Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood (Tin House)

Written with gritty honesty, Low Down is an extended improvisation on growing up among jazz royalty, a moving tour through the dope and deviance of the late-1960s and early-1970s jazz scene in Hollywood's underbelly and beyond.

A. J. Albany grew up in Hollywood. She now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.

Low Down, A. J. Albany's artfully composed and critically acclaimed memoir of life with her father, the great jazz pianist Joe Albany, is the story of one girl's gritty and unsentimental education in and around Los Angeles.

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 A. J. (or Amy Jo) and her charming yet deeply troubled father set up house in a seamy Hollywood hotel. While Joe finished a wee-hours set in some red-boothed dive, Amy would often be nearby, fast asleep on a patron's fur coat and clutching, perhaps, a 78 of Louis Armstrong's "Sugar Blues"—or, later, a photograph of the man himself, which was 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, Albany here guides readers through the dope and deviance—as well as the jazz and genius—that characterized the Hollywood underground of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Low Down is a raw, gripping, and surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a young girl trying to survive amid outcasts, misfits, artists, and other troubled souls.

"On one hand, [this books offers] an authentic trip through Hollywood's lower depths. On the other, it examines the conflict between the need for drugs and the neediness of children. In presenting her father's generosity as well as his failings, A. J. Albany uses language that is both astringent and compassionate."—Carolyn See, The Los Angeles Times

"Albany recreates a landscape of her childhood where misery is a faraway sound floating above a voice speaking in tones of affection, terror, rage, love, and, most of all, a hipster's defiance."—Greil Marcus

"In this beautiful memoir of jazz and junk, loyalty and abandonment, A. J. Albany [writes] with such straight-up charm and unsentimental lucidity that she makes her harrowing childhood seem as romantic and thrilling as she remembers it."—Francine Prose

"The daughter of famed jazz pianist Joe Albany recounts a childhood marked by music, drugs, and thwarted potential in this impressive debut. Albany's hipster pedigree is impeccable: her mother was fresh off an affair with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg ('I gather Mom was Ginsberg's last heterosexual liaison') when she married musician Joe Albany, a troubled heroin addict credited as one of the inventors of bebop. Amy Jo was born early in the doomed marriage; by the time she was five, her mother had disappeared and the preschooler was living with her father in the St. Francis, a colorful flophouse in Hollywood ('like Eloise without the frills'). Young A. J. Albany became a fixture in the L.A. jazz scene, accompanying her father to the smoky bars and clubs where he performed. In addition to jazz legends such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Albany's girlhood was populated with a nearly unbelievable cast of one-eyed junkies, dwarfs, and the inevitable hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold; each of these down-and-out figures is a nuanced character rather than a cliché. Thanks to her judicious use of humor, the book is truly affecting rather than maudlin, even in its most tragic moments. Albany employs an episodic structure that allows her the freedom to record events and memories in a way that seems true to her fragmented, tumultuous childhood. Though slim, Albany's well-wrought memoir contains emotional and lyrical volumes."—Publishers Weekly

"The daughter of jazz pianist Joe Albany, a key figure in the birth of bebop, exposes the seamy world of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s while spinning a pathetic tale of growing up as the child of addicted parents. When A. J. is five her mother deserts, and father and daughter take up residence in the St. Francis Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. In poignant staccato chapters, the author evokes vivid portraits of her fellow residents, a 'vast assortment of misfits' including a baby-sitter 'who did a lot of mescaline,' a cook-companion who was a transvestite and an addict himself, and her friend LaPrez, son of a 'strung-out hooker' who disappears after his mother overdoses. Joe's friendships with Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and Sinatra are all part of the mix, but so is Dalton, the porno moviemaker who introduces A. J. to speed. A. J. is seduced by an uncle at 12, attempts suicide at 14, and eventually gives up trying to save her father, who dies alone in 1988 . . . The author has perceptively written what she knows."—Booklist

"The daughter of respected jazz pianist Joe Albany debuts with a memoir of her young world, bracketed by a father's addiction and a mother's abandonment. The unnerving text primarily chronicles the nine years following 1962, when heroin-addicted Joe and his equally drug-dependent third wife had a baby girl and named her Amy Jo, after two of Little Women's heroines. Filtered through a child's eyes, the author's memories of those years in southern California include not just the dangerous shards to be expected, but also fragments of happiness and expectancy set against a backdrop of alternating neglect and loyalty. Albany's mother, who left when she was five, is almost always loaded on Dilaudid. Her father, on the other hand, in his loving, feckless way, made her the center of his unstable universe; he hugged her, brought her to work, and protected her fiercely . . . when he wasn't in rehab or jail. 'Trying to look out for yourself at all of six years old can be a brain-twisting experience,' writes Albany, and 'joy [is] strictly a luxury item.' Still, she unsentimentally captures the offbeat, fleeting pleasures: getting the television out of hock, taking trips to the Italian market with Dad, or catching a nap behind the bar at one of his late-night gigs. Circumstances guaranteed that Amy Jo would meet plenty of unsavory characters (the lecher who wanted her to check out his magic gizmo, the uncle who introduced her to incest), but also that she could lose herself in the music that surrounded her. Her prose resembles the shimmering complexity of bop, with its feeling of tight yet improvisational dartings through memory. From the slag heap of the junkie lifestyle, she manages to spin literary gold. [This book is] a vibrant testimony to survival founded on the author's childhood philosophy: 'Find love in some form, even when it appear[s] to be absent.'"—Kirkus Reviews

Written with gritty honesty, Low Down is an extended improvisation on growing up among jazz royalty, a moving tour through the dope and deviance of the late-1960s and early-1970s jazz scene in Hollywood's underbelly and beyond.

A. J. Albany, daughter of celebrated jazz pianist Joe Albany, lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.