Underneath the orange Tree

Underneath The Orange Tree

Underneath the Orange Tree starts where A Study In Unknowing left off, and where Alleman now resides, Los Angeles. However, you won’t find Hollywood in these songs. The album deals with the lesser thought of experiences that LA offers. You’ll find the grit and dust of the people and landscape, the trials of post-pandemic life, choice vs. fate, the nervous quiet of an LA winter, the exaltation of rain, killing old versions of yourself, and the conflict of abandoning your roots.

Alleman’s melodies are somatically written and autobiographical. Drawing inspiration from lived experience, place, memories, and circumstances, he fully dives into these subjects with mind and body, and extracts melodies, arrangements, and improvisations that at a glance can feel simple but have much more waiting to unfold if you’re patient and willing to receive. The music is emotionally primed to be lived in by your own story.

Other than Alleman’s melodies, little is written before the sessions begin. Much of what’s here comes from impromptu inspiration on the tracking day, stemming from improvising on the ideas. Written melodies are stated and expanded upon by Alleman tastefully augmenting the ideas, or fully diving into improvised sections in order to create worlds within each idea.

While rooted in lived experience, Underneath the Orange Tree doesn’t function to serve banal urges of nostalgia, rather it looks to the future and poses questions of what a piano trio can be, and what type of music gets to claim the concept of improvisation and how it’s defined. It offers new and compounded influences to an instrument created over 300 years ago. It’s an amalgamation of jazz-informed musicians bridging traditional ideas of augmenting melody with improvisation, but with modern sounds, harmony, and ethos. Alleman continues to uncover how a piano can feel when its function is not only to be beautiful, but also to introduce edges, tension and to commiserate on the uncertainty that occupies the corners of modern life.