Red Allen Chapters 9 - The Jazz Archive

Reactions to the idea of New Orleans
as "the cradle of jazz" till have begun to
set in - inevitably, I suppose. It has even
been said that the whole idea is built on
the towering status of Louis Armstrong,
and little else, an attitude which leaves
the reputation of such men as King
Oliver, Freddy Keppard, Jelly Roll
Morton, Kid Ory, Tommy Ladnier,
Johnny and Baby Dodds, Jimmy Noone,
Sidney Bechet, Barney Bigard, Zutty
Singleton, and Wellman Braud unaccounted
for. It also leaves out a trumpeter of a
generation and a style a bit later than
Armstrong's: Henry "Red" Allen, Jr.
New Orleans also gave jazz a durable
style which was popularized as "Dixieland,"
and especially since he is from
New Orleans, Red Allen has become
more and more associated with contemporary
quasi-Dixieland playing - as have
most trumpeters of the 30's. But good
New Orleans-Dixieland jazz is primarily
an ensemble style, and Red Allen is not
really an ensemble player. He is a soloist,
and the differences between Red Allen's
style and Freddy Keppard's are much
greater than the differences between Red
Allen's style and, say, Lester Young's.
Allen's best melodic lines are much too
active and exploratory to be lead parts in
an ensemble polyphony. He can play the
Dixieland repertory, of course, and play
it well; one of his best solos of recent
years was on a recording of Frankie and
Johnny. But he also finds, and meets, a
challenge in tunes of more complexity,
in all sorts of medium and slow ballads,
in their melodies, in their harmonies. In
fact, when Louis Armstrong began to
turn away from the then standard jazz
repertory of the 20's and improvise on
popular songs and ballads of the 30's, he
laid down a kind of challenge to other
jazz musicians, by implication at least.
Red Allen was one of the first players to
meet that challenge successfully, and his
1935 Body and Soul still seems an
exceptional performance.
For just such reasons of tunes and
repertory, it is encouraging musically (as
well as encouraging to his continuing
career) to see Allen recently moving,
with a quartet, into The Embers in New
York and The Palmer House in Chicago,
for programs of medium end slow ballads
and pop tunes are called for in those
clubs. Of course the chatty inattention of
the crowds there has encouraged some
players into certain forms of calculated
coasting, and pleasant trickery, but I
doubt if Red Allen, with his very special
hard working but modest approach to an
audience, will merely coast. Of course he
does have to pray with felts and mutes in
such places, and Red Allen likes open
horn, so perhaps that's one drawback.
Another apparent drawback may actually
be an advantage - there can be few uptempo
grandstanders in such clubs.
Those flashy pieces do rouse certain
audiences on occasion, but they seem to
me to show the least interesting and
inventive side of Allen's talent, …
In style at least, Red Allen is a kind of
link between Armstrong and Roy
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SOME WORDS FOR ALLEN by Martin Williams, Metronome 10-61p30
Eldridge. (Eldridge has denied any
actual influence from Allen, however).
His work was certainly a guide for many
trumpeters during the 30's, and Harry
James, while with Benny Goodman,
paid Allen the high compliment of
basing his solos on Wrappin' It Up, Down
South Camp Meetin', and Big John's
Special directly on the ones Allen had
recorded with Fletcher Henderson. I
have a friend who calls Allen's episode
on Wrappin' It Up, which includes both
solo and call-and-response patterns with
the group, one of the most perfect
trumpet passages in recorded jazz.
But of course there is more to Red
Allen than his historical position or his
influence. For one thing he has continued
to develop, and he plays today
perhaps better than he ever has. He has
also obviously listened sympathetically
to everyone around, through Miles
Davis. But he uses all that he has heard
with a real integrity and dedication, in
expanding a style that is his own.
Red Allen might give almost anyone
lessons in an adventurous use of
dynamics. Within the same phrase, he
may begin with the merest whisper and
then spiral up to a shout, always with his
own spontaneous kind of musical logic.
In that very same phrase, he is also likely
to have slithered through the whole
usable range of his horn - as a part of
that same adventurously sought musical
logic. About four years ago he made
recordin g s of I've Got The World on a
String and I Cover The Waterfront
(both also featuring
Coleman Hawkins) which show
this capacity strikingly.
Like Lester Young's and like
Thelonious Monk's. Red Allen's
Music depends on discoveries
and surprises. And besides the
thrusts of dynamics and range.
His use of the unexpected
includes rhythm. His rhythmic
sureness is exceptional at times.
There are many players of his
own and later generations who
still use repeated notes and
phrases with the more or less
mechanical function of rhythmic
reminders maintaining or reestablishing
the basic pulse.
Allen goes directly to the melody
he is improvising with an easy
phrasing that doesn't need such
signposts. His relaxed sense of
the time and his dynamics and
range break his lines up provocatively.
I don't imagine that an
horn man who arrived between
Armstrong and Lester Young
sounds less mechanical in his
phrasing or has developed more
rhythmic flexibility and variety
than Red Allen.
But the real pleasure of listening
to Red Allen is melodic and it is
to the line he is improvising that
he is always committed. His contemporaries
used to complain that
he was rather freehanded with the
harmony thereby. But I expect
that there might have been some notes
considered proper or "blue" in New
Orleans and not elsewhere. And subsequent
jazz history might be said to
vindicate Allen too, because Monk
sometimes overrides the changes in the
interests of melody, and so, of course, do
the atonal players of "the new thing."
Perhaps, some people say, his melodies
get too adventurous; they are undisciplined
and become disorderly. I think such people
may be hearing him the wrong way. For
me. his playing often creates a special
aura that unites the plaintiveness of the
blues and the lyricism of good ballad
playing, and is often far less exuberantly
extroverted than his stage manner. And
his happy surprise twists of melodic line
and sound are often personal enough to
establish standards of their own. Order
and symmetry are deeper pleasures only
when one has dared and won them. and
Red Allen sometimes shows a daring
that may turn up a kind of order not
known before him. Certainly one of the
major achievements of jazz improvisors
has been to show that melody need not
obey traditional classical or romantic
notions of order, that it need not use
traditional echoes or repeats but can be a
continuous linear invention, and still be a
complete and satisfying aesthetic entity.
It is for that kind of order that Red Allen
modestly searches. And for that reason, a
program of medium and slow ballads
and blues by Red Allen can be one of the
superior musical pleasures in jazz.
- Discography –