‘There’s no sense of taking it to the edge’ — Q&A with Allen Lowe

SOUTH PORTLAND — This year, more than 200 people from a wide range of creative fields applied for an Artists’ Fellowship Grant, an annual award of the Maine Arts Commission. On Oct. 19, four winners were named, including South Portland saxophonist Allen Lowe.

Billed as “one of the nation's highest awards for individual artists made by a state arts agency,” the $13,000 gifts come with no strings attached. They are meant only, says the commission, to “reward artistic excellence, advance the careers of Maine artists and promote public awareness regarding the eminence of the creative sector in Maine.” The grants are given “on the sole basis of artistic excellence,” as determined by a panel of “selected experts,” all residing outside Maine.

Lowe also is from away. A New York native who spent much of his musical career playing in and around Connecticut, Lowe moved to Maine 15 years ago. A composer, musician and music historian, Lowe, 57, has laid down tracks alongside modern giants in the jazz field, including Julius Hemphill, Marc Ribot, Roswell Rudd, Don Byron, Doc Cheatham and David Murray, just to name a few.

Scott Albin, of Jazz Times, recently dubbed Lowe’s latest effort, a triple album of avant-garde blues/jazz fusion entitled “Blues and the Empirical Truth,” a “compulsive and mesmerizing” collection. It is, said Albin, “one of the most ambitious and fulfilling projects to come out of the jazz world in recent years.”

Despite this, Lowe says finding an audience in Maine has been tough sledding.

On Oct. 20, in an interview conducted at Cambridge Coffee, Lowe took time to talk about his life, his music and the Maine arts scene.

Q: Congratulations on the grant. What was your reaction when you found out you’d won?

A: I cannot tell you how shocked beyond belief I was. Honestly, I almost didn’t apply, because I’ve been turned down a bunch of times. I think this was the third or fourth time I applied. Anyway, I was sitting on a stool in the kitchen when they called and I got a little faint. I literally almost passed out.

Q: Why did the news affect you so strongly?

A: If you look at the people who win these grants, they’re people with an artistic presence in Maine. I feel like I have none. Maine has been a long and difficult experience for me. I didn’t play for almost 10 years after I came up here. I’d go into places and they wouldn’t be interested in me because I was too old, and what I played was odd music to them.

Q: What brought you to Maine?

A: I moved here with my wife and two children. It was time for a change. We just kind of wanted to get out of the city and this seemed like a nice place to raise the kids. I liked the solitude of it for what I was doing at the time.

Q: What was that?

A: When I first came up here I had my own business. I used to do work in sound mastering, but I kind of gave that up. The availability of cheap software kind of killed that business. I still do some sound restorations – I’ve done a couple of historical projects with recordings from the ‘20s and ‘30s – but I do it on the side.

Q: If you didn’t play for your first decade in Maine, how did you support yourself?

A: Since 2002, I’ve worked full-time for Unum, in disability claims. It’s a good place to work. I’m lucky to be there. Maine has been a great place to live. My kids have loved it. It’s just been a hard place to keep up with my own music.

Q: How would you describe your music?

A: Avant-garde jazz is a combination of various traditions. It’s an approach that starts with the traditional chord-based things, a fusion of older styles, blues and gospel, but with open and free improvisation, as well.

Q: Do you think your work was just not accessible enough to the average Mainer?

A: I don’t want to offend anyone, because there are a lot of real nice people here, but what hit me by surprise in Maine is that it’s a really nice place with a real fear of the unfamiliar, which definitely includes those areas of the avant-garde arts that I’m been interested in.

Q: What were some of the places that rejected you?

A: I sent my resume to Portland Great Performances and got yelled at by the director for bothering her, because she had no interest in any of my stuff. When I came here I’d already put out a fairly significant body of recorded work. I had written several books, I’d done big projects, I’d played in New York, I was the director of cultural affairs for New Haven, Conn., in the 1990s. But I came here and got just so beaten down by the lack of interest in my work.

Q: It’s surprising to hear that Portland Arts was not interested.

A: Portland is a wonderful city with a lot of great musicians, but no infrastructure support for creative artists.  There’s tons of gigs, but no money.

