Sad News: #GeriAllen Dies at 60

Perhaps more than any other pianist, Geri Allen’s style — harmonically refracted and rhythmically complex, but also fluid — formed a bridge between jazz’s halcyon midcentury period and its diffuse present.

She accomplished this by holding some things constant: a farsighted approach to the piano, which she used both to guide and to goad her bandmates; an ability to toggle between artistic styles without warping her own sound; and a belief that jazz ought to interact with its kindred art forms across the African-American tradition.

Funeral services at Bethany Baptist Church 275 W. Market St Newark, NJ 07103 (973) 623-8161 Viewing - Friday July 7th, from 6:00pm to 8:00 pm. Funeral - Saturday July 8th, 11:00 am.

from: http://njjazzlist.com

#GeriAllen: pioneering female jazz

Allen released more than 20 albums as a bandleader, many of which featured her own compositions Rex

Matt Schudel

Friday 30 June 2017 09:46 BST

Geri Allen was a musically adventurous jazz pianist and bandleader who played with the leading musicians of her time, from Ornette Coleman to Wayne Shorter, and who furthered the careers of other women in jazz. She was known for her eclectic approach, exploring the traditions of jazz and reaching into some of its more arcane byways.

 She portrayed pianist Mary Lou Williams in the 1996 Robert Altman film Kansas City, set in the 1930s, but she also dipped into a variety of other styles, from the Motown music of her native Detroit to electronic music and classical works. “I like to look at the piano as a drum,” she said, “as 88 drums with pitch. Rhythm is the core of my music.”

 Allen was one of the leading pianists of her generation and, as the Los Angeles Times critic Don Heckman wrote in 2006, “long overdue for the sort of recognition that accrues for the top level of jazz performers.”

read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/geri-allen-obituary-jazz-pianist-musician-bandleader-actress-ornette-coleman-detroit-motown-kansas-a7814786.html

Geri Allen Trio: Live At The Village Vanguard

For some, jazz is a form of music defined by innovation. It's a language of hybrid invention, about a relentless quest for a new style, a new movement, a new expression. Alternately, there's a powerful argument for jazz as a tradition: a language of core values, worthy of a lifetime of respectful study, representative of a century of African-American cultural achievement. As the prevailing aesthetic outlook has it, both are equally valid; jazz is tradition and innovation, at once.


Over the last 30 years, it's hard to think of anyone who embodies this duality better than composer and pianist Geri Allen. As often as she's been lionized for the freshness of her playing, she's also been admired for the respect she's shown for its living history. WBGO and NPR Music featured the Geri Allen Trio in the Live at the Village Vanguard series of live on-air radio/online video broadcasts on Wednesday, Sept. 7.

Allen is known for her immense musical vocabulary. A recent example: In 2010, she released two distinct albums.

One was the enveloping solo piano record Flying Toward the Sound, a suite of original, somewhat abstract works inspired by Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Cecil Taylor. The other was Geri Allen and Timeline Live, a quartet recording with a new twist which is actually an old one: One band member is a percussive tap dancer. Her bassist for this trio hit, Kenny Davis, serves as lieutenant in several of her bands, including Timeline. And drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts played with Allen even before he played on breakout recordings with Wynton and Branford Marsalis.

Like many successful musicians from Detroit, Allen was mentored by trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, and attended Cass Technical High School, the city's magnet institution for performing arts.

She also did some study in Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, but her career as a performer took off when she moved to New York. That's where she began to attract the attention of peers and elders alike: Her C.V. includes work with Ornette Coleman, Betty Carter, Paul Motian and Charlie Haden, Charles Lloyd, Mary Wilson of The Supremes, members of the Black Rock Coalition and many of the players who helped develop the M-Base philosophy.

Now 54, Allen has put together a discography nearing 20 records as a leader alone, and she is currently a professor at the University of Michigan. But she still tours often, and the Village Vanguard is a regular destination for her. She cut a live trio record there in December 1990, which means she's been playing the downtown Manhattan club for at least 20 years. http://www.npr.org/2011/08/31/140086797/geri-allen-trio-live-at-the-village-vanguard&sc=nl&cc=jn-20110911

Listen on: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/31/140086797/geri-allen-trio-live-at-the-village-vanguard

Flying Toward the Sound: so beautifully impressionistic, the pianist Geri Allen recalls the "angels creators."

