May 16 at
All Souls at Sundown:

Geri Allen, piano
and the poetry of Kay Ryan

“...Geri Allen has taken the freedom of Jazz and combined it with the cultural freedom movements that have paralleled the evolution of Jazz itself.”

—Tavis Smiley

Geri Allen has appeared as a composer and performer in concert at Carnegie Hall, at international jazz festivals, and on Australian and European tours. She has performed and recorded with Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Dewey Redman, Oliver Lake, and Betty Carter. Her own recordings include The Printmakers, The Nurturer, Maroons, Twenty-One, and Eyes in the Back of Your Head (all on the Blue Note label), Twylight and The Gathering (Verve), and most recently, The Life of a Song and Timeless Portraits and Dreams (Telarc). Refractions, Flying Toward The Sound is being recorded by Motema Records, and Allen continues to perform her solo piano work throughout the 2009-11 concert season in major museums and concert settings internationally.

Appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 2008, Kay Ryan writes poems that are “as slim as runway models, so tiny you could almost tweet them. Their compact refinement, though, does not suggest ease or chic. Her voice is quizzical and impertinent, funny in uncomfortable ways, scuffed by failure and loss” (The New York Times).