Frank Lowe was born June 24, 1943, in Memphis, Tennessee, and picked up the tenor saxophone at twelve. He grew up inside one of the most productive musical neighborhoods in the country: saxophonists Charles Lloyd and Hank Crawford and singer Carla Thomas were friends and neighbors, and his first music teacher outside of school was Packy Axton, the saxophone-playing part owner of Stax Records. Lowe worked at the Stax studio and its record shop as a teenager, absorbing the bluesy, vocal tenor sound of King Curtis alongside the Memphis rhythm-and-blues that surrounded him. He spent a brief period at the University of Kansas, then moved to San Francisco in his twenties, studying with saxophonists Donald Rafael Garrett, Bert Wilson and Sonny Simmons and taking coursework at the San Francisco Conservatory. It was in San Francisco that he met Ornette Coleman, who told him to go to New York.

He did, settling there in the mid-1960s at the height of the New Thing, and gigged with Sun Ra from 1966 to 1968. His recording career began abruptly and near the top: in November 1971 he was the saxophonist on Alice Coltrane's World Galaxy, cut in New York with bassist Reggie Workman, drummer Ben Riley and a string ensemble, and released by Impulse! the following year. Lowe had served none of the long apprenticeship the jazz culture of the time expected. One moment he was largely unrecorded, the next he was working with John Coltrane's widow and members of his rhythm section. Other early credits followed quickly: Don Cherry and the Jazz Composer's Orchestra's Relativity Suite (1973), Noah Howard's Live at the Village Vanguard (1975), and Cherry's Brown Rice (1975).

The partnership that put Lowe on record as a leader was with drummer Rashied Ali. Frustrated at being unable to place their music with an established label, the two co-founded Survival Records in 1972, and its first release, catalog number SR 101, was theirs: Duo Exchange, a saxophone-and-drums duet probably taped in September 1972 at Marzette Watts's New York studio and issued in 1973. Lowe played tenor, Japanese flute and percussion, and both men were credited as composers. It remains one of the fiercest documents of the format, and it arrived a year before Impulse! finally released Ali's duo sessions with John Coltrane as Interstellar Space. In March 1973 Lowe made his own debut as a leader for ESP-Disk with Black Beings, a quintet with Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist Joseph Jarman, a violinist billed only as "The Wizard," drummer Rashid Sinan, and bassist William Parker, for whom it was a recording debut.

Lowe became a central voice in New York's loft scene, both as a player and as a beneficiary of the do-it-yourself infrastructure that scene built. On May 1, 1974, he took a quartet with Parker, trombonist Joseph Bowie, trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah and drummer Steve Reid into Ali's Survival Studio at 77 Greene Street, with Ali himself engineering, then played the same book at Sam Rivers's Studio Rivbea on Bond Street. Those tapes sat for forty years before Triple Point issued them in 2014 as Out Loud. His leader catalog through the rest of the decade moved between American and European labels: Fresh (Arista/Freedom, recorded March 1975 with Lester Bowie, Joseph Bowie and cellist Abdul Wadud, plus one track cut in Memphis), The Flam (Black Saint, recorded October 1975 with Wadada Leo Smith), the live Tricks of the Trade from Rouen and the studio The Other Side from Paris (both December 1976), Doctor Too-Much (Kharma, May 1977), and Lowe and Behold (Musicworks, October 1977), an eleven-piece orchestra date whose personnel reads like a roll call of the downtown players about to define the next decade: John Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne, Billy Bang, Butch Morris, Peter Kuhn, John Lindberg and Phillip Wilson. A raw October 1977 duo session with Chadbourne, released in 1979 as Don't Punk Out, took in Albert Ayler's "Ghosts," Sonny Rollins's "St. Thomas" and an original titled "Composition for David Murray."

The 1980s brought sharper writing and better-funded studios. Skizoke (Cadence Jazz, recorded at Soundscape on March 31, 1981) added vibraphone and guitar to a sextet co-arranged with cornetist Butch Morris. Then came two records for Giovanni Bonandrini's Italian labels that stand as his best-known leader work: Exotic Heartbreak (Soul Note, cut in Milan in October 1981 with Morris, pianist Amina Claudine Myers, bassist Wilber Morris and drummer Tim Pleasant) and Decision in Paradise (Soul Note, recorded in New York in September 1984), the latter an unusually starry band with Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Grachan Moncur III on trombone, a young Geri Allen on piano, and the father-and-son team of Charles and Charnett Moffett. A February 1982 concert by the Exotic Heartbreak quintet surfaced in Japan a dozen years later as Live from Soundscape. Running through the whole decade was his association with violinist Billy Bang, which began with the Billy Bang Sextet's Sweet Space in November 1979 and continued through the Jazz Doctors, the quartet with Bang, bassist Rafael Garrett and drummer Denis Charles that recorded Intensive Care in London in November 1983. Lowe also spent stretches in Europe working with the German painter and drummer A.R. Penck's TTT group, which produced a run of self-released Munich and Basel concert LPs.

In the early 1990s Lowe assembled the Saxemble, an all-saxophone front line over drums. Its first record, Inappropriate Choices (ITM Pacific, April 1991), teamed him with Carlos Ward, Michael Marcus and a young James Carter over Phillip Wilson; a reshuffled version taped a self-titled album for Quincy Jones's Qwest imprint in May 1995 with Carter, Cassius Richmond, Alex Harding, Bobby LaVell and drummer Cindy Blackman. Most of his final decade went to trios and quartets for Bob Rusch's CIMP label, recorded direct to two-track at the Spirit Room in Rossie, New York: Bodies & Soul (November 1995, with Charles Moffett on drums), Vision Blue (February 1997) and Lowe-Down & Blue (September 16, 2002), the last cut with guitarist Bern Nix, bassist Dominic Duval and drummer Michael Carvin. He recorded three albums in France with bassist Bernard Santacruz, led a 1998 quintet concert issued as Soul Folks, made One for Jazz with a Bang quartet including bassist Ed Schuller, and in mid-2001 returned to Ali's Survival Studio one last time as featured saxophonist with the Rashied Ali Quintet, a session that stayed in the vault until Survival released it in January 2025 as Sidewalks in Motion.

His last recorded appearance came on April 28, 2003, at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Michigan, playing with the Billy Bang Quintet on what became Above & Beyond: An Evening in Grand Rapids. He was working with one lung. Frank Lowe passed away in New York on September 19, 2003, from complications of lung cancer, at 60. He was survived by two sons, Yaphet in New York City and Frank III in Oakland, California.

Lowe played the tenor the way Memphis taught him and New York radicalized him. The fat, blues-soaked, vocal cry he took from King Curtis and the Stax horn section never left, even at the most abstract end of his work, and that is what separates his sound from the harder-edged Coltrane disciples he came up alongside. John Coltrane was the model, acknowledged directly in "In Trane's Name," the opening salvo of Black Beings, but the specific gift was fluency in registers that were supposed to be incompatible. AllMusic's summary is that he evolved from an unrestrained, free-blowing, fat-toned, high-energy player into a versatile, multi-hued improviser who nonetheless remained underground for most of his career, and the second half of that sentence is as much the story of his reception as the first. He wrote steadily, roughly forty copyrighted originals under his own Carlowe publishing imprint, and by the 1980s his bands were playing structured heads and arrangements rather than open blowing. His duo with Rashied Ali has been measured repeatedly against Ali's Interstellar Space sessions with Coltrane: Rolling Stone's Hank Shteamer called Duo Exchange looser and more conversational than that record, and Pitchfork's Andy Beta wrote that the two men burn "like a dragon dueling with a flamethrower."