On a beautiful day in Harlem a few months before the release of his debut album, Luther S. Allison stood chatting a few yards away from Duke Ellington’s white baby grand. Allison, a wiry 6’4” with huge hands and a contagious enthusiasm, was surrounded by history at the National Jazz Museum — Eddie Lockjaw Davis’s tenor saxophone, the famous Great Day in Harlem photo of 57 musicians taken on a stoop on 126th Street. It was a fitting scene for the pianist, a 28-year-old up-and-comer who’s drawn comparisons to Mulgrew Miller and learned to use the past as fuel for his own future.
Over the last whirlwind year, Allison won his first Grammy (for his work with the jazz vocalist Samara Joy), acted in and played music for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s movie “The Bride,” toured nationally with the singer Ekep Nkwelle, performed at the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival with the bassist Endea Owens and landed a fellowship at the Jazz Museum’s Jazz Is: Now! program, which involves playing and curating a series of events. It’s all happened so quickly, he hasn’t even had time to hire a manager.
On Friday, Allison will release his first LP, “I Owe It All to You,” on Posi-Tone, and then he’ll soon hit the road again. Jazz at Lincoln Center has chosen him as a featured artist for a 40-city bandleading tour across the country, arranging, playing and directing the music of New Orleans; he’ll also tour Mexico with his own band in October.
“I’ve had unique opportunities to play with my elders,” Allison said in his Southern lilt. “That gave me a lot more visibility than if I was only playing with people my age range.” While an undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee, his mentor was Donald Brown, the Jazz Messengers pianist who schooled him on Memphis greats like Miller, Harold Mabern and James Williams.
“Donald would tell stories about them,” Allison said, smiling at the memory. “It felt like we could have been just in his living room. He was just playing us music and expressing himself freely and it was so soulful.”
Brown was equally impressed by his young pupil. When he first heard Allison play, he was struck by how much he sounded like Miller, “that big beautiful sound and touch,” he said in an interview. “You can feel the warmth and love that went into molding him, and that comes across when he plays.”
Allison grew up in North Carolina, steeped in the traditions of Sunday church hymns and the blues soundscape resonating from parks, restaurants and bars. His home was full of music, though no one in his family was a musician. His mother was always dancing, and his father, who built up a huge CD collection, would play Stevie Wonder, smooth jazz and more. Allison asked for drums for his 5th birthday, and later picked up the saxophone.
He recalled his parents’ mind-set as “Let’s invest in this,” he said of his budding musicianship. “They never said, ‘You need to have a backup plan.’”
As a boy, Allison took lessons in classical piano but didn’t get serious about the instrument until he was a junior in high school, when he was discovered by the Jazz Arts Initiative in Charlotte in 2011. That program, now called JazzArts Charlotte, had just begun, and was looking for a pianist for its all-star ensemble to perform gigs out in the community and serve as a student ambassador. When a friend brought Allison in one day and he started playing, the program’s co-founder Lonnie Davis was a bit shocked.
“I was so blown away,” Davis said in an interview. “He didn’t have a lot of jazz chops. But with what he was able to articulate, I knew he was special.” She proudly shared a video of Allison sitting on a piano bench next to Sean Mason, another program alum who is also now a rising piano star. The two remain friends.
Allison’s professional recording debut came in 2015, at age 19, when the trombonist Michael Dease recruited him to play drums on his album “Father Figure.” Dease introduced him to the drummer Ulysses Owens Jr., who hired him just after graduate school at Michigan State to play piano on a world tour in his first Generation Y quintet. Owens encouraged Allison’s move to New York City in 2019, where he quickly scored gigs at clubs including Smalls, Minton’s and Smoke.
“He’s just a great talent,” Owens said. “He’s reamplifying the tradition of jazz piano and he’s lifting up a legacy that’s the foundation for many people. He’s the blue-collar guy, rolling up his sleeves and giving everybody what they need.”
Soon after Allison joined Owens’s band, Joy saw him playing in a video online and decided she needed him to join her. By November 2022, they were touring around the world.
“What sets Luther apart, for me,” Joy said in an interview, “is the fact that his openness and generosity as a person translates to how he interacts with everyone in the band on his instrument. The passion that he plays with uplifts those around him and inspires everyone to play at their best.”
Allison started work on “I Owe It All to You” in 2018 but laid down all 10 tracks in one day at Michael Brorby’s Acoustic Recording studios in Brooklyn in May 2023. The album, which features a simple trio of piano, bass (Boris Kozlov) and drums (Zach Adleman), was produced by Marc Free, the Posi-Tone label boss. It’s steeped in the straightforward tradition of deep blues, gospel and hard bop, and nearly captures Allison’s intensity and charisma playing live. All that’s missing is his perennially pumping loafer-clad left foot and his megawatt smile.
The album’s four original compositions build on what Allison learned from his college mentor, Brown, and its title cut is dedicated to everyone who’s paved the way for him: God, Brown, his parents and all those in between. That song, which opens the LP, starts with Allison playing a low tremolo that establishes a blues groove, before snapping into lightning fast melodies, lush chords and glissandos.
The LP’s covers include Miller’s waltz “From Day to Day,” Mabern’s “There But for the Grace of …” and a piece from Brown, “New York,” which Allison sped up and reharmonized in a couple of sections.
“Playing a song by someone I’ve admired for so much of my life is exciting but it’s also daunting because I want to do this person justice,” Allison explained, waving his big hands for emphasis. “You’re a little fearful but you’re also very excited to pay tribute.”
One standout is the original, achingly tender ballad “Until I See You Again,” which Allison wrote for his girlfriend, now his fiancée, the day he moved from Michigan to New York. It’s classic blues improvisation — “not just off the top of your head, but from the bottom of your heart,” he said.
When he listens to his album, Allison can hear the places where he’s grown and stretched in just the past year. He’s already working on composing his next one, which will branch out into orchestration, including strings, horns and woodwinds, as well as vocals, which he’s never written before.
Brown said he’s happy to see Allison coming into his own not only as a player but as a composer. “But he’s still that humble and modest guy,” he said. “The talent is there but also the work ethic and the creativity, which you can’t really teach.”
Read More: Luther S. Allison, a Jazz Pianist With Big Hands and Bigger Traditions
