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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Geri Allen Gone At 60

June 27, 2017 by Doug Ramsey

Geri Allen died today of cancer. She was 60. Ms. Allen was a pianist of uncommon technical achievement and fluency and inspired a generation of younger pianists. Recently a resident of Pittsburgh, Ms. Allen grew up in Detroit, where she began piano lessons at age seven. While at Cass Technical High School she studied with the trumpeter and Detroit jazz mentor Marcus Belgrave. One of her early trios included bassist Anthony Cox and drummer Andrew Cyrille. In the course of her career she collaborated with major musicians, among them Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Charlie Haden, Ornette Coleman, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Ornette Coleman and Terri Lyne Carrington.

For a comprehensive obituary of Geri Allen, see David Adler’s remembrance posted by the New Jersey jazz station WGBO. The piece contains two videos of Ms. Allen in performance, one with an extensive interview.

Geri Allen, RIP

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Comments

  1. Ken says

    June 29, 2017 at 3:53 am

    This was a shock, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind, I heard Allen live four times, counting a performance with Wallace Roney’s band at Iridium, but I’m sorry to say that the last time was in 2001. I’d always meant to hear her again, and I was often tempted to head up to New York in December to catch her again at what seemed like her annual stay at the Vanguard. Money being no object, I would have gone every year, but I’ve often remembered the gorgeous “Come Sunday” with which she opened her first set way back in 2001.

  2. Rob D says

    June 29, 2017 at 2:48 pm

    One of my favourite players. I can’t think of anything she did that didn’t have some value for me. Love her work with Haden and Motian, particularly the “Segments” release. Just looking at the cover for that CD which causes me to realize with a start that they are all gone now. Hard to believe.Time marches on and we lose great artists with alarming regularity, it seems.

    It’s great to have the recorded legacy to fall back on, but I always held out hope that I would see some of them live and in the flesh. I never got to see Geri, Charlie or Paul live and now I never will.
    Sigh inserted here. RIP to a great lady.

  3. Peter Levin says

    July 2, 2017 at 6:26 am

    Just two weeks before Allen’s death, the pianist Ethan Iverson posted a rumination about her early work and the influence it has had on younger pianists. Iverson posted his piece at about the same time as this site was hosting a discussion about whether jazz has changed, and one of Iverson’s thoughts about Allen is relevant to that discussion:

    History isn’t totally linear, but from my vantage point it feels like Allen really broke something open. Kenny Kirkland took the McCoy Tyner/Herbie Hancock/Chick Corea axis to its logical endpoint. Around the time of Kirkland’s greatest prominence in the 1980s, Geri Allen offered a way out of trying to play faster and louder patterns on chord scales. Her solution would go on to be vastly influential. There were other avatars from the late 80s and early 90s, perhaps most notably Marcus Roberts and Brad Mehldau. But it seems like most of the celebrated younger pianists of the current moment — a recent poll has names like Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn, David Virelles, Kris Davis, Matt Mitchell, Aruán Ortiz — don’t play like Kirkland, Roberts, or Mehldau. They play like Allen.

    The constant in Allen’s playing was its explorative curiosity, both harmonic and historical, and in all sorts of contexts. Iverson’s piece winds up with this:

    And of course, there’s all the great music Geri Allen has played since 1989. It’s a large body of work that deserves as much attention as anyone else from these times. But for now, on the occasion of her 60th, I just wanted to make sure that the official record was correct. In this music, there was before Geri Allen and after Geri Allen. She’s that important.

    Perhaps we are in the middle of a long-term broadening of the role of the piano in jazz. If we are, historians may conclude that it all began with Allen.

  4. Rob D says

    July 5, 2017 at 9:43 am

    Fascinating thoughts from Ethan Iverson. Thanks for the post, Peter.
    Sometimes it takes the perspective of time to realize that someone was a game changer. I don’t think there greater evidence that someone fits that role than the impact that he, or she, has on other players.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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Doug’s Picks

Monday Recommendation: Oscar Peterson Plays 10 Composers

Oscar Peterson Plays (Verve) In this five-CD reissue, the formidable pianist plays pieces by ten composers who dominated American popular music for decades. Peterson had bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Barney Kessel, succeeded by Herb Ellis. It’s the trio that made Peterson famous with Jazz At The Philharmonic and–by way of the 10 albums reproduced […]

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Monday Recommendation: DIVA At 25

The DIVA Jazz Orchestra 25th Anniversary Project (ArtistShare) It has been a quarter of a century since Buddy Rich’s manager and relief drummer Stanley Kay found himself conducting a band whose drummer was young Sherrie Maricle. Intrigued by her playing, Kay set out to find whether there were other women jazz musicians of comparable talent. […]

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Monday Recommendation, Keith Jarrett Trio: After The Fall

Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, After The Fall (ECM) In 1998 Keith Jarrett was emerging from a siege of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that had sidelined him for two years. As he felt better, he was uncertain how completely his piano skill and endurance had returned. He decided to test himself. He gathered his longtime […]

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Monday Recommendation: Gerard Kubik, Jazz Transatlantic

Gerhard Kubik, Jazz Transatlantic, Vol. I and Vol. II (University Press of Mississippi) The first volume of Kubik’s work is subtitled, “The African Undercurrent in Twentieth–Century Jazz Culture;” the second, “Jazz Derivatives and Developments in Twentieth-Century Africa.” The descriptions indicate the depth and scope of the Austrian ethnomusicologist’s research, which has taken him to Africa […]

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Monday Recommendation: Magris In Miami

Roberto Magris Sextet Live in Miami @ the WDNA Jazz Gallery (J Mood) Widely experienced and recorded in Europe, pianist Magris demonstrates in this club date that he knows how to reach an American audience steeped in Latin and Caribbean music. The front line has trumpeter Brian Lynch at his fieriest, and the imaginative young […]

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Monday Recommendation(s): Three From ECM

Andy Sheppard, Romaria (ECM) The title tune, written and first recorded by the Brazilian Renato Teixeira, was made still more famous by the singer Elis Regina’s 1977 recording. It has been a beloved standard song in Brazil for four decades. British saxophonist Sheppard and his quartet hew to the spirits if not the letters of […]

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More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

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