut [ESP-Disk', 2023]
Jazz loyalist, music historian, saxophonist, guitarist, and major cancer survivor Lowe declares that he doesn't much like today's music, which he claims lacks "funk" without indicating any familiarity with James Brown, who I assume he knows, or hip-hop, where I assume his education is spotty if that. But this hour of sax-guitar-bass-drums jazz got my attention from spin one. Lowe believes various of its tracks evoke "pre-blues ruminations" or "a post-rational burst of tongues," "medicine-show irony" or "old-time hillbilly rag." If so, it does so a little too abstractly or allusively for somebody who continues to find serious as well as pleasurable sustenance in a broad array of today's musics. But as mere jazz it generates a surprisingly compact, uncommonly straightforward, and dare I say pop-friendly sense of identity and purpose. A-