The Meanest Genius in Portland, Maine

Outsider jazz great Allen Lowe scorns his neighbors, argues endlessly with himself

By Theodore Ross for Tablet Magazine
It was a bleak January morning in Portland, Maine. Clouds heavy with foul weather and wet snow enshrouded the city’s stern Victorian houses and dormant factories. Casco Bay, white-capped and gray and dotted with mournful tankers, blew an icy gale. In the lobby of the Holiday Inn, where I was staying, wildly cheerful out-of-towners, members of a booster club for a visiting minor-league hockey team, milled about, looking beefy and hungover. Stacks of complimentary USA Today gathered dust at strategic locations. A Mainer—I swear he was wearing a flannel shirt and one of those plaid hunting caps with the earflaps—was drunk at 8 a.m. and arguing with a receptionist that he’d accused of stealing his medications.

Allen Lowe—late-blooming jazzman, self-taught music-historian, and 20-year disgruntled Portland resident—looked downright merry. Lowe, 60, a lopsided and harrumphing grin half-hidden behind his profusion of graying hair and beard and the Brezhnev-ian shrubbery of his eyebrows, had plenty about which to be cheerful. In 2013, he published two deeply researched histories of the blues and rock ’n’ roll, Really the Blues?: A Horizontal Chronicle of the Vertical Blues, 1893–1959 and God Didn’t Like It: Electric Hillbillies, Singing Preachers, and the Beginning of Rock and Roll, 1950–1970. Critic Greil Marcus called Really the Blues? a “crucial contribution to American culture,” adding that “all those who want to see our musical history whole are in [Lowe’s] debt.” Matt Glaser, the artistic director of the American Music Roots Program at the Berklee College of Music, has also said that “Lowe knows more about early American music—the development of it, the relations between rural and urban music, white and black music, white and black repertoires—than anyone in the field, including myself.”

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