One of the tenors of our time JD Allen heads in a new direction
This is clearly a stimulating, fresh, new direction for American tenor saxophonist JD Allen drawing on gnawa music and the musical culture of Morocco. Hypnotic rhythmic patterns, repetition, space and an earthy sense of groove are the order of the day. And it largely works.
‘Samawi’ is easily the best track – it has a powerful spirituality to it. On the album Allen is with Léo Montana on piano, Yazid Alaoui on the guembri, Hamza Souissi on bass and Ruy Adrián López-Nussa on drums.
Piano, fretless electric bass and percussion provide a supple framework, while vocal contributions add another layer to the trancey sound.
Gnawa is rooted in the traditions of Black Moroccan communities with West African ancestry and developed as both a musical and spiritual practice, with music, dance and ritual closely connected.
Its traditional performance centres on the guembri or sintir, a three stringed bass lute played by the maalem, or master musician, alongside the metallic qraqeb castanets, percussion, handclaps and voices.
The guembri supplies a low drone or bass foundation, establishes rhythmic patterns through percussive playing and carries much of the melodic material. The qraqeb provide a bright, metallic counter-rhythm.
My only exprience of hearing the style live was when Ornette Coleman curated Meltdown on the Southbank in 2009 and invited Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka to participate. Their call and response, pentatonic or modal melodic material and the use of drone was certainly memorable and hearing this new album transports me to that time instantly.
The most important jazz connection however mining this diasporic seam is probably Randy Weston (1926-2018). The pianist encountered gnawa musicians in Morocco in the late 1950s and subsequently spent substantial periods there, becoming one of the earliest major American jazz musicians to engage seriously with the tradition. His ‘Blue Moses’, along with pieces including ‘The Healers’, ‘Tanjah’ and ‘Gnawa in Paris’, shows how he translated elements of gnawa rhythm, call and response and pentatonicism into his own language.
Pharoah Sanders – a saxophonist Allen is certainly indebted to – took another route. His collaborations with Gnawa musicians go back at least to the early 1990s, most notably his work with Mahmoud Guinia. The Trance of Seven Colors, recorded with Guinia in 1994, is probably the most direct meeting of free-jazz tenor and Gnawa ritual music.
There is plenty of room for the tenor to breathe, but also a strong collective pulse underneath it, giving Söwt a distinctive sense of movement and purpose.
JD Allen III, 53, the initials stand for John and Daniel, was born in Detroit. He began playing saxophone at 11, having first absorbed funk and R&B through records by Sly and the Family Stone, Prince and Marvin Gaye, and then moved towards jazz and classical music, including Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. After studying music at Hampton University in Virginia, he moved to New York. He played with a lot of leading players and had a long association with Detroit singer Betty Carter.
His recording career as a leader began with In Search Of… in 1999, on Red Records. The album won him a Best New Artist award in Italy and drew attention to his writing as well as his playing.
The major breakthrough came with his Sunnyside period. I Am I Am (2008), Shine! (2009) and Victory! (2011) established the trio format that became so closely associated with him, with Gregg August on bass and Rudy Royston on drums.
The ongoing Savant years from 2012 brought perhaps the most concentrated run of important Allen records. The Matador and the Bull (2012) and Grace (2013) earned him consecutive DownBeat Critics Poll recognition for tenor saxophone and composition. Bloom (2014) is particularly important in assessing his development and the album of the saxist’s I like best. ‘Pater Noster’ on that album makes the hairs on your arm prick up.
Very prolific, by the middle of the decade Allen had settled into a distinctive small-group language. Graffiti (2015), with August and Royston, and Americana: Musings on Jazz and Blues (2016) and a later volume I liked even better explored a more explicitly American vernacular, while Radio Flyer (2017) added guitarist Liberty Ellman to the trio. Love Stone (2018) was his long-awaited ballad album. Barracoon (2019) and Toys/Die Dreaming (2020) introduced another trio, with bassist Ian Kenselaar and drummer Nic Cacioppo, showing that Allen’s music was never dependent on one particular rhythm section.
The pandemic produced one of his most revealing projects, Queen City (2021), a solo tenor-saxophone recording. Drawing on the tradition of solo records by Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins and Steve Lacy, Allen stripped the music back to the instrument itself. This (2023) took him somewhere more experimental which didn’t work as well, adding electronics and working with Alex Bonney and drummer Gwilym Jones in London.
I thought The Dark, the Light, the Grey and the Colorful showed him as a unique player who travels that bit more deeply than most, arguing that he uses the saxophone almost as a window into an internal life of thought, philosophy, deep feeling and study.
What distinguishes Allen, ultimately, is not novelty for its own sake. His music can sound deeply rooted in Coltrane, Rollins, Ayler and the wider post-bop tradition, yet it does not feel like an exercise in historical reconstruction. Allen belongs to a relatively small group of living players whose instrumental command can become something far beyond skill and technique. James Brandon Lewis is someone else who springs to mind in this regard although he is usually seen more as a free jazz player straying into punk even. But like him Allen is one of the tenorists alive today who can genuinely move the listener and enters a Moroccan realm here that suits him extremely well.
