Geri Allen obituary

Fortunately for music-making, creators emerge in every generation who balance deep understanding of the evolution of their art with a fearless relish for changing the rules moment by moment in restless working lives – and by doing so, change the game for their successors. Geri Allen, the jazz pianist, composer and educator, who has died of cancer aged 60, was one of those.

My first memory of hearing Allen live came in London in 1989, alongside the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Paul Motian – two of the most empathic partners the jazz scene could then offer a newcomer with something original to say. The pianist Keith Jarrett had been in town the previous month, and Allen’s performance – reimagining the methods of piano innovators such as Thelonious Monk, Paul Bley or Herbie Hancock via a free-fall approach as intuitive as the saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s – unexpectedly rivalled the superstar Jarrett’s gig for power and surprises.

Allen was 32 then, a pianist from childhood and an ethnomusicology graduate who had made the revolutionary jazz reeds-player Eric Dolphy the subject of her master’s dissertation. She had already distinguished herself in New York in her 20s as an open-minded player-composer in the M-Base movement, a collective of young African-Americans (including the saxophonist Steve Coleman and the vocalist Cassandra Wilson) making connections between African culture, popular and more formal music, poetry and dance. Allen had also launched her own recording career, with an original mix of postbop, free-jazz and African-inflected trio music on the album The Printmakers (1984), and with Motian, and Haden as leader, on the superb Etudes (1987), so the evidence of a precocious talent was growing fast by the time she made that London date.

She would go on to work with the fiery Miles Davis rhythm section of the bassist Ron Carter and the drummer Tony Williams, record with Ornette Coleman, accompany Supremes singer Mary Wilson and the brilliant vocal improviser Betty Carter, experiment with mixes of early synthesisers and African traditional instruments, collaborate with tap dancers and make unique jazz reappraisals of Motown soul hits.

She was also dedicated to the advancement of women in jazz – performing tributes to the pioneering composer-pianist and Duke Ellington arranger Mary Lou Williams (Allen played a character based on Williams in Robert Altman’s 1996 film Kansas City), helping to found the all-female jazz residency programme at New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 2014, and regularly working with the percussion star Terri Lyne Carrington on her all-female Mosaic Project. Allen was the first woman to win Denmark’s Jazzpar prize, in 1996, and also pursued a career as an educator, at her alma mater Howard University, in Washington DC, and later at the universities of Michigan and Pittsburgh, where she had also studied.

Geri was born in Pontiac, Michigan, and raised in Detroit. Her father, Mount Allen Jr, was a school principal, her mother, Barbara, a government administrator in the defence industry. She learned the piano from the age of seven, and by her early teens had decided to be a jazz pianist. At Cass technical school, in Detroit, she studied with the free-thinking trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, and in 1979 was one of the first graduates of the new jazz course at Howard University, directed by the hard-bop trumpet star Donald Byrd. Allen studied with the mainstream-to-bop piano virtuoso Kenny Barron in New York, and then pursued an ethnomusicology degree at Pittsburgh, studying with the saxophonist and academic Nathan Davis, and the acclaimed Ghanaian musicologist Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia.

Graduating in 1982, Allen returned to New York to immerse herself in the M-Base collective, imaginatively contributing to Steve Coleman’s debut album Motherland Pulse in the process. In the late 1980s, she began her rich association with Haden and Motian, took up the synthesiser in the album Open on All Sides in the Middle, worked with a variety of prominent soloists including the saxophonists Arthur Blythe, Dewey Redman and Wayne Shorter, and the trumpeter Woody Shaw, and played with the rock group Living Colour. In 1993, she accompanied Carter, and the following year recorded Ornette Coleman’s Sound Museum albums – the first pianist in over 35 years that he had worked with. In 1995, she married a regular playing partner, the trumpeter Wallace Roney.

Allen continued to be a prolific contributor to contemporary music as a composer, as the leader of a succession of diverse recording projects, and eventually as an inspiring teacher. In 2004, she made the dynamic trio album The Life of a Song, with Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, and also shared the antics of the Scottish drummer Tom Bancroft’s surreal Orchestro Interrupto band on tour. In 2006, she composed the jazz suite For the Healing of the Nations as a tribute to 9/11 victims and survivors, and contributed to LisaGay Hamilton’s prizewinning documentary Beah: A Black Woman Speaks. In 2008 she received a Guggenheim fellowship.

In 2011, Allen released an astonishing sequence of albums, beginning with the flat-out dance-inspired Timeline Live, featuring the explosive percussion input of the young tapdancing phenomenon Maurice Chestnut. Later that year came Flying Toward the Sound – a solo homage to pianists from Cecil Taylor to Hancock and Monk that Allen had composed during her Guggenheim fellowship – and then the Christmas album A Child Is Born. Two years later, in the kind of double-taking contrast the pianist had sprung on listeners throughout her career, Allen made the Motown tribute Grand River Crossings, bringing her own vision to classic songs by such musicians as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.

The American pianist and author of the jazz appreciation blog Do the Math, Ethan Iverson, put his finger on her pivotal influence on the evolution of jazz piano when he described the line that runs from Bill Evans, Hancock and McCoy Tyner, through the 80s and 90s originals Kenny Kirkland, Marcus Roberts and Brad Mehldau, and into the 21st century. “It seems like most of the celebrated younger pianists of the current moment,” Iverson wrote two weeks before her death, in a 60th-birthday tribute, “… names like Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn, David Virelles, Kris Davis, Matt Mitchell, Aruán Ortiz – don’t play like Kirkland, Roberts, or Mehldau. They play like Allen.”

“In this music,” he continued, “there was before Geri Allen and after Geri Allen. She’s that important.”

Allen is survived by her daughters, Laila and Barbara, and son, Wallace, from her marriage to Roney, which ended in divorce,and by her brother, Mount Allen III, and her father.

• Geri Antoinette Allen, jazz pianist and composer, born 12 June 1957; died 27 June 2017