She walked through to the sunken media spotlight.
In 2010, however, she releases two albums at once: one, launched earlier this year - and what this post says - it is a solo piano project called Flying Toward the Sound, the other released in June, shows his quartet called Timeline.

However, regardless of his reappearance, the pianist Geri Allen, one of the greatest jazz musicians that the last decades have shown, there is a type of artist which should have only one album and even less to lose sight of it or forget it.

Now this lady has moved freely between the creative core of free jazz through their associations with musicians like Andrew Cyrille and Joseph Jarman, was a founder of the M-Base Steve Coleman, already led a successful trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, already piloted in fantastic designs and fine channels such as Downbeat, JazzTimes and New York Times - as the album Zodiac Suite Revisited (a rereading of the original suite of Mary Lou Williams) - and has already integrated the legendary Charles Lloyd Quartet, that these achievements many musicians wish they had in their curricula.

Complete on  >>  http://farofamoderna.blogspot.com/

For all that pianist Allen has achieved as a composer....

By Ed Enright

Geri Allen, Flying Toward

The Sound and Geri Allen & Timeline – Live (Motéma)

For all that pianist Allen has achieved as a composer, performer and scholar, these two new CD releases vividly document her boundless curiosity, innovation and commitment to growth in every aspect of her artistry. Flying Toward The Sound is a moving solo disc that features Allen playing a suite of compositions on a Fazioli piano; a blend of scored and improvised passages, her playing here is informed and inspired by modern piano giants Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock.
 
When Allen tours the U.S. and abroad in support of the CD, she will share the stage with thematic film projections created by performance artist Carrie Mae Weems; a taste of the visual imagery from the live shows is included as enhanced content on the CD. The music on the companion release Geri Allen & Timeline – Live (Allen’s first live release) offers a completely different perspective. The Timeline band — which includes bassist Kenny Davis, drummer Kassa Overall and tap percussionist Maurice Chestnut — represents another facet of Allen in which she embraces elements of dance, rhythmic syncopation and intense band dialog.
http://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=editorspicks201006

Geri Allen....

Pianist / Composer / Arranger Educator
Geri Allen is an African-American Jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. Her abilities are many. She is both leader and collaborator. An artist grounded in tradition yet always poised on the cutting edge. She has given concerts internationally and her acclaim is worldwide. With all of this, she is also a deeply devoted mother. Allen inhabits all of these roles with grace and elegance.

Each contributes to the depth, diversity, complexity and beauty of the music she creates. In the past several years, she has appeared as a composer, and performer in concert, at Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall, Caramoor Festival in Katonah, NY, the San Francisco Jazz Festival playing the music of Mary Lou Williams, the First Jerusalem Jazz Festival, the Capetown Jazz Festival in South Africa, an Australian tour that took her
to the cities of Perth, Sydney and Melbourne, to New Zealand, a European tour throughout Europe, to Washington, D.C. for The Black Congressional Caucus and at The Village Vanguard in New York City.

Ms. Allen held recent residencies which included workshops, master classes, lecture-discussions, as well as concert performances, that took place at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga. and at North Carolina Central University in Durham. In December 2007, Ms. Allen concluded a very successful residency during “Geri Allen Week” at Harvard University where she received the Key to the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, from the Honorable Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves.

Professor Allen just completed a successful musical residency at Columbia University, and was invited by Professor Farah J. Griffin, noted author and scholar, and Director of the Center for Jazz Studies. Columbia also sponsored, a community outreach component which Ms. Allen insists on for all of her residencies. The outreach took place at Frederic Douglas School in Harlem, and incorporated spontaneous and interactive visual art, in a live improvised music/performance setting to underline the participatory nature of the audience
experience in Jazz. Ms. Allen is committed to these sorts of opportunities to engage young minds and introduce them to the ever evolving process of listening and communicating in today’s world.

Geri Allen is a recent recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Music Composition, and is presently composing an original Solo Piano work, celebrating three of our most important pianist-composer/innovators, in the contemporary history of jazz. Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock.
“Refractions, Flying Toward The Sound”, will be recorded by Motema Records, and Ms. Allen will be performing the “new” Solo Piano work throughout the 2009-11 concert season in major museums, and concert settings internationally.

