The Flam

A truly unclassifiable bit of madness from the great tenor player Frank Lowe, The Flam finds him breaking free from the hard-blowing freakout fests of the New York free jazz scene and moving on to something entirely different. At the time of The Flam’s recording, Lowe was fresh from groundbreaking sideman work on Don Cherry’s equally adventurous Brown Rice, and the heady experimentalism of those sessions seems to have at least partially informed Lowe’s work here. On the whole, though, The Flam is a far more intimidating, less welcoming work than Cherry’s. Where Brown Rice sometimes traded in abstract spiritualism, The Flam, with its jagged textures and harsh dissonance, possessed a distinct air of menace. Take “Third Street Stomp,” a rigorous workout led by Alex Blake's frantic electric bass work; it anticipates the punk-informed aggression of the No Wave scene. A truly strange and wonderful piece of work, The Flam marks the point in Lowe’s career where he finally began to emerge from the shadow of Coltrane’s influence to forge his own inimitable aesthetic.