A lovesome piano-guitar discovery

Geri Allen & Kurt Rosenwinkel's 2012 duet concert-album is one for the ages

Just in time for the holidays, A Lovesome Thing—pianist Geri Allen and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel playing duets at the Philharmonie de Paris on Sept. 5, 2012, for nearly an hour, five tunes, mainly standards, unrehearsed—is a welcome and ravishing balm.

The two had played together just once before—the previous July, when Allen briefly sat in with Rosenwinkel’s quartet at the Jazz Standard—and never together as a duo. Yet they make a perfect fit, Allen’s lush chords, streaming glissandos, and sparkling rhythms meshing seamlessly with Rosenwinkel’s bell-like tone, sometimes in near-unison, sometimes trading off melody and harmony, sometimes veering away from the tune while retaining its spirit, as in a riff on Herbie Hancock’s arrangement of “Embraceable You.” (“I don’t know if you recognize the melody, but it was in there,” Allen tells the audience afterward with a chuckle.)

Other songs include Strayhorn’s “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,” Monk’s “Ruby My Dear,” and one original by each musician. All are inventive, mesmerizing, gorgeous.

Allen, who was 55 at the time, would die five years later. She is much missed, a pioneer in the early 1980s M-Base movement, a group of young, mainly Brooklyn-based Black jazz musicians (they also included Steve Coleman, Cassandra Wilson, and Greg Osby) probing new fusions of tradition and modern, pop and avant-garde, Delta blues and global flavors. Allen was also in the forefront of those rediscovering Mary Lou Williams and working through the structures and improvisations of her legacy. Allen’s vast, versatile talents were recognized by everyone, fellow young Turks and adventurous elders: hence her appearance in concerts and on albums by Ornette Coleman (who almost never played with pianists), Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, Charles Lloyd, Betty Carter, and Oliver Lake, to name a few.

This recording—a co-production of Motéma, which recorded many Allen albums, and Rosenwinkel’s own label—was struck from the concert’s off-the-board stereo mix in high-res (24-bit, 48 kHz) digital. The mastering engineer, Alan Silverman of Arf Digital, told me in an email that “the balances weren’t optimal for a stand-alone record,” so he “had to devise a frequency-based dynamic mastering process to bring the intricate dance of guitar and piano into perspective.” He declined to explain exactly what this means. In any case, the sound quality is superb, the instruments captured in full color and dimension, their overtones glowing in the Paris concert hall’s warm acoustic.

(Also available on vinyl on bandcamp)