Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood

By A.J. Albany

Book Overview

A. J. Albany's recollection of life with her father, the great jazz pianist Joe Albany, is the story of one girl's unsentimental education. Joe played with the likes of Charles Mingus, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, but between gigs he slipped into drug-induced obscurity. It was during these times that his daughter knew him best. After her mother disappeared, six-year-old Amy Jo and her charming, troubled father set up housekeeping in a seamy Hollywood hotel. While Joe finished a set in some red-boothed dive, chances were you'd find Amy curled up to sleep on someone's fur coat, clutching a 78 of Louis Armstrong's Sugar Blues or, later, a photograph of the man himself, inscribed, To little Amy Jo, always in love with you--Pops. Wise beyond her years and hip to the unpredictable ways of Old Lady Life at all too early an age, A. J. Albany guides us through the dope and deviance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Hollywood's shadowy underbelly and beyond. What emerges is a raw, gripping, and surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a young girl trying to survive among the outcasts, misfits, and artists who surrounded her.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1935639765
• ISBN13: 9781935639763
• Release Date: November 2013
• Publisher: Tin House Books
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

The complex life of a troubled jazz artist through the soul of a loving daughter who never stopped l

I love this book! It is lyrical! Loving! Honest! Superbly creative! A thoughtfully written and living painting of lives, personalities, time, and places, that reverberates the eternal work in progress many sensitive jazz artists and their closest relations struggle through but courageously endure to try and keep their loves and dreams in a state of beauty! A. J. Albany is a beautiful person and this is her gift to the world!!

Couldn't Put It Down

This book was recommended to me when I was complaining about my jazz musician parents, their unbalanced, often drug addicted parenting, growing up in L.A. around musical celebrity, and some of the more tragic effects it had on my life. After reading AJ Albany's intense and intelligently written recollections of the insanity that surrounded her as a child of a jazz musician, in brief, I'll just shut up about my childhood that now seems like living in Disneyland by comparison. AJ Albany has been able to distance herself from what must be some extremely painful memories to create magnificent, finely descriptive and detailed accounts of her childhood days, surviving in the seedy streets of Hollywood with it's all too colorful characters. Her memoirs will be interesting to anyone who grew up around Los Angeles in the late 60's-early 70's and certainly for anyone who is a fan of classic jazz. AJ Albany has forever earned the title as given to her by her father, Joe Albany, "Be-bop Princess," and she is a brilliant writer. This book was a page-turner and when I reached the end, I wanted more.

A superb and wonderfully grown-up book

"Low Down" has plenty of moments that are tragic, horrifying, horrifyingly funny. A lesser person and a lesser writer could've written it in a continuous (and unbearable) whine. Yet, thanks to A. J. Albany's pitch-perfect, mean, clean, uncompromising writing, it's instead an example of how the best art transforms the most sordid reality into something else entirely - something beautiful, pure. Every time I revisit this book, and I've done so several times, I'm amazed by just how lovely Albany has made her story of wasted talent (the parents) and a ruined childhood (the author's), without letting her text get bogged down by the very natural emotions of self-pity, fury, sorrow. They're there, but they're not all that's there. There's the joy of music played right, the joy of love - however twisted - expressed fully, the joy the author clearly feels at getting it all down, and getting it down right - even righteously.This book deserves a thousand times more attention than it's gotten.

Raw, Romantic, Tormenting Account of Life with Jazz!!!!

Such an amazing story told in such a beautiful way that you truly don't feel 'BAD' after reading the awkward situations this young girl endored!! A completely original writing style adds to the romantic feeling of the entire book, which is a series of short stories about life in a Hardcore Hollywood, most kids couldn't even dream of. With each chapter, you expect to somehow get to the sunshine of her tormented life (ya know, like in the movies!) but, luckily, this book is reality, rather than a predictable movie and it stays true to it's "poetic integerity" throughout! Good luck putting this one down...there's nothing predictable about this book, it's truly BEAUTIFUL, somehow!