Geri Allen Trio - The Bakery 10.18.06
Geri Allen Trio@The Bakery 10.18.06By George W. Harris
Away from LA way too long, pianist Geri Allen showed the Bakery audience what it's been missing the past 2 years with an overwhelming performance that featured gospel-derived bop performed with alarming alacrity and fortitude.
Opening with music from her marvelous new disc "Timeless Portraits and Dreams", Ms Allen and her trio of Kenny Davis (bass) and Mark Johnson (drums) played the sentimental and spiritual "Oh Freedom/Melcezedik" with flexible dynamism and sympathetic interplay. On the bebop anthem "Ah-Leu-Cha", the band was hard driving, yet elastic. The snappy rhythmic brushwork by Johnson was so quick that it seemed like a slight of hand magic trick. Davis' nimble bass work bounced around Allen's inventive solos like bank shots in a shooting gallery. The clever call and response between all three on the freely funky "Our Lady" took the form of a musical relay race to see who could pass the baton the quickest, with all three reaching the bluesy finish line amazingly at the same time. Closing with a celebratory "In Appreciation", Ms Allen brough jazz to its church roots. With her piano supplying the down home gospel chords,Davis bringing the swaying rhythm to it's basic beat, and Johnson playing the cymbals like a Holiness tambourine choir, the band took the music to an ecstatic and volcanic climax. Allen's chords fed into Johnson's jaw dropping cross-handed drumming to create a cataclysmic finale that seemed timeless and eternally blissful. No one in the audience could believe the amount of energy being delivered from the stage. Such displays of musical vigor and spiritual vision are in short supply; Allen and her trio delivered the goods this warm autumn evening at the Bakery.
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