The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Thoughtful Approach Pays Off For Jazzman
New Haven-born Ben Allison’s 12th album out Tuesday
NEW HAVEN » Ben Allison isn’t just a string plucker at some hotel bar. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But the New Haven-born jazzman has composed, toured with his double bass, taught and advocated for musicians — part of his thoughtful take on jazz and other music. This coming week he’ll also release his 12th album of original music, the second on his own label.
Bass player Allison, 50, speaking via phone from his home in Greenwich Village recently, has played the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, as well as the old New Haven Jazz Festival and Firehouse 12 on Crown Street. But he’s more often heard in New York City and elsewhere.
Three times he was a featured composer, arranger and performer with Jazz Sinfonica, an 80-piece orchestra based in Sao Paulo, Brazil; he has played Carnegie Hall
and has written music for film, television and radio, including the theme for the National Public Radio show “On the Media”; and written music to a Donald Margulies play.
Up-and-coming young sax player Mike Casey, who attended University of Hartford’s Hartt School and has recorded an album at The SideDoor Jazz Club in Old Lyme, calls Allison “one of the most exciting, progressive, daring bassists and composers on the scene today.”
Allison’s new album, “Layers of the City,” is on iTunes now and will be officially released on Tuesday. Recorded as a quintet, it is a satisfying mix of melodic and atmospheric cool jazz, ranging from throwback (“The Detective’s Wife”) to “Blowback,” a horn-and-guitar feast, to the dizzying ride “Get Me Offa This Thing.”
Allison said the former was first titled “Duke Vibe” and then “Mingus Vibe,” but on the advice of his 12-yearold daughter, he settled on “The Detective’s Wife” as a film-noir nod.
On the latter tune, “Get Me Offa This Thing,” Allison said the experimental jazz sound is a free-wheeling improv on the tight and brisk title cut “Layers of the City,” which was the instruction he gave the other “cats” playing it.
“I tend to think visually when I compose or when I play. I kind of have these almost-like movies running through my head. And for that one, it just felt like you were on a boat in a storm, almost queasy. And then it kind of settles down and the boat is kind of rocking and the sun is glinting off the water,” he chuckles.
The album was recorded live so there’s no studio layering, but the odd shards of trumpet were accomplished through a second microphone on Jeremy Pelt’s trumpet that allowed him to play with the sound through pedals on the floor, for an electronic effect.
Allison and his groups have released albums about once every year or 18 months since the late 1990s. He took a three-year break after the 11th to recharge.
Asked how his music has changed or is affected by trends, Allison said, “I usually do not think about ... trying to follow trend lines. In fact, I could say I’m the opposite of that, even to a fault, trying to buck the trends. But really, I’m just driven by my aesthetic, by what I like. I listen to all kinds of music ... and the things that seep into your brain when you’re listening to music are the things you hold onto.”
Like many pros, Allison plays in different groups and different settings, also helping to inspire tunes.
He said he started his label, Sonic Camera, because “it’s like a snapshot in time of what I was thinking of that moment.” This album’s also crowdfunded through PledgeMusic.
There are still some jazz labels limping along, Allison said, and some indie labels, such as his previous label, Palmetto Records. But “I ... reached a point in my career where I thought I could do as good or better of a job as they were doing. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes . ... UPC codes, distribution channels, you have to know how to track your performance royalties. The marketing side of it, of course, is huge.”
The main thing labels did in the past was finance projects, but that has been changing for the worse.
“For those of us who want to pursue doing their own thing, it is increasingly possible (to go it alone), so record labels don’t have a stranglehold on distribution anymore.”
Allison, who co-founded the nonprofit Jazz Composers Collective as a young man, has been able to make a living recording and touring as a musician, “but at this stage, having done it for a long time, and (having) had a lot of fun ... I’m feeling a little less inclined to be on the road as much.”
So he’s been teaching more lately at The New School, which is on 13th Street and 5th Avenue just three blocks from his house.
New Haven days
As a boy, Allison was a Led Zeppelin fan with rock dreams. He attended the Neighborhood Music School on Audubon Street here, which he calls “fantastic” along with the whole arts district.
“But really the big one for me was ECA (the Educational Center for the Arts); that was the one that really helped me coalesce my certainty that music would be part of my profession in life.
“In fact, I was ... probably 14 years old and the New York Times came to do a story on ECA and the person interviewing came into the class and said, ‘Show of hands, who wants to be a professional musician?’ And I didn’t voluntarily raise my hand ... but my hand just shot up. And I remember that moment because I was like, ‘OK, brain, I guess you’re telling me this is where we’re going.’”
Asked his opinion on recent news of frustrated Yale students trying to get more formal jazz education as undergrads, Allison said when he was in ECA, Yale had a generation of students who became very influential in the genre. “Since then, it hasn’t churned out a lot of really influential jazz musicians, and I could never understand why. Because jazz, if I may say, is one of our greatest art forms ... and it’s a symbol of everything Yale believes in; which is artistic excellence and freedom of thought and creative enterprise and democratic ideals... you name it.”
Allison said teaching jazz history is one thing but “on the other hand, it doesn’t tell you what is happening and what will happen. And this is an extremely vibrant art form. I’m ... the president of the New York chapter of The Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys, and I can tell you with first-hand knowledge that in the jazz field of recordings that are submitted, it is one of the most active categories . ... More jazz albums are produced than almost any other genre, and that’s shocking to a lot of people.”
It’s not surprising that they’re not being heard as much in a pop-soaked media, but there certainly are a lot of people making jazz records. Allison said as far as streaming music goes, it’s also about how tunes are found online; tags are put in by staffers and sometimes “don’t line up with reality. It’s a challenge for artists because when I was coming up, I had the benefit of the record-store geek... a classification of human that doesn’t exist in the way that it really should (now).”
As a kid in New Haven, one of the counter guys at a local store would give him recommendations based on Allison’s likes. The tips made sense, but they weren’t the type that an algorithm would make.
Allison actually testified to Congress in 2012 on artists’ compensation amid internet radio and on-demand streaming. Now, with the help of crowdfunding and “superfans,” he says, he’s in the black already on the new album.
As for his next big gig, Allison will have a four-day run, mostly with his group Think Free, at the Jazz Standard in New York July 20-23, two shows per night ($30). See jazzstandard.com.