J. Albany, “Low Down,” in Tin House (Winter 2002) The music issue of this adventurous literary magazine leads off with the extraordinary memoir of a now 40-year-old woman who grew up as the daughter of Los Angeles jazz pianist Joe Albany (“Albany’s jumbled, idiosyncratic sense of time is almost all his own, and his solos are cliff-hanger explorations,” Richard Cook and Brian Morton write in The Penguin Guide to Jazz) and Sheila Boucher (“She was responsible for some of the best parts in Howl, something Ginsberg confessed to my father years after the fact,” Albany writes). Both were heroin addicts; Boucher was a prostitute who walked out when Albany was 6. “They were both bright and talented,” Albany says in her first published writing, “but always competing to see who could fall the furthest and the fastest down the ladder to hell. I have a photo of myself at one and a half years old, with my very pregnant mother. When I asked her about the fate of the baby, she was dismissive and said that had definitely been some john’s kid, who she ended up selling to a wealthy doctor and his wife in Bel Air.”
