Geri Allen
Pianist, composer, Guggenheim Fellow, and educator Geri Allen died on Tuesday, June 27, 2017 from complications of cancer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She had recently celebrated her 60th birthday.

Hailed as one of the most accomplished pianists and educators of her time, Allen’s most recent position was as Director of Jazz Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She was especially proud of performing with renowned pianist McCoy Tyner for the last two years, and was also part of two recent groundbreaking trios: ACS (Geri Allen, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Esperanza Spalding) and the MAC Power Trio with David Murray and Carrington – their debut recording Perfection was released on Motéma Music in 2016 to critical acclaim.

“The jazz community will never be the same with the loss of one of our geniuses, Geri Allen. Her virtuosity and musicality are unparalleled,” expressed Carrington upon learning of her passing. “I will miss my sister and friend, but I am thankful for all of the music she made and all of the incredible experiences we had together for over 35 years. She is a true original – a one of kind – never to be forgotten. My heart mourns, but my spirit is filled with the gift of having known and learned from Geri Allen.“

She was the first woman and youngest person to receive the Danish Jazzpar Prize, and was the first recipient of the Soul Train Lady of Soul Award for Jazz. In 2011, she was nominated for an NAACP Award for Timeline, her Tap Quartet project. Over the last few years, Allen served as the program director of NJPAC’s All-Female Jazz Residency, which offered a weeklong one-of-a-kind opportunity for young women, ages 14-25, to study jazz.

Allen was also recently honored to be one of the producers of the expanded and re-mastered recording of Erroll Garner’s The Complete Concert by the Sea, which garnered her an Essence Image Award nomination as well as a GRAMMY® Award-nomination in 2016. She felt strongly that students should have access to this material, and went on to organize a 60th anniversary performance of the material at the 2015 Monterey Jazz Festival with Jason Moran and Christian Sands.

Having grown up in Detroit, a region known for its rich musical history, Allen’s affinity for jazz stemmed from her father’s passion for the music. She began taking lessons at 7-years-old, and started her early music education under the mentorship of trumpeter Marcus Belgrave at the Cass Technical High School. In 1979, she was one of the first to graduate from Howard University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in jazz studies. It was there that she began to embrace music from all cultures that would ultimately influence her work. During that time, she studied with the great Kenny Barron in New York City.

“I first met Geri when she was a student at Howard. She would take the train up to my house in Brooklyn for lessons. Even then it was apparent that Geri heard some things musically that others did not,” Barron reflects. “In 1994 we performed a duo piano concert at the Caramoor Festival in New York and I realized how fearless she was and at the same time how focused she was. It was a lesson that I took to heart. Geri is not only a great musician, composer and pianist, she is a giant and will be sorely missed.”

In New York, Allen met Nathan Davis, a respected educator who encouraged her to attend the University of Pittsburgh where he served as Director for their Jazz Studies department. She followed his advice and earned her Masters Degree in Ethnomusicology in 1982. In 2013, she became their Director of Jazz Studies upon Davis’ retirement.

While at UPITT, Allen’s commitment to community outreach and bridging educational inequities manifested through her pioneering engagement on the research education network of Internet2 and CENIC, where she connected virtually to universities and cultural institutions across the country, collaborating with artists and technologists such as Terri Lyne Carrington, Chris Chafe, George Lewis, Michael Dressen, Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer and the SFJAZZ High School All-Stars.

She was also the musical director of the Mary Lou Williams Collective, recording and performing the music of the great Mary Lou Williams, including her sacred work Mass For Peace. Allen also collaborated with S. Epatha Merkerson and Farah Jasmine Griffin on two music theatre projects: “Great Apollo Women,” which premiered at the legendary Apollo Theatre, and “A Conversation with Mary Lou,” which premiered at the Harlem Stage as an educational component for the Harlem Stage collaboration. The University of Pittsburgh hosted the first ever Mary Lou Williams Cyber Symposium where Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, and Allen performed a three piano improvisation from Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh in real time using Internet2 technology.

Allen was a recent recipient of the Howard University Pinnacle Award presented by Professor Connaitre Miller and Afro Blue. She has served as a faculty member at Howard University, the New England Conservatory, and the University of Michigan where she taught for ten years. In 2014, Allen was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Music Degree by Berklee College of Music in Boston. The Honorable Congressman John Conyers Jr. presented the 2014 Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Jazz Legacy Award to Allen.

In 1985, Allen released The Printmakers – her debut release as a leader, and one of the hundreds of releases that encompasses her boisterous discography. In 1990, she signed to Blue Note Records and released The Nurturer with mentor Marcus Belgrave, Kenny Garrett, Robert Hurst, Jeff “Tain” Watts and Eli Fountain. This release showcased a more conventional playing style while still maintaining the freedom of improvisation and expression that was so present at the start of her career.

Throughout the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Allen continued to be a pioneer for the genre both as a side-woman and as a leader. Her improvisational virtuosity was displayed on Ornette Coleman’s 1996 release of Sound Museum, her 1988 release The Gathering, and again in 2004 with The Life a Song featuring Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette. In 2010 her solo piano album, Flying Towards the Sound was critically acclaimed and was rated “Best of 2010” on NPR and DownBeat magazine’s Critics Polls.

Allen’s commissioned work “For the Healing of the Nations” in 2006 was written to pay tribute to the victims, survivors, and family members of the September 11th attacks. This special tribute was performed by the Howard University’s Afro Blue Jazz Choir and included performances from jazz musicians such as Oliver Lake, Craig Harris, Andy Bey, among others. It was also around this time that Allen had been awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship honoring her prolific role in furthering this creative art form. This allowed her to release the compositions “Refractions” and “Flying Towards the Sound,” as well as three short films under the Motéma Music label.

