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.

"In Low Down...Hollywood shines, its run-down hotels and methadone clinics every bit as beautiful, on their own terms, as the grand jazz joints of Joe Albany's glory years."
—Los Angeles Magazine

"Truly affecting...Albany's well-wrought memoir contains emotional and lyrical volumes."
—Publishers Weekly

"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

"Her prose resembles the shimmering complexity of bop, with its feelings of tight yet improvisational dartings through memory. From the slag heap of the junkie lifestyle, she manages to spin literary gold."
—Kirkus Reviews