Geri Allen - The Life of a Song

previous review | reviews home | next review

Geri Allen
The Life of a Song
(Telarc)

A recording by pianist Geri Allen, accompanied byDave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, can promise only excellence. And with the opening cut on this CD, she delivers—poised, modernist jazz, beautifully articulated. So too when she plumbs the simple melodic beauty and haunting temperament of Mal Waldron’s “Soul Eyes” or Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” each a brilliant counterpoint to her free jazz inclinations.

Promised excellence, but not uniformly delivered excellence. Allen also courts the more traditional or newer listener with her focus on accessible rhythms, particularly on “Black Bottom” (where the composition’s pulse becomes the end-all and be-all and never develops). It is better on the funky “In Appreciation: A Celebration Song,” where Ms. Allen works creative filligrees atop the rhythmic bottom which itself dissolves and reemerges. Even here, however, the pianist lapses into a too-sentimental melodicism that proves droll.

Allen’s preoccupation with listener-friendly rhythm-a-ning proves distracting but the desultory moments are few and far between on what is largely a reminder that Geri Allen is a brilliant jazz pianist. — JULES EPSTEIN

~~~

Geri Allen: The Life of a Song (Telarc)

Release Date: 24 August 2004

Personnel: Geri Allen (piano); Dave Holland (double bass); Jack DeJohnette (drums); plus one tune with Dwight Andrews (saxophone); Marcus Belgrave (flugelhorn) and Clifton Anderson (trombone) added

please send comments to jazzmatazz@att.net

last update 7 November 2004

Geri Allen The Life of a Song (Telarc)

Geri Allen
The Life of a Song
(Telarc)