Allan Harris - The Poetry Of Jazz - Live at Blue LLama

Jazz

Allan Harris and the Poetry of Jazz: A Voice that Echoes Across Time.

Allan Harris is not just a jazz singer, he is, in many ways, a living chapter in the story of jazz itself. With a voice steeped in blues and soul, and a career spanning continents, decades, and 17 albums, Harris has long stood as a radiant figure in American music. On stage, he is as much a storyteller and educator as he is a vocalist, generously weaving history and insight into every performance. There is a warmth in his presence, a quiet authority in his voice, and an unwavering commitment to the art he carries proudly like a badge.

His latest project, The Poetry of Jazz: Live at the Blue LLama, is as ambitious as it is intimate. It brings together the verses of William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and Mary Oliver, poets whose words already hold multitudes, and sets them beside jazz standards and original compositions. The result is more than a concert or an album: it’s a kind of opera, a soulful meditation between jazz and blues that invites reflection, emotional connection, and quiet awe. In these uncertain times, its resonance feels especially poignant.

Harris’s deep, expressive voice speaks directly to the listener. He doesn’t just perform these works, he inhabits them. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) flows seamlessly into “Midnight Sun,” merging timeless love with eternal beauty. His own composition, “Autumn,” a gentle ballad on change and surrender, pairs hauntingly with Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” both searching for one’s place in a shifting world: “Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

“Charade,” Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s melancholic classic, explores the fragile line between performance and authenticity, a motif deepened by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, with its themes of disgrace and redemption. Elsewhere, Harris pairs “Shallow Man” with Dylan Thomas’s defiant “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” capturing a shared urgency to resist, whether against complacency or the finality of death.

Throughout, Harris evolves not just as a vocalist but as a thinker and curator. He reveals deeply personal reflections without ever making them overt, never imposing meaning but offering it with the elegance of a seasoned poet. Surrounded by an ensemble of remarkable musicians who elevate every note and nuance, Harris seems energized, even revitalized, by their collective artistry. There’s something in this collaborative spirit that recalls the great French artists of the 1960, —figures like Léo Ferré, who passionately fused poetry and protest, invoking Baudelaire and others to voice the disquiet of their age. Ferré once roared, “Poets, your papers!”, and Harris, in his own quieter, soulful way, answers that same call today.

More than a vocalist, Allan Harris is an essential artist. To hear him wrap jazz around poetry is to experience a kind of creative renaissance. The Poetry of Jazz: Live at the Blue LLama is a testament to his ongoing evolution as a storyteller through song. With this album, Harris continues to stretch the boundaries of jazz, offering listeners a new lens through which to rediscover familiar words and timeless truths. It is, unmistakably, a collector’s album, one to return to again and again.

Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News

PARIS-MOVE, July 8th 2025

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