2002 World Away

Tom Waits has said: "I like a beautiful song that tells you terrible things. We all like bad news out of a pretty mouth." When it comes to the material on Blood Money, I don't know if I can call Waits' mouth pretty, but he certainly offers plenty of bad news in a very attractive, compelling way. Released simultaneously with Alice, a recording of songs written in 1990, Blood Money is a set of 13 songs written by Waits and Kathleen Brennan in collaboration with dramatist Robert Wilson. The project was a loose adaptation of the play Woyzeck, originally written by German poet Georg Buchner in 1837. The play was inspired by the true story of a German soldier who was driven mad by bizarre army medical experiments and infidelity, which led him to murder his lover - cheery stuff, to be sure…

A versatile acoustic bassist with an adventurous spirit, Ben Allison has often excelled in avant-garde settings but has proven himself to be equally capable of playing hard bop. The East Coast native was only nine when he began studying music, and he was 22 when, in 1989, he graduated from New York University with a B.A. in jazz performance. In 1992, Allison founded the Jazz Composers Collective, a musician-run, nonprofit organization that encouraged artists to take risks and didn't shy away from the avant-garde when presenting many concerts in New York. It was in 1994 that the Collective launched the Herbie Nichols Project, which Allison co-directed with pianist Frank Kimbrough; it used concerts and CDs (including Love Is Proximity on Soul Note) to celebrate the music of the great but underexposed bebop pianist Herbie Nichols.