Collection: Frank Lowe

Frank Lowe grew up two worlds away from free jazz. He was raised in Memphis in the early 1960s in a neighbourhood shared by Charles Lloyd, Hank Crawford and Carla Thomas, learned saxophone from Packy Axton, a co-owner of Stax Records who also played the instrument, and worked as a teenager in the Stax studio and record store fetching coffee for Booker T. and the MGs. His early influences were Gene Ammons and King Curtis. What happened next is one of the more unusual trajectories in free jazz: he moved to San Francisco, studied with Donald Rafael Garrett, Bert Wilson and Sonny Simmons, and ran into Ornette Coleman, who told him he should go to New York. He went, began playing with Sun Ra from 1966 to 1968, and recorded with Alice Coltrane on "World Galaxy" (Impulse!, 1971) and with Rashied Ali on the duo album "Duo Exchange" (1973). He had had no long apprenticeship in standard jazz: by the time he was recording, he was playing with John Coltrane's former rhythm section. His debut as a leader, "Black Beings" (ESP-Disk, 1973), recorded with Joseph Jarman from the Art Ensemble of Chicago and a young William Parker on bass in what was Parker's recording debut, announced a saxophonist of ferocious commitment and direct lineage from the second wave of free jazz. "The Flam" (Black Saint, 1975) followed with Leo Smith, Joseph Bowie and Charles "Bobo" Shaw, recorded at Generation Sound Studios in New York. Lowe spent his later years moving between Paris and New York, working with Don Cherry, Eugene Chadbourne and Joe McPhee, and recording for CIMP until his death on 19 September 2003, aged 60.