This is the last of four articles profiling the headliners in CapitalBop’s D.C. Jazz Loft Series. The J.D. Allen Trio will play the series’ final show on Saturday at Subterranean A in Logan Circle.

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by Giovanni Russonello

One of the things that comes through on Victory!, J.D. Allen’s robust new album with his trio, is that he likes to work. The tenor saxophonist is always thirsting for a challenge, and he never makes his music sound easy – a big part of why it’s so gripping.

Another thing is that he prizes communication with his listeners (he rarely lets his songs run longer than four and a half minutes, he says, because people nowadays don’t like to waste a lot of time on one thing), but he puts a higher premium on doing justice to the fires he finds smoldering inside of him.

If the audience can’t follow Allen’s performances, he said in a recent interview, “I don’t care. If they do, that’s great, but that’s my solace, a lot of times, just playing.”

Fortunately, audiences are clearly catching onto what he’s doing. Allen’s breakneck shows, in which he keeps songs as brief as they are on the record and never so much as pauses to introduce the band, have become a hot ticket in New York City. D.C. will get a taste on Saturday night, when Allen closes out CapitalBop’s D.C. Jazz Loft Series with a performance at the underground venue Subterranean A.

JD Allen Trio, “Fatima” [audio:https://www.capitalbop.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/08-Fatima.mp3|titles=”Fatima”|artists=J.D. Allen Trio]

With the recent release of the heavily acclaimed Victory!, Allen finds himself occupying a spot that has become an awkward but illustrious mainstay of the jazz landscape: the moment’s most talked-about saxophone trio. With no chordal instrument (piano, guitar, etc.), this is a format that music critics and jazz cognoscenti love to puzzle over. Like a lone mismatched sock in a clean stack of laundry, the question always seems to be: “How’d that thing get here, exactly?”

In truth, the uncommon setup has been a major part of this music since Sonny Rollins pioneered it in the late 1950s. In the middle of the last decade, the Fly trio, featuring saxophonist Mark Turner, was achieving a similar level of scrutinized acclaim as Allen is today. With the release of Back East (2007) and Compass (2009), Joshua Redman briefly picked up the mantle.

Now Allen is taking the format in an entirely new direction, and his trio is shaping up to be one of today’s more influential jazz groups. He can swing in a style not altogether different from Rollins’, or dissolve into free-form improvisation while drummer Rudy Royston splays and plows on the snare. Allen says he tries to “listen to everything,” and his grasp on Indian and Arab music shines through on Victory! But what he always retains, and what defines the trio, is his commitment to an “urban” heartbeat: “keeping it a folk music,” he says.

Allen has been known to tell Royston and bassist Gregg August not to play “relaxed.” He’s also doggedly committed to forging a singular style – drawing on signs of the times and styles of popular music, sure, but only when he sees some part of himself in them.

The result is a gritty, combustible product that shows his two-pronged commitment to serious toil and an uncompromised vision. Allen estimates that the trio recorded Victory!’s title track 20 times. When you come into contact with it, a minor ballad of wearied but tenacious spirit, that number doesn’t surprise you.

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If not for Allen’s determination, he wouldn’t be where he is. Growing up poor on the east side of Detroit, Allen said in a CapitalBop interview last fall: “It was either [music], or the car plant, or the penitentiary. And I didn’t like the other two choices, so I chose the music.”

His mother, who once held dreams of becoming a star singer, formed a family R&B band with Allen and his two sisters. But she always chided him for singing flat. So when her son decided to pick up the clarinet, she got behind him all the way – until finances forced her to pawn the instrument.

But an enthusiastic teacher in middle school loaned him a saxophone, and a famous one in high school (the Detroit native James Carter, who would become an international phenom soon after) inspired him. By the age of 15, Allen was a professional musician, doing gigs and playing straight-ahead originals with a local teenage band that went by the name Legacy.

Along the way, he developed an infatuation with the music of Branford Marsalis. Listening to Marsalis’ playing on Black Codes (From the Underground), his brother Wynton’s monumental album, Allen noticed that “you had these young, good-looking guys playing this music that wasn’t necessarily popular in the mainstream community, but they were getting mainstream press,” he said. “I was into his playing, [and] he seemed like a hip dude. I wanted to be him when I was a kid.”

From there, he went on to listen to Trio Jeepy, a piano-less trio album by Branford Marsalis. Allen was hoooked – and he set about listening to sax trio records from Rollins, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and so many others. “That record, Trio Jeepy, was the record when I said, ‘Oh man, you can play jazz like this!’ That’s why [Marsalis] is always so dear to me,” Allen said.

After graduating high school, Allen spent two years at Virginia’s Hampton University, but he longed for someplace with a pulse. He got his wish when Betty Carter heard him playing on a friend’s audition tape, and admitted him in 1994 to her Jazz Ahead program for rising musicians in New York City. From there, Carter soon invited Allen into her band. He says he was too interested in the Big Apple’s nightlife to focus adequately on the band, and was eventually fired for showing up exhausted, but he did learn some of his hard-and-fast determination from working under her.

