
An American TV personality, composer, actor, writer and comedian, Allen played the piano.
Since my youth I have enjoyed playing occasional practical jokes… Two of the wildest involved albums of jazz piano music I recorded under fictitious names: Buck Hammer was supposedly a shy, black boogie-woogie pioneer whose album was released posthumously, and Mary Anne Jackson was, according to the liner notes, a black pianist and composer who performed with 'bold authority,' mainly in Europe. […] I not only did the piano playing on both albums but wrote the liner notes, in the deliberately stuffy, overly analytical style of some critics.
'Hammer’s death was a tragic loss to the world of jazz,' wrote a New York Herald Tribune critic. The experts, Allen later observed, liked his playing much better when they thought he was black and dead rather than white and alive.