Allen Lowe. On Friday night, the latest show in Firehouse 12’s fall concert series featured a journey through the American music of the 20th century before the rise of hip hop, as imaginatively seen through the eyes of one of jazz’s most central figures, Louis Armstrong. In walking decades in the icon’s shoes, it was also a trip through the latest compositional ideas of musician and writer Allen Lowe.The New Haven-based Lowe is a saxophonist, composer, and author who has recorded and performed with a long list of jazz greats. Jazz Times named him Artist of the Year In 2021, and as his bio states, ​“he has survived 20 surgeries for cancer.” On Friday, Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra — represented at the Crown Street club, studio, and bar by Lowe on tenor sax, Elijah Shiffer on alto sax, Frank Lacy on trumpet, trombone, and French horn, Ethan Kogan on drums, Will Goble on bass, Lewis Porter on piano — played selections from the 69-song Louis Armstrong’s America,​“a progressive look at the musical eras through which Armstrong lived,” Lowe writes. As Lowe explained, many approaches to the jazz giant tend toward ​“re-creations” of Armstrong’s music; by contrast, Lowe sought to portray something of the breadth of ​“the musical eras in which Armstrong lived.” Present for the birth of jazz, Armstrong’s career was long enough to see jazz develop through several different styles, and saw it, in time, supplanted in popularity by — even as it remained in musical conversation with — rock, soul, R&B, and funk. The six-song sampling of Louis Armstrong’s America on Friday gave a taste of that range, and offered a tantalizing speculation about how Armstrong influenced all of it, and in turn, was influenced by it.The concert began with ​“Mr. Jenkins’ Lonely Orphans Band,” a reference to the Jenkins Orphanage (now the Jenkins Institute For Children), which took in street children in Charleston, South Carolina beginning in 1891 and, thanks to an in-house band for the kids, ended up training several notable jazz musicians, including Duke Ellington, trumpeter William ​“Cat” Anderson, trumpeter Jabbo Smith, songwriter Tom Delaney, and Count Basie Orchestra guitarist Freddie Green. The tune started off on a big, festive melody over an old-school beat, but as soon as the solos began, the harmonies took a turn. Lacy’s trumpet solo grew abstract. The rhythm section became more fractured. Shiffer played his solo like it was coming apart at the seams. Kogan and Goble almost tore the rhythm to pieces completely, but left Porter more than enough for his own angular solo. On his solo, Lowe strode into the middle of this with his tenor sax, unfurling long, lyrical phrases that nodded to the chromaticism in the tune’s head and pushed it further. The head returned, as bright as ever, but it was hard now to shake the spin the solos had put on it.On ​“Bo Did It” — a reference to Bo Diddley and the rhythm he helped make famous in the U.S. — the band settled into a blues-oriented mode, but even then, Shiffer pushed out at the edges. Lowe kept it more straight ahead, letting the phrases do the telling. Lacy, first on French horn, brought a change in texture with declarative statements that he answered by swapping that horn for trombone halfway through his solo. As Goble and Kogan elaborated on that signature rhythm, giving it a more double-jointed New Orleans sensibility, Porter exercised the piano’s keys for a muscular solo of his own. Goble went on his own excursion, while never losing the beat’s pulse. “Valley of Sorrows” made a stop at the music of free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. Goble began on the bass all alone, then was joined by the horns wailing the head while the rhythm section created a a miasma for the melody to dissolve into. As the first soloist, Lowe climbed out of the fog with an urgent insistence, his playing the freest of the show. Shiffer followed the musical trail Lowe had left and then blazed his own path. Lacy created his own space on French horn, a clarion in the clouds. Porter took a searching solo, full of sweeping phrases, half anxious, half romantic. “Pleased” — which drew inspiration from James Brown’s early hit ​“Please, Please, Please” — was a fast waltz. Lacy took the first solo on trombone, punching out phrases firmly planted in the blues. Shiffer explored sounds that hearkened to the screaming sax solos Maceo Parker would unleash on James Brown records a decade after ​“Please, Please, Please.” Kogan got a break, and used it to create a series of escalating, cascading phrases that built tension and energy. “The Murder of Jaki Byard” — a pianist who Lowe called ​“one of the greatest jazz musicians who ever performed” — had the feel of a smoky ballad. Lacy’s expansive solo gave the rhythm section a chance to find the rhythms within the rhythms, before returning to the first feel as Lowe engaged in a conversational solo. When the piece returned to the head, the mood had changed, augmented by Porter running frantic piano lines behind the melody that lent a certain unease to the proceedings.The band closed with ​“Candy, Darling,” about Candy Darling, the actress and early trans icon who was a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory crew and a muse to the Velvet Underground. The song in her honor rested on a solid pop rhythm, implying a musical idiom that both Shiffer and Lacy used as their musical playground in their solos. Lowe’s own solo then took its time, unhurried and confident, letting the song come to a sweeping finish — the kind Candy herself just might have loved.Firehouse 12’s fall concert series continues Nov. 8 with Dezron Douglas 3 PEACE ft. Fabian Almazan and Willy Rodriguez; Nov. 15 with Jamie Saft, Joe Morris, Herb Robertson, and Bobby Previte; Nov. 22 with Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose, and Scott Amendola; Dec. 6 with the Tyshawn Sorey Trio; Dec. 13 with Matt Wilson’s Christmas Tree‑O; and concludes Dec. 20 with the Jeremy Pelt Quintet. Visit Firehouse 12’s website for tickets and more information.