Jackie Allen
Jackie Allen
Tangled Up In Blue
Media outlets galore utilized Pink’s “Stupid Girls” video to ultimately say what many Americans were already thinking: It’s not cute to play dumb. In a society driven by celebrity, young girls will do and say almost anything if the flavor of the week approves. Fortunately for these young ladies there are female role models in music, some just aren’t singing the sounds of top-40 radio.
Appearing: 6/9 & 10 at The Green Mill (4802 N. Broadway) and 6/16 at Katerina’s (1920 W. Irving Park) in Chicago.
Jackie Allen is an educated, visually stunning, politically conscious jazz musician who recently signed to powerhouse Blue Note Records. “I’m still scratching my head, pinching myself thinking ‘I’m not worthy,'” Allen laughs. But the reality of signing with the same label John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Etta James, and Louis Armstrong have called home wasn’t such a huge deal for Allen when it happened. “Everything in life is a slow progression, one thing leads to the next thing. There were so many steps that when I finally got to the point where I auditioned for them — in the moment it wasn’t so remarkable, it was just another step from the last thing I did. It’s about the small steps. It’s like any career where you think, ‘Oh boy! I’d love to work for this company,’ and when you finally work for the company, it took so much work to get to that place, that there isn’t just one huge moment, it ends up being a culmination of moments.”
Before signing to Blue Note and releasing her label debut, Tangled, Allen was a thriving musician. Her childhood was filled with Dixieland tuba playing courtesy of her father, and her parents together encouraged the arts. (Allen says “The question wasn’t ‘Are you going to play a musical instrument?’ but ‘*What musical instrument are you going to play?”) By the time she attended her local university she had already mastered the French horn and honed the instrument within: her voice. And being a hometown girl at the exceedingly progressive University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Allen says she didn’t realize how unique the school was until she moved away. “I hate the term ‘thinking outside the box,'” she says, but in one class Allen recalls having fascinating assignments, and as the only jazz vocalist in the midst of trombone, violin, and bass players it made most of her school work all the more interesting. “I remember one class, an instructor said ‘Today we’ll plan an egg,’ and I thought, ‘O.K., what does that mean?'” These imaginative classroom exercises would eventually help shape Allen’s distinctive sound.
It was also at Madison where Allen met Hans Strum, her current bass player, husband, and the songwriter credited with Tangled‘s “Hot Stone Soup.” One of the later tracks on the album, there is an obvious sense of balancing what once existed with what is: “The past isn’t what it used to be/honey cakes taste like ash?/the writing hand isn’t what it used to be/my short story left behind.”
There’s a slight crack in Allen’s voice as she explains the story behind “Hot Stone Soup.” “It’s about his mother,” she says referring to Strum. In her late 70s, Allen’s mother-in-law is a former English teacher suffering from rapidly advancing dementia. “It makes both of us choke up,” she says. “We don’t know how long she’s going to be around.”
Strum’s song to his mother fits perfectly with the feel Allen wanted for her CD. “In a recording I like to have as many different shades as there are colors. I wanted songs that were sweet and songs that were bitter, things that relay different aspects of life, like a good film. If a film is really good, it has its high points and its low points.”
Originally the title of a friend’s poem, Tangled serves as a launching pad for a loosely based concept album. “Entangled relationships,” is how Allen describes the album’s theme, “and the word ‘tangled’ was a large enough umbrella that it wasn’t going to restrict too many things. I wanted all the songs to be about relationships and how complicated they are.”
The first track, a cover of Van Morrison’s “When Will I Ever Learn,” is, depending on the individual, a song about religion or something equally personal. When asked what she wants her listeners to take from the track Allen says, “The same thing I took of it. I toyed with the idea of the Van Morrison song, and asked a lot of people what they thought about it. Many said they didn’t get the feeling that it was too religious.” After a long silence she adds, “It’s as emotional as ‘Hot Stone Soup,’ for me, but ‘Hot Stone Soup’ is more of a secret for my husband and I. ‘When Will I Ever Learn’ talks about the beautiful things around us — it asks the question ‘When will we ever learn to love our mother earth?’ Some may say it’s spiritual, but I say it’s as much spiritual as it is political, and so for me to feel gutsy enough to sing that, I feel like I’m throwing myself out there. I don’t want to be preachy but I do want to throw that out there.”
Allen can’t help but preach a little when it comes to the Iraq war, though. The day the first American air strikes began, she was performing in predominately Muslim Morocco. “It was frightening because I thought how would we be perceived in this nation, but it was amazing how hospitable these people were, despite everything. Unfortunately, some Americans believe everything their politicians tell them. The people that say ‘God save America’ or ‘God help us,’ the thing is if there is a God, he’s everywhere not just America.”
Despite her personal beliefs, Allen acknowledges her first priority as a musician isn’t to be political. “People listen to music because they want to be entertained,” but “if I can reach people beyond entertainment, that’s beautiful.”
After all, her music toes a sensitive boundary, too. Hopefully Allen’s non-traditional jazz album can cross the pop barriers that separate younger generations. “I didn’t grow up in the ’40s or the ’50s; I grew up listening to my older sisters’ Beatle albums and Billy Joel. Why should I be doing the music that Billie Holiday did? That was her generation and, while I respect her and want to sing those songs, if I don’t make them my own I wouldn’t be true to myself.”
And in “being true” Allen’s a step ahead, uninterested in dumbing herself or her audience down. She succeeds by embracing intelligence and individuality, and as Allen often says, “That is a beautiful thing.”
— Angie Maldonado
