Tyrone Allen II’s emergence as one of the New York jazz scene’s most indispensable bassists didn’t happen with a bunch of fanfare. It happened through a steady accumulation of trust, depth, and range. In the last several years, Allen has become a go-to voice on both upright and electric bass for artists exploring the continuum of Black American music and beyond—whether playing in the trio of acclaimed pianist Sullivan Fortner, anchoring Nicole Glover’s rhythmically muscular ensemble, shaping the bottom line of the Miki Yamanaka Quartet, or stepping into the conceptual frameworks of Kazemde George, Wendy Eisenberg, Joy Guidry, and others who push the envelope of modern jazz expression.

With UPWARD, Allen takes a bold, deeply personal step into the foreground. Released on his own Dreams and Fears imprint, the album introduces Allen not just as a bassist but as a producer, composer, and ensemble architect. It’s a work born out of introspection and crafted with the patience of someone who prefers long arcs over quick impact.

Allen, whose father was an amateur electric bassist, grew up in Temple Hills, Maryland, a community in Prince George’s County where music education and church performance were foundational. Allen’s first structured music experience came via recorder lessons at age three, later followed by stints on piano, saxophone, and guitar, before he ultimately arrived home to the bass.

Though formal music programs weren’t available in his early schooling, Allen began upright bass in high school at the urging of a jazz band director who insisted he study both electric and acoustic. He joined the school orchestra, dove into jazz repertoire, and later connected with Paul Carr, the DMV jazz legend whose mentorship pipeline has produced generations of serious players. A scholarship to Carr’s Jazz Academy followed, which in turn opened the door to the Eastman School of Music’s summer program, then undergraduate study there.

Eastman’s dual track in classical and jazz refined Allen’s technical approach while exposing him to Rochester’s vibrant DIY music scene. There he met multi-instrumentalist Abe Nouri, a creative foil who co-produced UPWARD. At Eastman, Allen also connected with Wendy Eisenberg and other future collaborators. He continued his education at Berklee College of Music through the Global Jazz Institute, where he studied with Danilo Pérez, Terri Lyne Carrington, and John Patitucci, among others.

UPWARD was recorded in April 2024 at Bunker Studios, but its emotional and conceptual core stretch back to the early days of the pandemic. “The theme came to me in times of isolation,” Allen writes, “when I was longing to be in communion with others while attempting to cherish the times of stillness that we all knew were fleeting.”

The album’s title track—first conceived years ago—is the oldest piece on the record, and one that has evolved with Allen’s own outlook. “Just like my approach to music-making, it is ever evolving,” he writes. This sense of gradual becoming is embedded in the record’s structure and sound design. He cites foundational sound influences in Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis.

The ensemble across the album is fluid but focused: Neta Raanan (tenor saxophone), Lex Korten (keys), Samantha Feliciano (harp), Aidan Lombard (trumpet), Kayvon Gordon (drums), and Nouri (live effects and co-production). Allen plays upright, electric, synth bass, and electronics—often blurring them together in layered meditations.

Feliciano’s harp appears on nearly half the record, lending lightness and shape to sonic environments that are often richly textured. This is especially evident in “harp solo,” a moment of suspended hope in the middle of the album, and “art day,” a preserved sonic artifact from a one-day outdoor installation that inspired the record’s cover image. Allen confesses that one of his primary jazz influences (especially the harp parts) comes from bassist and cellist Oscar Pettiford’s big band records featuring harp.

Allen’s background in soundscape production, and his immersion in the work of Solange and Oneohtrix Point Never, also showcased in his solo electronic project TY.000, inform much of the sonic architecture here—looped rhythmic motifs, ambient textures, and manipulated audio.

The emotional core of the album is a four-part “Stuck” suite—“Stuck,” “harp solo,” “Mood 1a-1c,” and “Alt. stuck”—that journeys through stillness, frustration, meditation, and ultimately, release. Allen describes it as an exploration of “longing to move past the current predicament while simultaneously clinging to the desire to stay patient.” In “Alt. stuck,” he trades patience for “brooding anger,” before arriving at the gentler resolution of the final stretch.

Elsewhere, Allen engages with his love of form and irony. “Smp Sng” juxtaposes a simple melodic idea with a massive, arena-like soundscape—what he calls “a sarcastic kind of grandiosity”—while its reprise, “when is it ever really smp / smp 4 me,” uses a looped line to interrogate privilege, accessibility, and emotional distance.

The A-side is dedicated to Allen’s late Berklee College mentor Ralph Peterson Jr., who invited him into his Fo’tet and encouraged him to explore complex emotional expression through stripped-down forms. In tribute, Allen recorded one piece using only bass, harp, and saxophone—a configuration that emphasizes intimacy over density.

Although UPWARD is Allen’s debut as a leader, it doesn’t feel like a first step. Rather, it feels like the culmination of a quiet ascent—years of sideman work, self-study, and personal calibration, synthesized into a multi-dimensional vision. The album closes with “Bass UNLIMITED,” a full-circle moment that reintroduces the theme from the opener, signaling not closure but renewal.

This isn’t an arrival—it’s a waypoint. A declaration of direction. A statement that Allen, shaped by his early community ethos, Eastman’s dual rigor, Berklee’s cosmopolitan reach, and New York’s wide-open creative terrain, is ready to continue building—not upward for its own sake, but toward connection, transformation, and truth.