Tom Allen (broadcaster)
Tom Allen is a Canadian public radio broadcaster, concert host, trombonist and author.
Allen was born in Montreal, Quebec, and studied music at McGill University, Boston University and Yale University. He lives in Toronto, Ontario, with his wife, the harpist Lori Gemmell, and broadcasts on CBC Radio 2, on which he presents Shift, a national cross-genre afternoon music program. From 1998 to 2008, he hosted the classical music program Music and Company and, from 2008 to 2009, the Radio 2 Morning program.
Allen works also as a concert host and a creative consultant for symphony orchestras. He hosts the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's Afterworks series and has hosted concerts for the Hamilton Philharmonic, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and Symphony Nova Scotia. From 2006 to 2009, he hosted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's Unmasked series of concerts, working with conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Hans Graf and Peter Oundjian. With Oundjian he co-created Eight Days in June, a "festival of music and thought" that was described by the Detroit Free Press as a "chaotic success".
Allen has published three books of autobiographical non-fiction: Toe Rubber Blues, and The Gift of The Game. He received the 2002 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction for Rolling Home, his memoir of a cross-Canada rail journey.
Two of Allen's musical works premiered in 2013: Bohemians in Brooklyn, a cabaret-style revue based upon the lives of the musicians and writers living in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s, and The Judgment of Paris, a "chamber musical" about the composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Both featured the Canadian soprano Patricia O'Callaghan, the pianist-singer Bryce Kulak, the harpist Lori Gemmell and Allen himself as trombonist and narrator.
