(Reprinted from the April 2022 issue of Downbeat magazine)
Whenever bassist Ben Allison records, he always leaves some time at the end of the session for an unstructured improvisation with the band. He records these offhand moments and usually files the track without much ado. But the improvisation that concluded the session for his 2021 record, Moments Inside—released via his label, Sonic Camera Records, last November—was different. Deeply nuanced, the free piece tapped into the players’ elation at playing again post-lockdown: They extemporized without interruption for almost half an hour. In February, Allison launched this sweeping track as Moments Outside, a complementary afterword to the discrete reflections of Moments Inside.
Though wholly unplanned, Moments Outside stands as a remarkably finished piece. “It’s a complete statement, where you can hear the musicians finding their way through this completely spontaneous composition,” Allison said in a remote video chat from his Manhattan home. “It feels like a suite of tunes that have a trajectory and that fit together cohesively, beginning to end.”
To understand this newest album, Allison’s fifth as an independent label owner, it helps to listen closely to Moments Inside. Recorded in June 2021, these eight tracks emerged, Allison said, from the pressure cooker of life under lockdown the year before, when the world was shuttered so jarringly. Against expectation, Allison’s pandemic visions were of light and air, sea and sky—symbols of the very freedom he yearned for during that first troubling year of the pandemic.
Allison opens Moments Inside with “Safe Passage,” establishing his composer’s gift for melodic storytelling and the group’s easeful, string-centric sound (with guitarists Chico Pinheiro and Steve Cardenas). From this tune’s clean surfaces, he segues into “The Chase,” with its variegated percussive textures and brisk pulse (from drummer Allan Mednard). It’s clear, by the end of these two exuberant tunes, that Allison has no intention of deconstructing our communal suffering of the last two years.
Rather, he holds it differently. Take “Milton,” for example, a tribute to Brazil’s Milton Nascimento, one of Allison’s favorite composers. Atop a bustling rhythm section, solo guitar articulates the brightness of the changes, dipping only occasionally—and masterfully—into their harmonic shadow.
“[Brazilian music] is as deep and complex as any musical tradition ever,” Allison offered. “Even when [Brazilian musicians] are writings sad songs, about horrible things like poverty, there's still a sense of beauty to the music. I find that so inspiring and awesome.”
He brings this same insight to “The Great Sandero,” a darker, moodier piece despite the smooth lyricism that he uses to recall not just Nascimento, but jazz fusion composers like Weather Report’s Joe Zawinul.
“It’s in the way that the harmonies move above pedal points,” Allison said. “I wanted to write a tune that had one simple melodic idea that was repeated through different permutations.”
The title is completely made up, he continued. “But it's mysterious, like an imaginary magician who is creating mystical, wondrous things before our ears.”
Allison’s also conjures the fantastic on “Voyage of the Nautilus,” a modern jazz reference to Jules Verne’s adventure, Twenty-Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Written in five, the composition rolls like waves crashing—an effect that’s especially strong on the bridge, as the melody surges and swells. As Allison explains, this musical motion represents the submarine’s plunge toward the depths and the astonishing sea creatures that live there.
“My brain is a strange place,” Allison joked, in discussing what sparks his creative musicianship. Here he’s referring specifically to “A Child Sings in Stone,” arguably the most rending piece on the album. The prompt for this composition’s mournful lines—and Allison’s eloquent bass solo on the track—derives from an e.e. cummings’ poem that suggests children’s voices rising from the grave. Allison was reading this poem around the time that he heard about the shooting of Duante Wright in April 2021.
”The idea of losing a child—I think there's nothing worse. It's just so disturbing,” he said. “Hearing [Wright’s] parents talk about their loss—it hit me very hard, and I sat down and wrote this tune in three minutes.”
Allison was also hit hard by the death of his close friend and longtime collaborator, pianist Frank Kimbrough, at the end of 2020. Not only had Kimbrough played on six of Allison’s 10 releases for Palmetto Records, but the two were founding members of the Jazz Composers Collective, a forward-thinking non-profit that sponsored scores of jazz jams, concerts, and commissions from 1992 through the mid-aughts.
In Kimbrough’s memory, Allison added the harmonically dense “House Party Starting” to the album, the only cover on the roster. In Allison’s hands, this surprisingly complex composition, by the oft-overlooked pianist/composer Herbie Nichols, unfurls fluidly.
“I think this is the first tune that Frank ever brought to me,” Allison said. “I went back and listened to it, and I heard some clusters of harmonies that are not the way that [Nichols] originally recorded it. And the intro is mine. But how it came together was inspired by my love of Herbie Nichols—and by Frank.”
Allison originally wrote the only other pre-pandemic contribution to the album, “Breakfast with Eric,” as a theme for a friend’s indie radio show. Allison based the jazz blues tune on the odd-meter, whole-tone bass line in Eric Dolphy’s “Hat and Beard,” from Out To Lunch!, and in live performance it served as an open vehicle for Pinheiro and Cardenas to trade with abandon. Today this tracks serves as a reminder of the days when such in-person abandon was the norm, rather than a socially regulated event.
But Allison is resolute in his optimism. He’s looking forward to releasing Moments Inside on vinyl this spring. He plans to drop Healing Power, a tribute to composer Carla Bley, on Sunnyside in July. And his work as an advocate for musical artists—ongoing since his days with the Jazz Composers Collective—continues at the New School, where he both teaches and co-chairs the faculty senate.
“Someday we’ll be able to look back and say, ‘Those moments were finite,’” he observed. “We reemerged from those moments of total lockdown to find that our culture and our art are still here. It’s a great feeling.” Here, on the outside.