Geri Antoinette Allen (June 12, 1957 – June 27, 2017) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator who was dedicated to the advancement of women in jazz. She taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh.
Geri was born in Pontiac, Michigan, and raised in Detroit. Her father, Mount Allen Jr, was a school principal, her mother, Barbara, a government administrator in the defence industry. She learned the piano from the age of seven, and by her early teens had decided to be a jazz pianist. At Cass technical school, in Detroit, she studied with the free-thinking trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, and in 1979 was one of the first graduates of the new jazz course at Howard University, directed by the hard-bop trumpet star Donald Byrd. Allen studied with the mainstream-to-bop piano virtuoso Kenny Barron in New York, and then pursued an ethnomusicology degree at Pittsburgh, studying with the saxophonist and academic Nathan Davis, and the acclaimed Ghanaian musicologist Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia.
Here’s “Stoned Love” from above album.
Graduating in 1982, Allen returned to New York to immerse herself in the M-Base collective, imaginatively contributing to Steve Coleman’s debut album Motherland Pulse in the process. In the late 1980s, she began her rich association with Haden and Motian, took up the synthesiser in the album Open on All Sides in the Middle, worked with a variety of prominent soloists including the saxophonists Arthur Blythe, Dewey Redman and Wayne Shorter, and the trumpeter Woody Shaw, and played with the rock group Living Colour.
In 1993, she accompanied Carter, and the following year recorded Ornette Coleman’s Sound Museum albums – the first pianist in over 35 years that he had worked with. In 1995, she married a regular playing partner, the trumpeter Wallace Roney. They later had a daughter and a son but the marriage ended in divorce.
In 1996 Allen was awarded the Jazzpar Prize. She continued to be a prolific contributor to contemporary music as a composer, as the leader of a succession of diverse recording projects, and eventually as an inspiring teacher. In 2004, she made the dynamic trio album The Life of a Song, with Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, and also shared the antics of the Scottish drummer Tom Bancroft’s surreal Orchestro Interrupto band on tour. In 2006, she composed the jazz suite For the Healing of the Nations as a tribute to 9/11 victims and survivors, and contributed to Lisa Gay Hamilton’s prizewinning documentary Beah: A Black Woman Speaks. In 2008 she received a Guggenheim fellowship.
In 2011, Allen released an astonishing sequence of albums, beginning with the flat-out dance-inspired Timeline Live, featuring the explosive percussion input of the young tapdancing phenomenon Maurice Chestnut. Later that year came Flying Toward the Sound – a solo homage to pianists from Cecil Taylor to Hancock and Monk that Allen had composed during her Guggenheim fellowship – and then the Christmas album A Child Is Born(2011) . Two years later, in the kind of double-taking contrast the pianist had sprung on listeners throughout her career, Allen made the Motown tribute Grand River Crossings (2013), bringing her own vision to classic songs by such musicians as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.
Allen was a longtime resident of Montclair, New Jersey. For 10 years she taught jazz and improvisational studies at the University of Michigan, and she became director of the jazz studies program at the University of Pittsburgh in 2013.
Allen died on June 27, 2017, two weeks after her 60th birthday, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after suffering from cancer.
(Edited from John Fordham’s obit @ the Guardian & Wikipedia)
