Marilyn Crispell is a top American jazz pianist and composer. She began studying piano and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music and later discovered jazz thru Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley and others. She was a member of the avant jazz groups of Anthony Braxton and Reggie Workman for a decade, and has also performed and recorded classical avant new music by John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and others. She received a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship grant.
While I’ve personally found most of her previous work a bit too much in the tres-avant Cecil Taylor bag to garner my interest, this solo statement of 17 little original pieces composed (except for two) and played by Crispell has my vote. Producer Manfred Eicher clearly intended to show a different side of Crispell and perhaps gain new fans for her, and he has succeeded. While some of tracks are wildly avant garde, others are thoughtful, fairly tonal improvisations much in the style of Paul Bley. Some of them are just a bit over one minute, and there are two over-seven-minute pieces that really caught my ear. The first, Cuida Tu Espiritu, has a long-limbed very tender melody, and Sweden makes use of suspended chordal sounds using Debussy-styled pedaling. As usual the ECM liner notes tell us nothing specific. The excellent piano recording for which ECM is famed was made in an auditorium at the Italian-Swiss Radio in Lugano, Switzerland.
TrackList:
1. Vignette 1
2. Valse Triste
3. Cuida Tu Espíritu
4. Gathering Light
5. Vignette 2
6. Vignette 3
7. Vignette 4
8. Vignette 5
9. Sweden
10. Once
11. Axis
12. Vignette 6
13. Vignette 7
14. Ballade
15. Time Past
16. Stilleweg
17. Little Song For My Father
— John Henry
