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Jazzman's daughter gives 'Low Down' on childhood
'Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales From Childhood'
Her girlhood playground during the late 1960s and '70s was more junkyard than sandbox, and Dad wasn't just Dad. He also was a great jazz musician who ran with Charlie Parker, Lester Young and their ilk. He also had a lifelong heroin habit.
Home for father and daughter was the residential St. Francis Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. Among little Amy Jo's companions were Koko, a retired circus clown; Alain, a handsome dwarf; and Terry, her transvestite substitute mom.
This would seem to be a setting for tragedy. Instead, Albany casts her maximally dysfunctional childhood as a triumph. She extracts both the chilling details and electrifying exhilaration of those days in a series of brief episodes.
Each fragment is elegantly and sparsely captured, from early memories of her mother lying unconscious in a pool of her own vomit to happier days when her father was working with Louis Armstrong, and to the criminal and occasionally hilarious perversions of her neighbors at the hotel.
Albany's prose is tough and funny. She takes on the difficult no man's land where love and disgust intersect, where terror and elation go hand-in-hand, and makes no sentimental excuses. Growing up with Joe Albany was as low down as he was high on drugs.
From this junkyard history of jazz burnouts and the fading glory of Hollywood, Albany pulls out treasures that are well worth discovering.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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