This ensemble is now officially retired.
Jazz Lauds was a seven-piece ensemble—two vocalists, two horns, and rhythm section—formed and co-led with Jen & Kris Allen. The group played regularly at St. Paul’s Collegiate Church in Storrs, Connecticut from 2008–2010, joined by a rotating roster of invited jazz musicians.
The project explored the possibility of placing authentic jazz language—composition, improvisation, and arrangement—within the context of church services. The aim was not decoration, but integration: treating the music seriously, and trusting it to carry spiritual and emotional weight without dilution.
Guest musicians included: Jimmy Greene, Kyle Beecher, Matt Dwonszyk, Alexandra Eckhardt, Charles Flores, Henry Lugo, Aaron Nebbia, Stephen Porter, Ben Bilello, Rogerio Boccato, Tido Holtkamp, Eric Nebbia, and students from the Hartt School of Music, UConn, and the Hartford Academy.
Holy, Holy, Holy, arranged by Earl MacDonald.
Some of the arrangements first written for Jazz Lauds—played in church services during those years—later found a second life on my 2021 album Consecrated. Recorded several years after this ensemble ended, the album revisits that material from a different vantage point: shaped by distance, doubt, and a more unsettled relationship to faith. What began as functional music for a specific liturgical setting became, over time, a quieter reckoning—preserved not as worship, but as reflection.
This music belongs to a specific chapter of my life and work. While I no longer identify with evangelical Christianity—particularly where it has aligned itself with exclusion, political power, and ideological certainty—I remain committed to the values that originally drew me to this project: care, seriousness, and the belief that art should deepen our ethical attention to one another.
Jazz Lauds stands as a record of that moment—of musicianship offered in good faith, of community formed through sound, and of questions that were already beginning to outgrow the structures around them.
This Is The Air I Breathe, arranged by Kris Allen.