Play Misty For Me

Marilyn Crispell

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, March 25, 2010

There’s a sweet sadness that hangs in the morning air. A cold, monochromatic mist hugging the damp, coarse rocks. Gray and black. Black and gray. Barely a sound. Bleak…but beautiful. It might be the view out our own Hudson Valley windows in rainy mid March, when this is being written. It might be the lonely, wind-and-wave-lashed shores of Cape Cod in the off-season. Or it could be somewhere in rural Scandinavia at around the same time, when conversations happen around warming indoor fires and steaming bowls of yellow pea soup called ärtsoppa. And it could also be exactly how the recent music of Marilyn Crispell sounds: sparse, icy, haunting. But how about all four scenarios combined? That wouldn’t really be a stretch, given that the fabled Woodstock pianist has spent considerable time absorbing the atmosphere in all of the above locales, although it’s northernmost Europe that’s fascinated her most these last few years.

“I’ve always been a winter person, and there’s something very cozy about the way the Scandinavian people live during that part of the year,” says Crispell, who frequently performs in the region, often with native musicians, and was sufficiently moved to name one of her pieces for Sweden. “Burning torches, lining the city streets with candles for their festivals. I love the feeling of silence and space there, those pre-Christian, mystical Viking vibes. And I love Nordic folk music. It has this great, wild, keening sound. I recorded with [Swedish singer and fiddler] Lena Willemark, who I’ve become a big fan of. Even the furniture design there somehow reminds me of my musical aesthetic.”

The aesthetic in question is one that has changed much over time. It’s a sensibility that Crispell has been cultivating since she started taking lessons at age seven in her Philadelphia birthplace—long before the early 1980s, when she would emerge from the free-music scene to become one of modern jazz’s leading pianists. Her family later moved to Baltimore, where she spent most of her childhood, before she went on to study classical styles at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute. Crispell spent her summers at a music composition camp in Vermont. “I lived for those six weeks every year when I could go [to the camp] and be with people like me,” she recalls. “The instructor there, Grace Cushman, introduced me to improvisation. An amazing woman.” Crispell next enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, but stopped playing around the time she got married in 1969.

But after a divorce and a move to the Cape, she had an epiphanic encounter with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, which opened the door to a new universe. She learned jazz harmony under influential educator Charlie Banacos and in 1977 moved to Woodstock to study and eventually teach at the legendary Creative Music Studio. “One really needs to listen to Marilyn’s music from a purely emotional standpoint,” says CMS founder Karl Berger. “She’s unique in that she’s never really tried to follow others’ leads. She does her own thing, it all comes from her.” Crispell describes her time at CMS as “fantastic, unique, beautiful, complex.”

Those same four adjectives also perfectly describe the style Crispell had begun to formulate by this time, a captivating approach reminiscent of the propulsive “energy music” of Cecil Taylor. It won her a key admirer in the eminent composer, saxophonist, and sometime CMS teacher Anthony Braxton, who in 1978 recruited her for his quartet. After several successful European tours and albums with Braxton, she began leading her own bands and performing with Evan Parker, Reggie Workman, Barry Guy, Fred Anderson, Gerry Hemingway, and other groundbreakers. She cut a stack of fiery, highly praised albums as a side person and leader for key labels like Leo, hatArt, Black Saint, and Music & Arts, before her playing began to suggest a somewhat more lyrical side in the realm of Keith Jarrett and Paul Bley. She made her debut with Germany’s ECM Records in 1996 with Nothing Ever Was, Anyway, an album of compositions by her fellow Woodstocker Annette Peacock that features drummer Paul Motian and bassist Gary Peacock. Amaryllis, another outing with the same exemplary trio, arrived in 2001, followed by 2004’s Storyteller, which features bass man Mark Helias taking over for Gary Peacock. Her first solo set for ECM, the elegiac and supremely meditative Vignettes (reviewed in the September 2008 issue of Chronogram), came next.