March 14 at
All Souls at Sundown:

Geri Allen, piano
and the poetry of Lisel Mueller

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.

One of our most celebrated poets, Lisel Mueller is the daughter of a German intellectual whose opposition to Hitler forced the family to flee to America in 1939. She received the National Book Award for The Need to Hold Still (1981) and the Pulitzer Prize for Alive Together (1996). Her poetry is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform experiences we all have in common: sorrow, tenderness, desire and mortality.