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Allen Won Biography

allen-won
  • Born: March 31, 1958 in Tokyo, Japan
  • Years Active: 2000s
  • Genre: Jazz

Based in New Jersey, the Tokyo-born Allen Won is a post-bop reedman who frequently performs in and around New York City. The Asian-American musician (who shouldn't be confused with a hip-hop/urban contemporary engineer named Won Allen) is hard-swinging, but he is also quite capable of being lyrical -- and the musicians who have had a direct or indirect influence on his solos include, among others, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, and Pharoah Sanders. Won has clearly spent a lot of time studying Shorter's long, impressive history -- not only Shorter's contributions to Miles Davis' quintet in the mid-'60s, but also the veteran saxman's own albums and his Weather Report collaborations with acoustic pianist/electric keyboardist Joe Zawinul. And when it comes to Coltrane, Won has been generally affected the most by Trane's modal recordings of the early to mid-'60s (as opposed to his hard bop output for Prestige in the late '50s or the blistering, atonal free jazz he favored during the last few years of his life). Won (who, like his influences, has never been afraid to combine post-bop with world music) knows his way around more than one wind instrument; he plays the tenor, soprano, alto, and baritone saxophones, but he has also been documented on the clarinet and the flute. Although Won was born in Tokyo on March 31, 1958, the improviser has spent most of his life in an English-speaking environment. Won was only nine months old when he left Tokyo for Honolulu, Hawaii, where he grew up. As an adult, he moved to the eastern United States -- where over the years he has backed artists ranging from arranger/bandleader Galt MacDermot (who has featured him extensively over the years) to drummer/composer/bandleader John Hollenbeck to the very sociopolitical saxophonist/bandleader Fred Ho (who has often used Won in his Afro-Asian Music Ensemble). What instrument or instruments Won is hired to play on a particular album or live performance depends on the needs of the employer; between the late '80s and the mid-2000s, he played on at least 20 albums as a sideman -- and it was not uncommon for Won to go from playing nothing but the soprano sax or the tenor sax on one album to playing several different instruments on another album. Clearly, Won's flexibility as a wind player and his ability to move from wind instrument to wind instrument has been a plus. But despite all that sideman work along the way, Won didn't start recording as a leader until he was in his early forties. In 1999, he produced his first album as a leader, The Jewel in the Lotus, which was mixed in 2000 but didn't come out until 2005; the disc finds Won playing original material exclusively and leading an acoustic quartet that employs Kiyoto Fujiwara on bass, Rave Tesar on piano, and Michael Sarin on drums. ~ Alex Henderson, Rovi

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