Pianist/Composer Geri Allen will be performing with her Quartet at Miller Theater @ Columbia University in NYC on October 25th, 2008.
Show Time 8:00 PM
The Geri Allen Quartet
Geri Allen - Piano
Dwayne Dolphin - Bass
Kassa Overall - Drums
Maurice Chestnut - Tap
“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." --Tavis Smiley
Geri Allen Bio
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, Massachusettes, from the Honorable Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves. Ms. Allen is scheduled to hold a residency at Columbia University within this academic year.
Geri Allen is a recent recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Music Composition, and is presently composing “Refractions”, 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.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).
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, a Peabody Award for the musical soundtrack she composed for Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, a documentary film directed by Lisa Gay Hamilton, and, she 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.
Show Time 8:00 PM
The Geri Allen Quartet
Geri Allen - Piano
Dwayne Dolphin - Bass
Kassa Overall - Drums
Maurice Chestnut - Tap
“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." --Tavis Smiley
Geri Allen Bio
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, Massachusettes, from the Honorable Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves. Ms. Allen is scheduled to hold a residency at Columbia University within this academic year.
Geri Allen is a recent recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Music Composition, and is presently composing “Refractions”, 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.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).
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, a Peabody Award for the musical soundtrack she composed for Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, a documentary film directed by Lisa Gay Hamilton, and, she 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.
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