JAZZ SPOTLIGHT

GERI ALLEN

* * * 1/2

“Twenty One”

Blue Note Records

Until very recently, 37-year-old Geri Allen was one of the best-kept secrets in jazz, a pianist honored and respected by musicians but not especially well-known to the wider audience. But gigs with Ornette Coleman, Betty Carter and Wallace Roney in the last year and a half have dramatically increased her visibility.

This new release should generate even more attention. Allen’s previous two Blue Note albums signaled her capacity to take a place in the line of world-class jazz pianists. With “Twenty One,” she shows every indication of not being satisfied until she can move to the very front of that line.

Her approach to the jazz piano trio has many of the qualities present in the classical piano trio. Both ensembles balance the timbrally rich, orchestralike piano against other, more tonally limited instruments.

Many jazz pianists deal with the disparity by taking a path of least resistance, using bass and drums as accompanists rather than full-fledged musical creative associates. But with this particular trio--which is enormously aided by the presence of Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums--Allen takes the classically oriented route of conceiving music that is structured around an equal and continually unfolding interaction among the players.

This is, of course, not necessarily a new approach. The Bill Evans trios of the ‘60s and ‘70s virtually defined the process of symbiotic trio improvisation. What Allen, Carter and Williams add to the style here is a surging rhythmic energy that was not always present in the Evans musical lexicon.

Pieces such as “RTC,” “Tea for Two” and “Feed the Fire” are driven forward, not simply with great urgency, but with the kind of subtle but relentless rhythmic flow that allows players to improvise with a sense of floating on top of the time.

Allen is clearly having a ball, producing solo after solo articulated with the crisp confidence of an artist who has finally found her voice. As always, Williams is astonishing, constantly adding propulsive flashes of snare, insistent undercurrents of bass drum and dramatic shivers of cymbals in a way that supports, rather than intrudes upon, the unfolding of the group improvisation. And Carter, freed for once of the obligations of being a leader, plays some of his finest choruses of recent memory.

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Hear Geri Allen

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