“The music takes you where you need to go”
- Marilyn Crispell
Memento, the first duo release from US pianist Marilyn Crispell and Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, is an album of lyrical and subtle music-making, with compositions and improvisations that circle around ideas of memory and loss.
Crispell previously appeared on Jormin’s cycle of sacred songs, In Winds, In Light (2004), and has long credited the Swedish bassist as an influence on her own musical thinking. “When I heard Anders playing, it touched a chord in me that resonated strongly,” she has said, of a first encounter at a Stockholm festival in 1992. Subsequently absorbing what she perceived as an “aesthetic of space, beauty and tenderness” in the playing of the Scandinavian improvisers, she felt her own music “becoming more whole.” There was a growing recognition that freedom in improvisation need not be measured only in terms of energy and intensity.
Recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in July 2025, with Manfred Eicher producing, Memento begins with four freely created pieces: The opening “For the Children” Anders Jormin explains, is in memory of innocents caught in the crossfire of global conflicts, from Sudan to Gaza and Ukraine. Jormin’s evocative high arco playing – almost kamancheh-like in the phrasing – inside the spontaneous framework created by the piano, brims with emotion. The sombre, thoughtful “Dialogue” is a creative exchange of ideas, exploring melodic material shared in the moment. “Embracing the Otherness” is magically sparse, with silence as an active component, and both players negotiating the upper range of their instruments. And “Contemplation in D” with double bass as a lead voice over floating piano chords is a meditation to conclude the fully improvised component of Memento.
“Three Shades of a House” is a composition that Jormin has featured in his work with Bobo Stenson (see the album Contra la indecisión). Originally a commission to accompany an exhibition by Norwegian painter Hanne Borchgrevink – whose works have been described as a game of variations on a compositional theme, music in form and colour– the piece is presented here in two versions. A “Morning” version has pellucid piano to the fore. An “Evening” version is given over to dark-toned bass.
“Song” is a composition by Marilyn Crispell which dates back to the 1990s. Marilyn says it is “about the distance between two people.” The title track “Memento”, meanwhile, a perfectly phrased miniature for solo piano is about closeness, referencing “people I feel connected to all around the world, and the many people I miss, including family and friends lost in the past few years.”
“The Beach at Newquay” depicts Crispell’s first visit to Cornwall, on tour with saxophonist Raymond MacDonald: “Standing on the beach at night. The sea and stars: magical.” Jormin’s high arco bass adds seagull cries.
“The Dark Light”, Anders Jormin says, “became a piece just slightly hinting at one of the compositions I brought for the recording; we never played the composition it in its entirety. The contradictory title refers to counterpoint, to several layers in music and to the emotions of both joy and sadness we can sense and share at the same time. We even have a special Swedish word for this; vemod. A silent song, a frozen sunbeam, a whispering storm, the dark light...something opens up behind the contradictory words...”
Finally, there is Crispell’s “Dragonfly”, a warm, rural-sounding piano piece, written in memory of Gary Peacock. Crispell and the late bassist made some fine recordings together including the trio sessions Nothing ever was, anyway and Amaryllis and the duo album Azure. Marilyn: “Gary was a close friend as well as colleague. In the month before he died, I would visit him and we would sit outside on his porch. It was early fall, the weather was beautiful, and there were a lot of dragonflies and little animals – especially a chipmunk he fed – who would come to visit him…”
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Marilyn Crispell has been an ECM recording artist since 1997, coming to the label with her remarkable account of the music of Annette Peacock on Nothing ever was, anyway. Her discography for the label includes in addition to her trio recordings, the solo album Vignettes and an of duets with clarinettist David Rothenberg, One Dark Night I Left My Silent House. Latterly, Crispell has been featured with the trio of Joe Lovano on the albums Trio Tapestry, Garden of Expression and Our Daily Bread. The recipient of numerous prizes, she was recently honoured as National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master 2025.
Anders Jormin first appeared on ECM with Don Cherry on Dona Nostra (recorded 1993), and has since been heard on albums with Charles Lloyd, Bobo Stenson, Tomasz Stanko, Jon Balke, Sinikka Langeland, Marilyn Mazur and Ferenc Snétberger. He is a long-time member of the Bobo Stenson Trio, and plays also with new Nordic supergroup Arcanum (with Arve Henriksen, Trygve Seim and Markku Ounaskari). Jormin’s albums as a leader include In Winds, In Light with Marilyn Crispell, Karin Nelson, Raymond Strid and Lena Willemark. Recent album Pasado en claro (2023) also features singer/violinist Willemark, as well as koto player Karin Nakagawa and drummer Jon Fält. The first contemporary improviser to have become a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, Anders Jormin has taught at the University of Gothenburg and Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy.
