Jazz Festival 2006, The Front Room
November 8 | Reviewed by Patrick Fitzsimons

The Geri Allen Trio, one of the title acts of the Wellington International Jazz Festival, gave an inspired performance on Wednesday night at the Front Room. The house was filled with a typical Wellington jazz crowd; the people who say Oh Yeah as though they were playing, the people who tap your chair from behind as if to let you know they can keep time as well as any drummer and the people who clap thirty times during a drum solo but not once for the piano one because they're not sure if it’s finished. They’re a goodnatured crowd, regardless, and ready to appreciate. The show began when she spoke. She sat herself on her stool, turned over her shoulder and said “So...” And it was the voice that we wanted, effortless and American. “I gotta feel your vibrations tonight,” she told us, and people seemed willing to oblige.

Geri Allen was older and looking a little more tired than her photo in the booklet had suggested, not quite the African Queen I had expected. Her bass player, Darryl Hall, spidered up his fret while he tuned, and I read the names he’d played with and the fact that he won the Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition for Bass in 1995, perhaps the coolest award in the world. Mark Johnson, on drums, and boasting a similar record of famous names, sat behind a modest array of cymbals in a homemade sweater. They had an unassuming air, and while the performance was a flurry of nods and grins, the few words Geri said were restrained and modest, and neither bass player nor drummer said a word. This performance was the finale of the trio’s tour, performing tunes from Geri Allen’s new album Timeless Portraits and Dreams.

They began slowly, and felt no need to blow the audience away with an unnecessary showcase of ability, though we wouldn’t have complained. I had a seat on the left side of the auditorium, with a clear view of the piano keys. The piano began and fed the bass, who was all smiles around his instrument’s long neck, his head whipping constantly between piano and drums, but always in perfect time with Johnson’s tolling ride cymbal. You could tell no one felt a need to impress; this is music that goes beyond the desire for frivolous flair or that takes pride in virtuosity, it is about the communication of ideas. At a certain point technical ability is only a tool for the communication of these ideas, and they weren't obsessed with its display.

While Geri Allen lent her name to the group, and was hailed in the programme as “perhaps the most significant pianist-composer of her generation”, jazz is nothing if not a collaborative effort. There was certainly no hierarchy between the trio; the performance relied on their complete cooperation and communication. Nods signaled a change in feel, smiles began a solo or encouraged an idea – they spent far more time looking at each other than their instruments. Regardless of the fact that Allen requested our vibrations at the beginning of the set, I think Hall’s and Johnson’s really gave more to the music than mine did. The entire time I felt as though I was privy to a discussion I had no hope of being able to comprehend. Not that I couldn't say Yeah as loud as the man behind me. I could.

The piano trio formula is a unique one. It lends itself to a subtle, interactive sound and more experimental form. The three instruments play off each other’s ideas and lines so extensively that it often becomes difficult to determine who is the soloist, if there is ‘supposed’ to be one at all. While following the tradition of piano trios established by such names as Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, and practically every prominent jazz pianist of the last half-century, the Geri Allen Trio demonstrated more than a purely jazz influence. The pulsing piano and bass riffs that were discovered and held beneath the drum solos hinted at soul rather than traditional jazz, and it was clear that no musical ideas were limited by a formulated genre.

While the performance demonstrated a musical maturity and experience that can hardly be expected for a Wellington stage, the venue (The Front Room) did little to aid it. The trio were suspended on an odd puppet-show stage, with the lights that hung in an arc above them being adjusted insistently throughout the second set. The break between sets was long, and the second set fairly short, but ultimately little can be taken from the quality of the music. The audience walked away thoroughly inspired, though I suppose, at $60 a head, they had come to be.