The only time pianist Geri Allen and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel performed as a duo—at the Philharmonie de Paris, in September 2012—they began with a song Allen had suggested, “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing.” An early masterwork of Billy Strayhorn’s, composed for Duke Ellington’s orchestra, it reveals what Strayhorn biographer David Hajdu called an “inner torment” wrapped within a lovely melody.
In Paris that evening, Mr. Rosenwinkel eased his way in, one fragment of that melody at a time. Soon, Allen built a rhythm from rolling chords, spilling the song’s phrases across the full range of her piano’s keyboard as if they were tiny chants that rang sweetly but with a brooding undercurrent. Thereafter, Mr. Rosenwinkel carried most of the melody as the two stretched the tune across more than 10 minutes, the glow of his electric-guitar tones enhanced by Allen’s glittering upper-register ostinatos. Gentle waves of sound from her piano led him in and out of tempo and form; the two musicians focused more on Strayhorn’s complex feelings than on his composition’s structure.
So goes the first track of “A Lovesome Thing: Live at the Philharmonie de Paris” (Motéma/Heartcore), which was recorded at that concert 11 years ago and released last week. They had performed together a few months earlier, within an ensemble led by Mr. Rosenwinkel at Manhattan’s Jazz Standard. Here was an enthusiastic reunion, this time just the two of them. In the years that followed, according to Mr. Rosenwinkel, he and Allen talked about making a studio recording together, maybe even co-leading a band. Those things never happened.
And by 2017, Allen was gone. Her death at age 60, from complications of cancer, cut short a career still in full bloom that had already left its monumental mark. The influence of her pianism and her compositions, of her career as a bandleader and a master collaborator, of her presence in general on the jazz scene—on our very idea of jazz—are hard to overstate and only beginning to be fully grasped. Nearly everyone wanted to make music with her, and many did (in addition to releasing nearly two dozen recordings as a leader, she was co-leader or band member on over 100 more).
Mr. Rosenwinkel’s fascination with Allen’s music began in his teens, when he first heard her late-1980s albums. Those recordings solidified Allen’s standing as a first-rank player; they also announced a graceful and liberating synthesis of styles at a moment when the jazz community had grown balkanized. If Mr. Rosenwinkel benefited from this galvanizing vision, his own music during the past 20 years has in turn become a touchstone for many younger players, especially guitarists. His distinctive tone and approach on his instrument, like Allen’s on hers, express rare blends of clarity and openness, of warmth and tension.
The easy rapport between these two musicians was due to more than shared attitude. The drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, a close and frequent collaborator of Allen’s, once told me that she could “literally hear a guitar sometimes when Geri played,” especially in the way that Ms. Allen slid from one chord to another. The 2022 release “Kurt Rosenwinkel Plays Piano” revealed both his prowess on that instrument and its centrality to his ideas about composition.
The version of Mr. Rosenwinkel’s “Simple #2” here forgoes the power chords that open the song on his 2020 release “Angels Around.” He heads straight for the tender heart of his blues-based melody, and she offers thoughtful countermelody and spiky commentary, largely via chiming chords.
The subtle ingenuity with which Allen and Mr. Rosenwinkel manipulate both tone and time are best expressed through the unison lines and interlaced phrases of “Open-Handed Reach,” which Allen composed for a Kennedy Center tribute to one of her mentors, pianist Billy Taylor, and which she had never recorded.
Allen was one of jazz’s great innovators—not through any one identifiable technique or stylistic advancement, but through her ability to enrich and expand that which came before, and to distill influences into highly personal musical statements. As pianist Vijay Iyer once wrote in an essay, she found “multidimensional cracks in the rhythm,” and sought whatever a song “wasn’t saying yet.” Both ideas are exemplified by this duo’s version of George Gershwin’s “Embraceable You.”
As heard here, Allen addressed the Parisian audience after that song. She explained that this interpretation was based on an arrangement by another of her forebears, Herbie Hancock (from his 1998 release, “Gershwin’s World”). “I don’t know if you recognize the melody,” she said, “but it was in there, amidst all of that beautiful, dense harmony.”
Allen, who was also a noteworthy scholar, could be simultaneously soft-spoken and direct, and could make jazz’s past seem present. This document of an evening’s communion with one of her many worthy collaborators reminds us of her disarming and commanding power and, if only for about an hour, brings all that back.
Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz and Afro-Latin music for the Journal and is editorial director for Chamber Music America.
