“Listen,” he says, taking a seat at his piano and hitting a single key.

Allen is perhaps Roosevelt Island’s best-known musician.  He has been an important part of the New York music scene for more than 25 years, playing in jazz clubs, forming his own groups, helping write the script for what he calls America’s native or classic music.  And lately he’s been a musical ambassador, making two trips to Beirut this year, performing at a jazz festival in Oslo, and traveling to Paris and Hamburg.

Allen came to New York in 1973, and his first job, coincidentally, involved a concert at a church – Trinity Church in Manhattan, where he played trumpet in the Gil Evans orchestra in an ambitious jazz performance that produced a CD, Svengali, which you can still buy today on Fifth Avenue.

Evans, a pianist and composer, was an inspiration, a man Allen compares to the great classical composers.  “It lives, just like Bach and Beethoven, Mozart,“ he says of Evans’s music.  Then he hooked up with bands led by the drummer Louis Hayes and the bassist Cecil McBee, and after that, he was, by his own account, “on the Main Street of America’s native music.”

But you’d be hard-pressed to find a Tex Allen CD in a Midtown record store.  Despite his early success and his legacy as a member of one of America’s foremost showbiz families (his younger sisters are Phylicia Rashad of Cosby Show fame, and Debbie Allen, the producer and choreographer), Allen’s name thus far has appeared more often in the fine print than on the marquee.  Dozens of other musicians have recorded or performed his works, but Allen himself is still pursuing the elusive goal of a wider audience.

In a way, he peaked early.  He started playing the piano at 6, the trumpet at 10, and the following year he stood, baton in hand, onstage with the Houston Symphony, having won a citywide contest to conduct the orchestra.  They played The Stars and Stripes Forever.

“That was very inspirational to me as a kid,“ Allen says.  He got a lot of encouragement at home, too.  His mother, Vivian Ayers, majored in piano at Howard University and became a poet, and his father Andrew, for whom he is named, was known as a great dancer.  The Allen children followed in their parents’ footsteps, learning art and music and dancing.  “I think I taught Deborah her first few steps,“ he says.  “I studied tap and ballroom dancing and a little bit of ballet.  We all studied the same things.“  Even as a child, he had a flair for the technical aspects of music: “I did arrangements, complete orchestrations off of records with my trumpet; I’d take all the parts off and write them out for all the instruments.”

Dr. Andrew A. Allen, who died in 1983, was a dentist.  He was the one who acquired the “Tex“ nickname, while attending Howard, and his son, Andrew Lloyd, inherited it, with a brief apprenticeship as “Little Tex.“  The Allen sisters went on to Howard, but Tex stayed in Texas.  He studied music composition at what was then North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), in Denton.  By whatever name, it is, according to Allen and UNT itself, “one of the largest and best music schools in the United States.”

He sharpened his skills as a composer, but it wasn’t until he came to New York, he says, that he really became a trumpet player.  In the meantime, he returned to Houston to put together a band called the United Nations Sextet (“a very mixed group“), which played mostly rhythm and blues.  “We were one of the few bands to be working, four or five nights a week, playing jazz in a regular place, anywhere in the country,” Allen says.

The United Nations Sextet?  Was this a premonition?  He is on Roosevelt Island in 2000 by virtue of an intimate U.N. connection – his wife.  Dagmar Allen had the apartment when they met about ten years ago.  She works in the administration of a U.N. development program.  They met at a Broadway opening.  He dedicated a song to her on his second CD, the 1999 Tex Allen Song Book, called Say Little Mama Say.  (The song “is for my wife, who happily gives me the business.”) The CD also has a song dedicated to his children from his first marriage.  The youngest, Oliver Lloyd Allen, now 11, did a cartoon sketch of Tex in hip-hop regalia, which is on the cover.

Allen is rather circumspect about some of his personal history.  He guards his wife’s desire for privacy and doesn’t like to give out his age, or his mother’s – although it’s hardly a secret, in his case, that we’re talking about the ’40s (his decade of arrival, not the total), and he’s old enough to have six grandkids.  When he came to New York City he had a mass of curly black hair.  Now he’s got more of a Michael Jordan look, with a few gray bristles in the beard.  As for his mother, one has the feeling that he’s simply being ... prudent.

	At the Yamaha, Tex Allen works through a progression, delighting in what he finds along the way.

Vivian Ayers and Andrew Allen were divorced in the late ’50s.  By some accounts she was a formidable force, at least in her daughters’ drive for success (there’s a younger brother, too, Hugh, a real estate banker in North Carolina).  Vivian Ayers has been a New Yorker for many years, and operates the Adept New American Museum, devoted to the culture of the Southwest, in Mount Vernon.  “She’s still feisty, very young,” Allen says.