What Allen calls “the university of Betty Carter” was a school of hard knocks. “Her love was very blunt,” he said. Onstage at the Village Vanguard one night, “she got in my face and said I wasn’t swingin’ – in front of the whole world. And she was right: I wasn’t. So I stood my ground, and I didn’t let that deter me in what I had to do. You know, you had to be strong to deal with her.”

Soon after leaving Carter’s band, Allen found himself without enough work to pay rent. He wound up homeless.

Sleeping at friends’ houses, on subway cars and sometimes at Small’s Jazz Club in Lower Manhattan, Allen was approaching a downward spiral. Characteristically, he refused to give up. “I decided to not go back home or go to Detroit, and I told myself, ‘I’m going to deal with this shit, because I came up here to do this,’” he said. “I couldn’t stop, man. I could not stop wanting to play.”

That choice came with obvious sacrifices. Laughing about it now, Allen recalls that a girlfriend at the time told him, “Look, this music shit isn’t working out. You’re going to have to do something else.” He responded, “‘Well, if I can’t play music, I want to be a fireman.’ She thought I was crazy, but I was serious. I said, ‘Only thing that compares to this shit is running into a burning house. What do you think?’ And you know, she left me.”

In 1998, Allen stumbled into the opportunity to record an album. He jumped at the chance, and the record – In Search Of – received some positive critical recognition. But to him, it was a disaster.

Allen feels he wasn’t ready to be a bandleader. “I had gotten to this thing where [I thought], ‘Okay, the personality of the musician can bring things across.’ And I didn’t realize at that time – I was 26 – that there’s just stuff you’ve got to sit down and talk about and be on the same page about….

“I own not one copy of that recording,” he added. “I went downstairs in the garage and threw every CD that I owned of In Search Of away.”

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While finding his way in New York, Allen developed a friendship with his old idol, Branford Marsalis. “When I met him and got to sit down with him, he didn’t disappoint me as far as being a very intelligent, witty and creative person, and a very nice guy,” Allen said of the elder saxophonist. “He’s always been very generous to me.”

One night, Marsalis drove Allen home to his apartment in Harlem. “It was Harlem back in the ’90s, still kind of raw, you know? And when he saw where I was living, this cat … offered me to stay at his place upstairs,” Allen recalled. “He said, ‘Look, I’m never there man, you can stay there.’”

Another time, “I was hanging with him and he called me into the kitchen,” Allen said. “He said, ‘Hey man, come into the kitchen, I want you to check out these two horns.’ I’m thinking, like, he got some horns, he just wants me to see what he got. So I played them. He said, ‘What you think about ‘em?’ I was like, ‘Man, that shit is bad.’ He said, ‘Well, they’re yours.’ He just gave me two horns, man…. Offered me a spot to stay, and made sure that I had a couple horns so I could continue to play.”

Through the help of Marsalis and others, and his own determination, Allen found his footing and recorded the album Pharoah’s Children in 2001, drawing more praise from the press. But then Allen took a six-year hiatus from recording as a leader. When he returned to the studio in 2008, it was with his current trio. The record, I Am I Am, earned him recognition around the jazz world, and he wound up as a finalist for the Tenor Saxophone Rising Star award in Downbeat magazine’s prestigious Critics Poll, where he has remained ever since. In 2009, his second album with the trio, Shine!, wound up on several best-of-the-year lists.

Allen says that his time out of the studio stemmed mostly from his inability to find a record deal, but he’s grateful for it. “I had a lot of growing to do,” he said. “I’ve still got a lot of growing to do, personally and musically, but it’s a lot better.”

His earnest, questing sensibility is one reason why the name of the J.D. Allen Trio’s new release, Victory!, isn’t as conclusive as it might seem. The music on the record is distinctly more self-possessed and centered than any of Allen’s previous work; it hits harder. But don’t tell him that – he’ll just thank you and move on to talking about the latest aim that’s haunting him: using a quartet on his next record.

“I’m going to give myself the goal and I’m going to stick to it that it’s going to be a quartet. It’s definitely going to be a quartet. I’m going to try to use a piano,” he said.

He has a sense of obligation to his listeners and critics. If he can make a great album with a quartet, he said, “I feel like people might take me a little more seriously.” No problem with that, though: “That’s cool. That’s a goal.”

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The J.D. Allen Trio plays at Subterranean A on Saturday night with an altered lineup of Michael Bates on bass and Jeremy Clemons on drums. He is joined on the bill by D.C.’s Elijah Jamal Balbed Quintet. The show starts at 9 p.m., with the J.D. Allen Trio going on first, and is the last of four in CapitalBop’s D.C. Jazz Loft Series at the DC Jazz Fest.

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