Frank Lowe grew up in Memphis in the 1940s and 50s, surrounded by the kind of raw, honking R&B saxophone sound that city was famous for. As a kid he lived near the Little family, and watching young Booker Little practice trumpet stuck with him — proof that serious music could come out of an ordinary Memphis block. That grounding never left his playing. Even at his most abstract, you can hear the blues shout underneath.

He landed in New York at the tail end of the 1960s, right as the free jazz scene was hitting its most combustible phase. He played briefly with the Sun Ra Arkestra, then found his way into the orbit of players pushing the music somewhere rawer and less tethered to form — Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Rashied Ali. His 1973 duo record with Ali, Duo Exchange (1973), is just two guys in a room working without a net, and it tells you everything about how comfortable Lowe was out there with nothing to hide behind.

The record people point to first is Black Beings (1973), cut for ESP-Disk with Joseph Jarman and violinist Raymond Lee Cheng among others. It's a wild, scraping session — Lowe's tone is huge and rough, full of cries and overtones, like he's trying to get the whole history of Memphis saxophone honking into a single note. It's not easy listening. It's not supposed to be. But it's honest in a way a lot of free jazz from that period isn't — there's blues feeling buried in the noise, not just abstraction for its own sake.

Lowe spent the rest of the 70s and 80s deep in New York's loft jazz world, playing alongside bassist William Parker and drummer Denis Charles, leading his own groups like Saxemble, and generally being one of the guys who kept that scene functioning after the bigger labels stopped paying attention. He never became a household name, and he probably didn't care much — he kept working, kept finding sidemen who could match his intensity, and kept that Memphis grit in his sound right up until he died in 2003. If you want to understand why free jazz doesn't have to mean cold or academic, start with Frank Lowe. He never let go of the blues, even when he was blowing it apart.