Tenor Saxophone | 1943-2003

Frank Lowe grew up in Memphis surrounded by the musicians who made Stax Records, took saxophone lessons from Packy Axton, a Stax co-owner who also played the instrument, and worked as a teenager in the Stax studio and record store. His earliest influences were Gene Ammons and King Curtis. The free jazz scene was not where Memphis pointed you in 1960, but Lowe found his way to it through San Francisco, where he studied with Donald Rafael Garrett, Bert Wilson and Sonny Simmons and encountered Ornette Coleman, who sent him to New York. He arrived in the mid-1960s at the height of the New Thing and began playing with Sun Ra from 1966 to 1968, then recorded with Alice Coltrane on "World Galaxy" (Impulse!, 1971) and with Rashied Ali on the duo album "Duo Exchange" (1973). His debut as a leader, "Black Beings" (ESP-Disk, 1973), featured Joseph Jarman on soprano and alto saxophone alongside a young William Parker on bass, which was Parker's first recording. The album's three tracks included "In Trane's Name" and "Brother Joseph," titles that made explicit where Lowe placed himself in the lineage from John Coltrane and the AACM. "The Flam" (Black Saint, 1975), recorded at Generation Sound Studios with Leo Smith, Joseph Bowie, Alex Blake and Charles "Bobo" Shaw, extended the same commitment into a pianoless quintet setting. Lowe died in New York on 19 September 2003, aged 60.