Allen Lowe & The Constant Sorrow Orchestra - Louis Armstrong's America, Vol. 2 / 2CD set

One might think that an album titled Louis Armstrong’s America is a tribute to the famed trumpeter, and certainly he’s a focus here, but a normal tribute would feature compositions by him, or at least associated with him. Allen Lowe doesn’t operate in the realm of the predictable, though; instead, the concept—powered entirely by Lowe compositions—takes in not just Armstrong’s influence but also the evolution of jazz starting with influences (not all jazz) on Armstrong and continuing to the end of his five-decade career in 1971—which means that even Albert Ayler is touched on in this wide-ranging album (heck, even indie-rock icon Steve Albini is referenced).

Lowe writes, “I think that Louis Armstrong may have been the first true post-modernist, picking and choosing between a hierarchy of personal and public musical sources and tastes, but without any concern for the way in which hierarchy acted on all of this in terms of class and even, ultimately, race (e.g.; think of Armstrong’s reverence for opera and the way it effected his broad and classically expressive method of phrasing). So he fits all the definitions of post-modernism, even as a kind of anachronistic vessel for so much that was still to come not just in jazz but in all of American popular music, in particular but not only through the mediation of black life and aesthetics. Black song, vernacular and popular, is amazingly flexible it its ways and means of expression, lyrically, rhythmically, and sonically.”