Ace of bass

Some artists are too curious, too versatile, too adventurous for their own commercial good. They avoid being pigeonholed, yet they risk missing out on the fame and familiarity that an easy label can help to provide. By default, they're dubbed "eclectic," a death-knell adjective for someone trying to forge an identity.

Ben Allison knows these pitfalls and has taken pains to have his intrepid, idiosyncratic muse and profit from it, too. At age 41, the jazz bassist and composer has led no fewer than six distinctive ensembles and participated in a slew of others.

Local audiences can see two of them in the next few days. On Saturday, Allison will appear at Walker Art Center as part of Steven Bern-stein's Millennial Territory Orchestra, a rollicking nonet that plumbs the infectious swing of Roaring '20s Harlem one minute, and the funky fatback of Sly Stone the next. Next Friday, Allison will return to Minneapolis as a member of Matt Wilson's Carl Sandburg Project, a quartet that puts Sandburg's Midwestern poetry to music.

Allison forged strong relationships with both Bernstein and Wilson via the Jazz Composers Collective, a nonprofit organization he co-founded 15 years ago to draw attention to creative composers.

"One of the reasons we started the collective was to bridge all the different scenes in New York -- uptown, downtown -- and consider ourselves musicians first and foremost," Allison said. One of its first efforts was the Herbie Nichols Project, promoting an unjustly obscure pianist/composer who died of leukemia in 1963 at age 44.

"His music is sheer genius, and when I discovered it, I was struck with wondering why he wasn't well-known," Allison said by phone from his home in New York. "It made me think that maybe there are other musicians out there on the level of Miles and Coltrane and Monk that we don't hear about. From what I've heard and read, Herbie was a sweet and shy, soft-spoken intellectual, and that's a tough sell when you're talking about entertainment. The music of Mingus and Monk and others was great, but they were also great showmen."

True to that lesson, the live gigs led by Bernstein and Wilson promise to be playful. "Steve will be the first to say he's more intuitive; he likes to keep it raw, with an emphasis on the spirit," said Allison of Bernstein, whose other ensemble is named Sex Mob. "I don't think we've ever rehearsed or maybe we tried once or twice and it backfired on us. Now that we're used to each other a little bit and Steve can stay so freewheeling, it is even better.

A good conversationalist

Allison is in demand as a sideman because he brings a compositional intelligence to the rhythm section that is both forceful and sensitive.

"The best way to describe group interplay to nonmusicians is that it is like a conversation," he said. "To be bombastic is just rude; the goal is to make the conversation interesting. That's what the audience wants, and what I want when I put a record on more than once, to hear that mystery of the interaction and how it takes place."

That kind of mystery suffuses "Little Things Run the World," his eighth album, and the second featuring guitarist Steve Cardenas in place of a pianist. The disc is on sale via download at www.palmetto-records.net before hitting stores Jan. 22.

"I grew up in the '70s listening to a lot of folk and rock, and guitar was the instrument, but the problem was finding one that was right for me," Allison said. "Steve has a very warm, mid-range sound that blends with my bass, and when I heard it I knew I wanted to build a band around it."

"I grew up in a very intellectual environment," said Allison, who was raised in the Ivy League college town of New Haven, Conn., to a psychoanalyst father who was also on the faculty at Yale. "My brother teaches at Prince-ton, so I am the free spirit.