The Renaissance of Marilyn Crispell

News, Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Braxton, AACM, Wadada Leo Smith, Roscoe Mitchell, Tyshawn Sorey/Marilyn Crispell, Tyshawn Sorey, Joe Lovano, Oliver Lake

By Philip Freeman I Oct. 21, 2019

The sound of pianist Marilyn Crispell changed following a trip to a festival in Stockholm: “I heard them playing stuff that really, really touched me.”
(Photo: Claire Stefani)

The performance is remarkably cohesive, traveling through several distinct phases, neither player ever seeming to catch the other off guard. This might be because Crispell and Sorey both are composers who improvise, and both are deeply in-tune with the creative and philosophical principles of the AACM, the drummer as a student (he wrote his master’s thesis on Mitchell) and the pianist as a peer.

“Tyshawn gives me a lot of space—in a way, a lot more space to introduce things than I’m used to,” she said, admiringly. “Often, someone will just put something down and I’ll react to it, which became a way of operating for me. And so, I suddenly felt that I was not in that kind of comfort zone anymore, that I had a different kind of responsibility for the direction of the music.”

On Wednesday, Crispell and saxophonist Joe Lovano’s Trio Tapestry, a group that made its debut earlier this year, head out on a string of European dates. Somewhere along the way, they’ll duck into the studio and make a second album.

Crispell describes the trio as “sort of a renaissance for me, to be invited to join that group and play his music that’s also challenging; a lot of stuff out of my comfort zone. But it’s all stuff that I can relate to, and I love the challenge.”

Four decades out from her Creative Music Studio days, it seems as if Crispell continues foraging for new sounds. DB