In 2008, Allen received the African American Classical Music Award from the Women of the New Jersey chapter of Spelman College as well as “A Salute to African-American Women: Phenomenal Woman” from the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, Epsilon chapter at the University of Michigan. Allen also performed in a theatrical and musical celebration honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the statue unveiling in Washington, DC.

In a career that spanned more than 35 years, she recorded, performed and collaborated with some of the most important artists of our time including Ornette Coleman, Ravi Coltrane, George Shirley, Dewey Redman, Jimmy Cobb, Sandra Turner-Barnes, Charles Lloyd, Marcus Belgrave, Betty Carter, Jason Moran, Lizz Wright, Marian McPartland, Roy Brooks, Vijay Iyer, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Laurie Anderson, Terri Lynn Carrington, Esperanza Spalding, Hal Willner, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Dianne Reeves, Joe Lovano, Dr. Billy Taylor, Carrie Mae Weems, Angélique Kidjo, Mary Wilson and The Supremes, Howard University’s Afro-Blue and many others.

Allen contributed some of the most groundbreaking and forward thinking music of the time. The remarkable pianist leaves behind a wealth of material that will educate future generations of musicians. A mother of three, she credited her family for making it possible for her to maintain such a successful and fruitful career. She was a cutting edge performing artist, and continued to entertain internationally up until her death.

Geri Allen is survived by her father Mount Vernell Allen, Jr., brother Mount Vernell Allen III, and three children: Laila, Wally, and Barbara Antoinette. Funeral arrangements and a memorial service are pending.

Kurt Rosenwinkel
American composer, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, and producer Kurt Rosenwinkel is one of the most celebrated musical voices in jazz and is widely renowned as one of the most distinctive and gifted guitarists to have ever played the instrument.

Rosenwinkel’s harmonically rich, rhythmically free, and incomparably fluid style has made him one of the most important jazz musicians to emerge in the last thirty years, and his groundbreaking sonic conception of the guitar has changed the way the instrument has been perceived and played ever since. His recordings as a bandleader in early aughts on Verve Records were strikingly original releases that reshaped contemporary jazz in the 21st century. The Enemies of Energy (2000), The Next Step (2001), Heartcore (2003) and Deep Song (2005), would redefine the sound of jazz for a new era, deftly fusing jazz’s deep acoustic traditions with electronics, digital manipulation, programmed beats, and utterly modern harmonic and compositional structures that even today we can still only reference as ‘Rosenwinkelian’.

He continues this freethinking experimentalism with albums like Our Secret World (2010), in collaboration with the Orchestra de Jazz Matosinhos, the “contemporary classic” (Kelman, All About Jazz) Star of Jupiter (2012), and Caipi (2017), a Brazilian influenced album with Rosenwinkel taking on most of the instrumental and vocal duties.

He continues to reinvent jazz standards on Reflections (2008) and Angels Around (2020). Rosenwinkel’s most recent releases include Kurt Rosenwinkel Plays Piano (2021), an album of solo piano pieces that offers an intimate look at Rosenwinkel’s relationship to the piano and how it formed his compositional mind, and a collaboration with pianist Jean-Paul Brodbeck entitled The Chopin Project (2022) which finds him reimagining Chopin compositions with Brodbeck in a jazz context. His latest upcoming album, Berlin Baritone is a solo improvisational album on baritone guitar, and a uniquely intimate release, where listeners get to hear Rosenwinkel discover the timbral world of his newfound instrument with reverence and curiosity. Rosenwinkel’s prolific output has always retained his unique voice, and each release is a constellation in his singular musical universe, always expanding outwards, to reach for the next beautiful sound.

In addition to his genre-defining work as a bandleader, Rosenwinkel is also an accomplished sideman, with over 150 credits to his name. His first exposure to international touring was with Gary Burton, the legendary vibraphonist who hired him out of Berklee College in 1992. That same year he joined Paul Motian’s Electric Bebop Band, and entered into a decade-long musical relationship with the drummer that helped usher in a new era in Motian’s already illustrious career.

These collaborative relationships, along with tours as Joe Henderson’s guitarist in 1997 established Rosenwinkel early in his career as a player who had the blessing of giants of the jazz world. His work with Brian Blade Fellowship, Mark Turner, Joshua Redman, Seamus Blake, Donald Fagen, and hosts of other jazz luminaries further cemented his star power.

Rosenwinkel’s success has also extended far beyond the world of jazz. He has been a member of the Crossroads Guitar Festival family since 2013, when he was personally invited by blues and rock legend Eric Clapton to perform and share the stage with him. The iconic guitarist who called Rosenwinkel “a genius” also featured on Rosenwinkel’s Caipi (2017), playing on the song “Little Dream”. Rosenwinkel’s collaboration with Q-Tip on The Renaissance (2008) and Kamaal the Abstract (2009) showed that Rosenwinkel’s playing had breadth that extended comfortably into hip-hop that has led to performances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon with The Roots, and a collaboration with internet sensations DOMi and JD BECK.

In the winter of 2016, Rosenwinkel formed the independent music label Heartcore Records with the focused intention of signing and promoting a new generation of musicians whose exacting standards and creative passions equal his own. Over the last few years Heartcore has released a series of online masterclasses taught by Rosenwinkel that leads viewers through deep theoretical, compositional, and technical explorations of musical topics with humor and approachability. Heartcore Records has also allowed Rosenwinkel to flourish in another dimension of his ever-evolving musical practice as a record producer of other artists, while still consistently putting out his own music that blazes new pathways in the annals of modern jazz.