Ms. Allen is presently an Associate Professor of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, School of Music, Theater and Dance. Born in 1957 in Pontiac, Michigan and reared in that bastion of African-American musical creativity, Detroit, with the support and encouragement of her parents, Mount Vernell Allen Jr. and Barbara Allen, she began playing piano at age seven. In addition to those genius musicians from Motown, Detroit has consistently given us master musicians including the three Jones brothers: Thad (trumpet), Elvin (drums) and Hank (piano). Hank Jones and Barry Harris, another Detroit native, remain the supreme elder statesmen of Jazz piano.

More recently Detroit has given us Ron Carter and Yusef Lateef, as well as members of a younger generation, the multi-reedist James Carter, and, of course, in Geri Allen. In addition to nurturing extraordinary musical talent, Detroit is also known as a place where mentorship thrives both in formal settings, such as, Allen’s Alma Mater, Cass Technical High School, and even more importantly, in one on one tutorials at the Jazz Development Workshop, where Allen came under the tutelage and guidance of trumpeter. Marcus Belgrave, drummer, Roy Brooks, and saxophonist, Donald Walden. In Detroit, Allen studied classical music as well as jazz, playing Motown hits, and at times singing madrigals.

Having absorbed most of the music in her hometown, she enrolled at Howard University, (another African American Mecca), where she received her Bachelor’s Degree in Jazz Studies and Piano. Shortly thereafter, she received her Master’s Degree in Ethnomusicology from The University of Pittsburgh. It is, therefore, not surprising that Allen is an intellectual, educator, teacher and a continued student of the music in it’s historical, cultural and social contexts.

Geri Allen arrived in New York in 1982 where she immediately began to establish herself. She was a charter member of the M-Base Collective and The Black Rock Coalition, and soon moved on to perform in a variety of musical surroundings with pre-eminent musicians. As a leader of her own trios and various ensembles, her work was seen as having established a strong new presence on the New York jazz scene. She was invited to perform and record with Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Dewey Redman, Oliver Lake, and Betty Carter.

In 1996 Ornette Coleman, one of a few indisputable inventors of free jazz, invited Ms. Allen to record with him. This was exceptional since Mr. Coleman had recorded with a pianist only once before, and that had been thirty five years previous. The sessions produced Sound Museum, a work in two volumes: “Three Women” and “Hidden Man”. Her own recordings include: The Printmakers, The Nurturer, Maroons, Twenty-One, and Eyes in the Back of Your Head (all on the Blue Note label), Twylight and The Gathering (Verve), and most recently, The Life of a Song and Timeless Portraits and Dreams (Telarc).

Tavis Smiley, the highly respected African American radio and television host and cultural commentator, has said this about Timeless Portraits and Dreams: “Jazz pianist Geri Allen has taken the freedom of Jazz and
combined it with the cultural freedom movements that have paralleled the evolution of Jazz itself”. Allen reveals the profundity of African American history and its expression through Jazz in this recording. Moving from Spirituals, old and freshly composed, through works by Lil Hardin Armstrong and Charlie Parker, to the blues, “I Have a Dream” by Mary Lou Williams, and “Nearly” by Ron Carter, Geri Allen adds the brilliance of her own compositions, “Our Lady”, her loving tribute to Billie Holiday, and the title track for which she also wrote the words, “Timeless Portraits and Dreams”. George Shirley, the operatic tenor, sings a thrilling version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” on this recording where he is accompanied by Ms. Allen and The Atlanta Jazz Chorus under the direction of Dwight Andrews.

Geri Allen has received many awards during the twenty-five years of her professional career. The women of Spelman College presented her with The African American Classical Music Award. In 1996 Ms. Allen was the youngest person, and the only woman to date, to receive the Danish JAZZPAR Prize. Allen was asked to compose original music for the concerts involving the JAZZPAR Prize celebration in Copenhagen. The performances were recorded on the Steeplechase Record label in Copenhagen and the following year released as, Some Aspects of Water. Ms. Allen has received the Benny Golson Award, a Distinguished Alumna Award from Howard University, Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, a documentary film produced by Lisa Gay Hamilton and Jonathan Demme which she co-created with Dr. Bernice Reagon and Toshi Reagon, aired as the HBO Black History Month film, and this film received a Peabody Award. Geri Allen also created original orchestrations for the Grammy nominated recording, American Song by Andy Bey.

