Marilyn Crispell

Vignettes (ECM 2027), Storyteller (ECM 1847), Amaryllis (ECM 1742) and One Dark Night I Left my Silent House (ECM 2089)

A COMPELLING pianist whose sounds span the perceived gulfs between classical music and jazz, Marilyn Crispell was born in Philadelphia in 1947 and studied classical piano and composition and the New England Conservatory of Music as a young woman. She virtually abandoned music for medicine for six years, but began singing blues in a folk rock group after the breakdown of her marriage. She then discovered the free jazz beauties and profundities of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and the pioneering free pianism of Cecil Taylor, and since the 1970s she has performed and recorded prolifically as a jazz artist and improviser with many of the US eminences of the avant-garde, from multiple reedman Anthony Braxton and arch-bassist Reggie Workman to European free masters like Evan Parker and Barry Guy.

Over the last decade she has become a regular artiste with the Munich-based ECM label, recording a series of fine albums as one third of a stellar trio, with two other US veteran virtuosi including bassist Gary Peacock, who goes back to some of the earliest startling albums cut by rasping tenorist Albert Ayler, and those of long-time confrere Keith Jarrett in the pianist’s renowned Standards Trio. The subtle and feathery drummer is Paul Motian who played on some of Bill Evans’ most brilliant trio albums between 1959-63 and, after a lifetime of powerful jazz achievement with some of the music’s greatest originators from Lee Konitz and Charlie Haden to Jim pepper and Don Cherry, died aged 80 in 2011.

Amaryllis, recorded in New York in 2000, is described by Crispell in her sleeve notes as “very inner space,” containing several “slow free pieces.” The tracks are mainly short and have a beautiful quietude, through which Crispell’s softly chiming notes, Peacock’s essential yet exploring heartbeat and Motian’s serene brushes unify to create a peculiar hushed and tranquil peace, as in Motian’s Voices, where Peacock’s bass sounds like a giant and deep-cushioned hammer, Peacock’s tuneful December Greenwings which sounds anything but the sheer improvisation that it is, and Crispell’s Silence (for P) where the trio’s interactions are sublime. The exception is the free-jumping Crispell piece called Rounds, which skips and kicks like a children’s dance. Morpion too is fast, free, almost weightless as it glides through the ears.

Storyteller of 2004 brought in New Jersey-born Mark Helias for the ever-busy Peacock. Jazz is all about sonic narrative and the album’s three musicians are also the writers of its stories. Crispell’s opener, Wild Rose, is almost anthemic, a praise song to a flower alive with Motian’s rustling brushes and Helias’s mollifying bass. Motian’s Flight of the Bluejay has such spring in his drums that these birds levitate over Crispell’s caressed keys and Helias’s soft melodism. Then Crispell’s Alone, with its few enough notes of stark solitariness aches to tell more of its story. Helias’s track Limbo is a complex improvisation, with Crispell’s excursion belying any easy dancing which is saved up for the fleeting, lightweight movement of Motian’s Play. If listeners bring their own events to this music’s promptings, there are stories galore stemming from the trio’s album.

Vignettes can be engraved illustrations with no definite borders — an ideal concept for jazz improviser or character portraits. It is also the title of Crispell’s solo album recorded in 2007 in Lugano, Italy, and dedicated to her father.

There are 17 short tracks on Vignettes and without stalwarts like Motian, Peacock or Helias, Crispell’s chiming sounds seem strangely naked (listen to Vignette II for example) but nonetheless beautiful. The slow accumulation of notes on Valse Triste bursts with emotive power, and within Cuida Tu Esperito it is as if every line of improvisation is an emergent melody. Notes of hope seem to pour from Gathering Light, and the concluding Little Song for My Father which very powerfully and tenderly exemplifies within its brief three minutes the words of Cecil Taylor, Crispell’s great piano inspiration, who declared that her music was creating “a new kind of lyricism” in jazz.

Finally there is One Dark Night I Left My Silent House, a 2010 album Crispell made with US clarinettist David Rothenberg, who is also a philosophical naturalist who has written influentially on music and the natural world in his books such as Why Birds Sing and his study of the sounds of whales, Thousand Mile Song. Tracks like Stay, Stray, Grosbeak, Owl Moon and Still Life with Woodpeckers pursue these studies into jazz and Rothenberg’s own woodwind birdsong harmonises engagingly with Crispell’s naturalism of sound, particularly in the Hawk and the Mouse, when she directly plucks the piano strings. Inside the house is silent, outside the night brings an orchestra of natural sound. Crispell is there to hear it and bring it to us.