Allen is not that close to his siblings.  “They’re very busy women, I’m very busy, too,“ Allen says.  “We see each other maybe three, four times a year.“  At the end of March, Phylicia Rashad and Tex performed in Houston in a “family reunion” benefit for the Conrad Johnson Music and Fine Arts Foundation, a music scholarship program named for the Houston big-band leader.  The Allens have teamed up on other occasions over the years, but at times their ships seem to be moving in different channels.  Four days before Tex’s concert, for example, Phylicia will be at Town Hall for a benefit for the Brainerd Heritage Fund, which is supporting the restoration of a historic South Carolina school for blacks that operated until 1939 (Vivian went there, and Phylicia bought it for her).

Tex is not involved in that event, but it may be just as well, because he’s preoccupied these days with his own concert preparations, even to the point of handing out fliers on Main Street.  If he doesn’t fill the Chapel, it won’t be for lack of promotion.  That cannot be said for The New York Septet’s previous performance at Good Shepherd, on July 27, which went largely unnoticed on the Island, although people in the audience judged it an artistic success.

One of Tex’s converts that night was an Island House neighbor, the Rev. Luke McCann.  The concert, he says, was “absolutely stunning.“  Father McCann compared the musicians’ solos to the improvisations of the Italian poets of the 16th Century, who thought up and recited their lines in sequence.  “One was better than the next,” he said.

Allen would probably appreciate the Renaissance allusion.  He does have a solid base of fans here, having performed concerts on the waterfront, and at the Main Street Theatre with singer Juanita Fleming, another Island resident.  And the chapel was overflowing when he played a new composition, Lullaby for Inez, at the funeral of Inez Dickens Gumbs, one of many tributes to the longtime Grog Shop owner, who died May 26.

Personal events and experiences are Allen’s subject matter, and he says he’s been in a very productive period lately.  “I’ve got some pieces that I really don’t know what to do with them,“ he says.  “When you get a piece of music, writing it on a piece of paper sometimes takes a little courage.”

“Most of what I learned about writing I learned at living,“ he says.  “True music is an expression of feeling, and you have to live the feelings in order to communicate.”  Thus, most of the songs on the new CD are dedicated to family and friends, and one, Forever I Love You, is meant to convey a sense of premonition: the song “means I was in love with you before we met.”

He describes its creation: “I came into my house one day with a perfect piece of music and I sat at the piano and played the whole thing at once, I was singing it before I was playing it, but the melody was in me and I wasn’t making it up, it was there.”

Allen plays the opening bars of a wistful ballad, and laughs with pleasure.  “That’s a perfect melody and I never did that in my life!  And that just came with me one day when I walked in this house.  I had been out partying with some friends for a couple days, I wasn’t feeling that good, and when I walked in that music walked in with me.  I couldn’t believe it, I literally, practically cried for two days.”

Forever I Love You is the last song on the CD, in an arrangement with trumpet, piano and contra bass, but it’s hard to imagine that the perfect version – aside from the one in Tex’s head – isn’t the pure unadorned sound coming right now from that gleaming black Yamaha.

There was a gap of about six years between the Song Book and Allen’s previous album, Late Night, a period of some unhappiness for a man who proudly declares that “I never compromised on art for business.”

“When you have your own expression, sometimes it’s harder to get in the door,“ Allen says, “because a lot of the people who are in the administration of record companies, they look for something that’s already done, and they give you excuses like maybe they’re taking a risk to do this and do that, but for me it was a very humiliating and very frustrating situation.”

His friends came to the rescue in 1998, and the result was the Song Book, an independent production by Allen and Buddy Williams, which Allen is marketing through Geronimo Inc. right here on Roosevelt Island (Box 0042, NYC10044).  “This is the greatest compliment in my life as a musician, because the musicians decided that they were tired of waiting for a company to produce my writings, and they got together and raised the money to produce this CD because they believed in my work,” he says.

The Geronimo distribution title, which he’d gladly trade for a major label, reflects Allen’s abiding interest in multihued Americana.  “I think of the music as embracing people,“ he says.  “It’s warm and it gives you a sense of home.”

Tex Allen hasn’t had the warm notoriety of his sisters, but he admits being lucky to be able to pursue his calling as a jazz musician, and he seems to be well adjusted to the trade-offs: “The music I do is a product of living, and I’ve done a lot of living.  I’ve covered a lot of ground.”

And he has maintained his sense of humor.

”I asked God for a job, to be his musician.  Twenty-four seven, 50 years later, I came back and said, 'Look Lord, you didn’t tell me all this was coming along.' A little voice came over to me, and He said, 'Hey, Tex, the gig was optional, now do you want it or not?'

”And I said, 'OK, I’ll take it.'

“And it got worse!”

 
HOME PAGE