On her most recent album, last year's "Timeless Portraits and Dreams," pianist Geri Allen applies her crystalline touch and graceful melodicism to such varied fare as Charlie Parker's bop classic "Ah-Leu-Cha," the devotional "Well Done," and the African-American anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing." With old-school luminaries Ron Carter and Jimmy Cobb as the rhythm section, the record features guests such as vocalist Carmen Lundy and pioneering black tenor George Shirley.
The companions are prestigious and the program seemingly eclectic, but the agenda that informs the album - and with it, the current phase in Allen's career - is personal, highly focused and deeply felt. Allen's perspective on jazz is both grounded and panoramic, constantly attuned to the connections between the music's development and the unfolding of American, and especially African-American, history.
Her concern with jazz as not just music but culture makes Allen an inspired choice for the residency she undertakes this weekend at Harvard. It features three public events: a music-illustrated discussion this afternoon, followed by a concert with her trio this evening, and tomorrow night she'll perform with the Harvard Jazz Bands in an evening devoted to the work of the trailblazing female pianist Mary Lou Williams.
The academic setting is a comfortable one for the 50-year-old Allen: She is an associate professor of jazz piano and improvisation at the University of Michigan, and she has a graduate degree in ethnomusicology. As she says on the phone from her home in Montclair, N.J., the focus on education runs in her family.
"It's a natural place for me to be," Allen says. "My grandmother was a one-room schoolteacher in Tennessee, and my father worked 35 years in the Detroit public school system."
Her Motor City upbringing also embedded Allen in a distinguished jazz tradition. Her fellow alumni of the music program at Cass Technical High School include legends Carter, Donald Byrd, Kenny Burrell, and many others, including several important female jazz artists, notably Alice Coltrane.
Like these illustrious forebears, Allen eventually moved to New York, emerging in the 1980s as a vivid new voice on the piano. But that was also a complicated period for jazz. Record labels were scaling back their investment in the music or shifting their focus from straight-ahead to fusion and "smooth" styles. Yet while recording budgets dried up, some of the great, long-running bands like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers continued to incubate new talent with irreplaceable on-the-job training.
"There was a sense of jazz being on the road all the time," Allen says. "The scene was in flux, but it was still rooted in the Art Blakeys, the Betty Carters."
Today, that picture is reversed. Jazz recordings are abundant, whether on major or independent labels, and jazz programs at music schools release hundreds of technically proficient graduates onto the scene each year. But many of the elders have passed away, and the great working-band tradition, with its attendant transmission of experience and lore, is moribund.
At risk, Allen believes, is the cultural grounding of the music and its continued ability not only to reflect American history, but to reconnect to the African-American community in a way relevant today.
"Jazz is a great art form, with a legacy attached to it that helps [us] understand who we are as a people," Allen says. "How do we access these communities of folk for whom the music is a direct reflection of their roots?"
That project resonates with Ingrid Monson, who holds the Quincy Jones chair in African-American music at Harvard. "One of the reasons we wanted to invite Geri Allen is that she places jazz in social context," Monson says. "There's always a dialogue between music and community."
Monson says her undergraduate class on jazz explores the links between jazz and often uncomfortable topics in American history, and asks questions like, "How did jazz come to symbolize freedom, individuality, self-expression?" Allen's approach, Monson says, makes her an ideal guest lecturer on these topics.
"In her musical practice, that's always been there," Monson says. "Not that every piece of music has to have a political connotation, but she has a feeling of responsibility to the larger world."
Allen says that responsibility is not a matter of ideology, but simply the way she is: "It's organic in the way that I work, in the way that I was raised as a musician."
So whether she is honoring the legacy of Williams, a major female jazz innovator who might otherwise be forgotten, or holding community events like her visit yesterday to the Roland Hayes music school in Roxbury, Geri Allen is simply giving back.
"Jazz is culture," she says. "It's a legacy art form. It continues to evolve as long as we continue to celebrate and support that legacy."
"A Musical Conversation With Geri Allen" is at Lowell Hall at Harvard University today at 4 p.m. Free. 617-495-8676, fas.harvard.edu/ofa
Allen and her trio are at Paine Concert Hall at Harvard University tonight at 8. Free. 617-496-6013, music.fas.harvard.edu
"A Tribute to Mary Lou Williams" featuring the Harvard Jazz Bands with Allen is at Lowell Hall at Harvard University tomorrow at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 at 617-496-2222 or boxoffice.harvard .edu.
