Ben Allison
Ben Allison, born November 17, 1966 in New Haven, Connecticut, is an American jazz double bassist, composer, producer, bandleader and educator. He co-founded the Jazz Composers Collective in 1992 and led it as Artistic Director for 12 years, helping many composers create and perform new jazz works. He is an adjunct professor at The New School and serves as President of the New York chapter of the Recording Academy.
He began guitar at age 9 and later studied bass. He also explored West African, Haitian and Cuban drumming, attended ACES/ECA and Wilbur Cross High School, briefly studied with Steve Swallow, and took courses at Yale. He entered NYU in 1985 on a scholarship to study jazz performance and bass, studying with Joe Lovano, Dennis Irwin, Jim McNeely and Steve LaSpina, and graduated in 1989 with a BA in Music Performance.
In 1992 he and friends formed the Jazz Composers Collective, a musician-run nonprofit that built audiences for new music. The collective produced 12 seasons of concerts, featuring about 50 composers and 300 new works, with Allison as Artistic Director until 2005.
In the 1990s Allison released his own albums, starting with Seven Arrows (1996) and Medicine Wheel (1998). His 1999 album Third Eye used a wide range of instruments beyond typical jazz and topped the CMJ jazz charts for nine weeks. He also worked with other Collective members and recorded with Lee Konitz. He helped lead the Herbie Nichols Project, which released three albums of Nichols’s music discovered at the Library of Congress.
He began teaching at The New School in 1996 and also taught at the Third Street Music School. After the collective dissolved in 2005, he released more albums for Palmetto Records, including Peace Pipe (2002) with Malian kora player Mamadou Diabaté and Cowboy Justice (2006), which introduced electric guitar as a major voice in his sound. His album Little Things Run The World received praise from NPR.
Allison has received several commissions and grants and has performed and recorded with many artists. In 2001 he wrote the theme for NPR’s On The Media. He continued teaching and performing around the world, and in 2011 released Action-Refraction, an album of non-original pieces that topped the CMJ jazz chart. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2012 and in 2013 started his own label, Sonic Camera Records; the first release was The Stars Look Very Different Today, featuring Brandon Seabrook, Steve Cardenas and Allison Miller, which he wrote, arranged, produced and mixed.
He lives in Greenwich Village, New York City, with his wife, Suzanne DiMaggio, and their daughter.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 10:02 (CET).