Jazz legend Marshall Allen reflects on his music journey at 100 years old: “You just have to depend on the spirit of the song”

At the golden age of 100, Marshall Allen is still on tour. He’s promoting New Dawn, his first solo album with his name and was honored Saturday with the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Fellowship.

Allen grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, listening to the sounds of Duke Ellington’s jazz orchestra. The clarinet was the first instrument Allen learned to play. He then learned the saxophone, while serving in the Army band during World War II.

“I’m going in like I’m going to be a hero. I’m going to do this and that, but when I got that reality of Army life, it was … it was different,” he said.

His sound is unique because he doesn’t just play the written melody, he adds random notes at random times to reflect how the songs make him feel.

“You just have to depend on the spirit of the song,” Allen said.

How Allen played and his reasons why changed in the late 1950s when he met Herman Poole Blount, known as Sun Ra. The composer and leader of “Sun Ra Arkestra” later welcomed Allen into his group, but not without criticism.

“He said ‘You sound good, had a tone and your disk and it sound good, but it’s not what I want.’ I said, ‘Now what is it that you want?’ He is saying … ‘I want to hear what you don’t know.'”

Sun Ra’s fascination with outer space and the true freedom it could offer inspired his cosmic blend of jazz, Afrofuturism and spiritual expression. He encouraged his artists to play from the heart and improvise when they “felt the spirit.”

For years, the group lived together in Philadelphia and practiced relentlessly.

“Rehearsed day and night,” Allen said. “I had to get my discipline together.”

When Sun Ra died in the early 1990s, Allen became the new leader. For the last 30 years he has been teaching musicians the art of playing what they don’t know.

Jazz music journey

Allen said jazz music is just as important today as it was when he was starting out.

The routine of preparing for a show and testing his instruments never seems to get old for Allen, who turns 101 next month, and recently performed in Brooklyn, New York.

“I’ve been doing this so long,” he said. “70, 80, 90 years.”

It’s been time well spent doing what he loves, which is making people feel something. He said what keeps him going with jazz is, “the spirit of things and not knowing everything.”

As for the next generation of musicians, Allen said they “have to earn it.”

“If you want to play music, you have to get it,” he said. “You have to be in a spirit. You have to play what you don’t know.”