Geri Allen – Flying Toward the Angels

A Memorial

Geri Allen's album Flying Towards the Sound

It seems I do my best listening these days while driving alone in the car. It’s a quiet time and I can concentrate on the music. Lately, I’ve been listening to Flying Toward the Sound, the remarkable solo piano album by Geri Allen released in 2010. Like most music that’s affected me deeply, this album requires a time commitment. It unfolds its true wonder upon repeated listening.

Flying Toward the Sound completes something of a full circle for me. I was first introduced to the music of Geri Allen through her 1985 solo piano release, Homegrown. To this day Homegrown is one of the most remarkable piano albums I’ve heard (listen to her conceptions of Bemsha Swing, and Round About Midnight). She presents her entire canon here. A canon that mixes tonality with chromaticism (or atonality), rhythmic ostinato with a sometimes arhythmic phrasing that resolves back to time.

Originality

Geri Allen has passed now. I can say that writing these words today still brings disbelief and sadness. This was a woman who moved jazz ahead at a time when some wondered if jazz could indeed move any further forward. She came of age at a time when jazz began looking back on itself and a type of standard-based conservatism came to the fore.

Not Geri Allen. She developed an original language, a new way of dancing and phrasing. She proved that it could be done. Of any pianist of my generation, she, to me, is the one that proved that still more could be added to the great modern piano innovations of the ’60s and ’70s – that Herbie-Chick-McCoy-Keith nexus – that still embodies so much of the piano of today.

Geri Allen’s approach has influences, yes, in fact, the Flying Toward the Sound album is dedicated to Herbie, McCoy and Cecil Taylor, but her influences are so fully incorporated into an overall, personal concept that I never get an inkling of hearing something I’ve heard previously from someone else. I don’t doubt influences are there but as Farah Jasmine Griffith says in the liner notes Allen does not play the music of Taylor, Tyner, and Hancock; rather she plays toward it, around it, through it to her own unique voicings…resulting in a flight of light and sound.

To me, Geri Allen was a genius and an American treasure. I’m not sure when the nation will come around to see that. Maybe never. Ornette passed away and I don’t think it even made the nightly TV news. Part of the reason may be that yes, the music does require something of a listening discipline and that extended listening is something we don’t really learn as Americans.

We are the land of the song – the 3-minute song. We do that probably better than anywhere but don’t ask us to listen much beyond that. So many other kinds of music ask for more of a time commitment, more personal investment. To me, art has the power to change your life when you invest the time. You invest your time, in return, you get the reward – an aesthetic or spiritual reward.

Geri Allen's album Flying Towards the Sound

Geri Allen on Etudes

My favorite Geri Allen recording is Ornette’s tune Lonely Woman on the Soulnote release Etudes from 1987 (Charlie Haden, bass; Paul Motian, drums; Geri Allen, piano). This is one of my lifetime top 10 recordings. I remember the moment I heard it. It felt as if somehow I’d already heard it. Like the code was already written in my brain and this was it just coming to light in my life experience. The music spoke to me personally.

The playing on Lonely Woman is sublime. The piece really breathes. There is deep spirit evoked in the performance. And then there is Geri’s playing, tonal then chromatic, in the time, outside the time, jagged, angular lines, that seem to stumble upwards slightly out of control, then fall back into the time.

I first heard this trio at the Village Vanguard. I remember I attended multiple days, multiple sets. At one performance, I remember Charlie making an announcement from the stage asking folks to refrain from smoking because Geri was a little under the weather. This was around Christmastime 1989 or so. At one point I saw her sitting alone between sets and had thoughts of approaching and saying Hi but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’m sure I would have just blathered something nonsensical. But she seemed approachable and that’s been my loss.

Geri Allen playing on Ornette Coleman's Sound Museum album

Geri Allen on Ornette’s Sound Museum

I couldn’t write about Geri Allen without mentioning Ornette Coleman’s wonderful Sound Museum CDs released in 1996 on Ornette’s own Harmolodic label.

There are two albums: Sound Museum – Hidden Man and Sound Museum – Three Women. The two disks are almost identical as far as tune selection but each song on each disk gets its own unique concept in performance The band is Ornette, Geri Allen, piano; Charnett Moffett, bass; and Denardo Coleman, drums.

Paul Bley, in a blindfold test he did with writer Ted Panken, listened to a song from the Sound Museum sessions. He said that no pianist can really play with Ornette. It doesn’t work because the pianist can’t escape creating a tonal center.

Well, it’s a waste of time with the pianist. There’s a good reason he doesn’t use piano. See, the horn player can make the transitions to wherever he wants to go at any time, but the piano player actually has to change their mindset to get rid of the key center. – Paul Bley

I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea that a chording instrument will find difficulty comping against lines that are free (so-called). I do disagree with the idea that the piano or a pianist somehow doesn’t belong in Ornette’s band.

To my ears, what Geri Allen plays on these records works and, in fact, brings textures and colors to the music that we don’t often hear with Ornette’s sound. She comps tonally (somewhat) but the tonality is never fixed or static – it’s fluid – it’s always sliding and moving around. It’s in motion, there is no dominant key center. It’s open but at the same time, it’s rooted in the traditional function of a pianist comping in a jazz band. Her comping (accompaniment) is based on the melodies and textures being played in the band at the moment, and that is what comping should be.

Sound Museum has a precedent. Ornette did something similar with his In All Languages album. This is a two-disk set where his classic quartet (Ornette, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins) records these wonderful new songs on album one and then Prime Time, Ornette’s electronic band, records the same songs on album 2. In the Prime Time recordings, there are two guitarists (two chording instruments), and together they create a very open, chromatic world for the band to sit in, one not tied to any specific key center.

Angels

The last time I heard Geri Allen was at Birdland on the “Perfection” tour with David Murray and Terri Lyne Carrington in May of 2016. It was a wonderful set. Geri seemed pretty stoic at the piano that night. I, of course, had no idea she was ill. A little more than a year later, she passed away.

Besides a deep connection with her music, I somehow always felt a personal closeness to Geri Allen.  She was basically my age, she’s from Detroit.  I’m from Windsor, Ontario, just across the Detroit River.  She was at the University of Pittsburgh while I attended Carnegie-Mellon University at about the same time.  CMU is just up the road from U Pitt.  I’m not positive but I believe I heard Geri Allen play at the Carnegie-Mellon student union with a quartet around 1979 or 1980. Come to think of it, that may have been a good ice-breaker to ask her that time between sets at the Village Vanguard in 1989.

I don’t really believe in “Rest in Peace”.  Someone dies and we say RIP.  It’s become a throwaway line. It doesn’t seem appropriate in this case.  The cover of Flying Toward the Sound is a wonderful picture of angels.  This is a better way to remember Geri Allen.  Now as an angel – someone to watch over us. 

The metaphor of dwarfs “standing on the shoulders of giants” expresses how you discover truth by building on previous discoveries. Geri Allen certainly did this in her lifetime and became a giant.  But the metaphor of “standing on the shoulders of giants” doesn’t seem right when applied to Geri. I like more the idea of being accompanied by an angel.  One of our better angels.