Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales From Childhood
By A.J. AlbanyTin House/Bloomsbury, 163 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Although just a footnote in jazz history, Joe Albany was a brilliant bebop pianist who played and/or recorded with titans Charlie Parker and Lester Young, among many others. Like all too many of his generation, he was plagued by chronic substance-abuse problems and other personal demons. Albany’s daughter Amy has written a fascinating, sometimes harrowing, and ultimately heartbreaking account of growing up in the Sixties and Seventies in a series of fleabag Hollywood apartments with a loving father who also happens to be a sporadically employed jazzman and junkie. Although precious little has been written about Joe Albany, if you come to this book looking for more than a few insights and several wonderful photos, you’ll be disappointed. Albany, the musician, is a virtual cipher. His role as irresponsible father is still only a supporting character whose many tribulations are filtered through the prism of his daughter and serve as the cause of her distressing accounts of growing up on the streets of Babylon. Dad’s lean years of playing in low-rent gin joints to unappreciative barflies becomes daughter’s schoolgirl travails of hanging out with drunks and sleeping behind the bar. His late-career revival and resettlement in Europe becomes her abandonment issue. That said, Ms. Albany’s tales of surviving a motherless and extraordinarily dysfunctional childhood through the benefit of genuine paternal love, resourceful street smarts, and an uncanny resilience make for a powerful and intriguing read. It’s not until the final pages that Albany reveals the crushing depth of her pain. It’s a story that deserves the haunting accompaniment of a mournful Joe Albany ballad.
This article appears in May 28 • 2004.