The Detroit Metro Jazz Festival honored her with “Geri Allen Day”. She was recently invited to sit with a gathering of some of the great music performers and composers for a photograph called: “New Great Day In
Harlem” an acknowledgment of historical importance. Geri Allen’s notable collaborations and commissions include: Eric Dolphy Suite, commissioned by Tom Johnson and premiered in Rotterdam, Holland, Lil (a music theater work in progress) with director Joanne Akalaitis, and, For the Healing of the Nations, a full length work commissioned by The Walt Whitman Center in Camden, New Jersey, the Dodge Foundation, and Meet the Composer.

This sacred concert, in two halves, was written in memory of the victims and survivors of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and premiered in 2006 at Rutgers University in Camden. The work had a second performance at The Rialto Performing Arts Center in Atlanta, Ga. in October of 2007. In 1989, Ms. Allen was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center to compose Sister Leola for its ‘American Portraits Series’. Ms. Allen has also composed music for, and performed with, The Donald Byrd Dance Company in 1999, and with the Ronald K. Brown Dance Company in 2003. In the year 2000, Ms. Allen acted as musical director and pianist in a presentation of Mary Lou’s Mass by Cleo Parker Robinson, in Denver, Colorado.

In 1990 the Music Theater Group commissioned Ms. Allen to write Short Takes, a theater piece, composed for an Off Broadway presentation. Lloyd Story, tap dancer, performed on Ms. Allen’s recording “In the Middle” in 1989, which was, perhaps, one of the first documented Jazz and Tap performances on record in recent times. In 2003, Stanford University commissioned Ms. Allen to compose the work “Of Mounts and Mountains” which was performed in Europe, in Solo Performances, concluding in Bonn, Germany at the Bonn Chamber Music Hall in the famed Beethoven-Haus. Geri Allen has performed with many of the leading mainstream and avant garde jazz musicians of the last 25 years. Including: (In addition to those previously noted), Jack DeJohnette, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Charlie Haden, Reggie Workman, Lee Konitz, Carmen Lundy, and Marian McPartland. Geri Allen’s flexibility has caused artists as varied as: Marianne Faithful, Bill Cosby (on drums), Mary Wilson (formerly of The Supremes), Ruth Brown, Me’shell Ndegeocello, and even Joan Rivers, to seek her as a pianist.

Geri Allen was especially honored when Ravi Coltrane asked her to be a part of his loving tribute to his mother Alice Coltrane at both the JVC, and International Detroit Jazz Festivals this year. Bruce Lundvall, of Blue Note Records, invited Ms. Allen to serve, in place of an ailing Mr. Hank Jones, at the piano under the direction of Maestro Sir Simon Rattle, conducting the Birmingham Symphony, when recording the music of Duke Ellington. This historic recording celebrates and features Luther Henderson’s arrangements as well as
an all-star ensemble, including Ms. Lena Horn.

Geri Allen is currently Associate Professor in the School of Music at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In the past she has taught at Howard University, The New School of Music in New York City, and at The New England Conservatory in Boston. Her particular fields of expertise are in the cultural and social history of American Jazz and of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation.

In the music of Geri Allen, we hear a quiet, passionate, intensity, and a sense of revolution. Of growth. Of possibility. It is a music driven by a desire to honor those who came before and a disciplined devotion to forging new paths through her playing and writing. She herself has said that “this music is about change. That is its focal point – having the courage to believe in your own voice”. Her solos and her compositions manage to create a feeling of safety while also expressing the tension of her adventurous spirit. It is as if she creates a home from which she, and, in turn, we, at times journey by flying, at other times through intelligent introspection, but always towards knowledge and freedom.

Discography
107. Miles Davis - "Miles Cool and Collected [Sony Records)
106. Timeless Portraits and Dreams / Geri Allen: 2006 Ron Carter, Jimmy Cobb, Wallace Roney, Carmen Lundy, Don Walden, George Shirley, and the Atlanta Jazz Choir
105. Zodiac Suite: Revisited: 2006 Geri Allen: piano; Buster Williams, bass Andrew Cyrille: drums (13,15) Billy Hart drums (all other tracks)
104. Mary Stallings - "Remember Love" (Half Note Records) 2005, Geri Allen, piano and Producer
103. The Life of a Song / Geri Allen: 2004 Geri Allen(p),Dave Holland(b),Jack Dejohnette(ds)
And much more. See on site http://www.geriallen.com/

Geri Allen Trio, Dark Prince