I think there are arts groups that truly mean to do something good in this state. The problem is nobody will take the bull by the horns – there are a lot of really nice people who just don’t make the effort to take it to the next step.

Even at a place like the Space Gallery, they don’t even know what’s going on in contemporary jazz, except for a few big names. For example, when I first came up here, they said, “Who have you worked with?” and I said, “Julius Hemphill.” They just didn’t have a clue who I was talking about. In the jazz world he’s considered of Duke Ellington’s stature as a composer and a musician. Man on the street may not know Julius Hemphill, but if your business is to run an avant-garde arts space, you need to know what that means. It’s like walking into a classical organization and having them say, “Who’s Mozart?”

Q: Do you think people are just afraid to try something new?

A: One problem is that a lot of people don’t know the difference between what’s new and what’s trendy.

Q: What is the difference?

A: What’s trendy is what’s new at the moment. What’s really new is something that’s on the cutting edge intellectually and artistically. Sometimes they’re the same, and sometimes they’re not.

Q: You would have been 42 when you first came to Maine. Did that contribute to you’re not being seen as trendy, or new?

A: I think this is one of the most ageist towns in the arts I’ve ever seen. When I first walked into the Space Gallery they basically told me I was too old. Not in so many words, but they said, “You’ve got to be like one of the people hanging out here if you want to work here.” But, if you’re over 30 and have a family, you can’t be hanging out there at noon.

Q: What did you make of the local arts scene?

A: There are great musicians up here who are content to work for very little money, for some imaginary piece of the door, and so they get as many people in as they can and think it’s a scene because their friends all came to hear them play. They say its exposure, but exposure means nothing. It’s just exposure for more free gigs. In the long term it contributes to a very immature music scene that lacks in professionalism. They’ve built an arts scene that’s based on no money and no real scene, because there’s no actual audience.

There’s no sense of taking it to the edge. To me, even if I’m playing bluegrass or indie rock, I want to be taken seriously by an audience that’s not just my family and friends. I want to reach people who come to my music not because I’m a friend, or famous, but because they want to take a chance on music that challenges and pushes them in terms of their own experience and what their ears are accustomed to. I think there’s very little of that around here.

Q: Did you ever try teaching music?

A: I spent five years trying to do that when I first got up here, calling the public library, Portland Performing Arts, other places. I got a lot of, “Yeah, that’d be great, we should do something,” and then nothing would ever happen. I got tired of beating myself against that particular wall. I finally decided I’d just do my own thing and whatever happens, happens.

Q: And what was your own thing?

A: One of the strange ironies of living up here is that I’ve had the opportunity to expand my knowledge, because I’ve had nothing else to do. If you’re talking about 20^th century American music, from the period of 1920 to 1970, I probably know more about that than any other person in the world. All I do is sit around and listen to music because I’ve got no place to play.

I also taught myself another instrument, learned to play guitar, just because I was bored from not doing anything. I switched from the tenor sax to the alto sax. Then, I started composing again in 2007.

Q: And that’s brought you up to your latest CD, which the reviewers seem to really dig.

A:  Yeah, I collaborated with some really brilliant local musicians, and we’ve been getting real raves. That doesn’t necessarily translate into much work, but we’re trying to take it to the next level.

Q: Still, it did translate into the Maine Arts Grant. What will you do with that money?

A: For me, it takes a lot of the financial pressure off, because I put a lot of my own money into this and my last CD, from about five years ago. That’s why it was so gratifying to get the grant money, because it allows me to say I broke even . . . maybe. [Laughs] Yeah, maybe, I’ll have to look at my tax returns.

But, really, I’m deeply indebted to the Maine Arts Commission. What makes this so amazing is that they give the money directly to individual artists. That’s a huge and important thing. It shows me that there’s some hope in this state, but I still don’t have any gigs.

A CLOSER LOOK

To hear sample tracks from Allen Lowe’s latest album, the three-CD, 52-song “Blues and the Empirical Truth,” visit the artist’s website, www.allenlowe.com.

A Jazz Times review of the album can be found online at http://jazztimes.com/community/articles/28431-blues-and-the-empirical-truth-allen-lowe.