Storyteller
Marilyn Crispell Trio
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04:10 - 2Flight of the Bluejay
04:37 - 3The Storyteller
06:05 - 4Alone
04:44 - 5Harmonic Line
05:48 - 6Cosmology 2
05:35 - 7Limbo
06:51 - 8Play
05:10 - 9The Sunflower
03:59 - 10Cosmology 1
03:58 - 11So Far, So Near
09:27
If the parameters of her early work were defined by energy, speed and attack – she counts amongst the most articulate of pianists to have been profoundly influenced by Cecil Taylor – the lyrical qualities of her music have consistently distinguished it from the output of many contemporaries – as indeed Taylor was the first to recognize. In the recent music there is a more rigorous sense of form, as well as an awareness that power can often reside in the unstated. Nothing is abandoned in the new music but when characteristic torrents of sound are unleashed in “Cosmology 2”, ten songs into the set, the impact is the stronger for the tension established along the way.
In other words, the lyricism and the energy balance each other, and the music as a whole is the stronger for it. “It’s all evolving process,” Crispell told the San Francisco Bay Guardian. “And the process is not something you can pin down. Categories don’t account for process… I’m feeling more open about expressing everything I feel and not playing what I think I should play to satisfy anyone’s preconceptions, including my own.” And, to the Boston Globe, “Energy will always be part of me – even when I play Bach, which is still my favourite music – but now my lyrical side feels more centred. Intensity remains the thread that ties all of my music together, although now some of the intensity is inner-directed.”
The band shows great poise and control throughout. The continual interaction between Crispell and master drummer Paul Motian is of immense subtlety (easy to argue that this is also one of Motian’s best recordings). Mediating between them is new band member Mark Helias. A very different player from Gary Peacock (the trio’s previous bassist), he completes and anchors the band. Helias shows a firm, rhythmic grasp, like a heartbeat – one reason why he was Ed Blackwell’s preferred bassist for many years – and also contributes a couple of tunes to the repertoire including the irresistibly catchy “Harmonic Line”.
There are strong pieces from Crispell here – “Wild Rose”, “Alone”, “So Far, So Near” - that reflect her current focus on both the poetic compression in the playing and the yearning for wider space in the form. And there is also a showcasing of Paul Motian’s gifts as a unique songwriter, which first flowered with the encouragement of ECM in the early 1970s. Crispell has gone back through three decades of Motian compositions to select six pieces for this recording – they range from “The Sunflower”, written for Paul’s wonderful group with Charles Brackeen and J.F. Jenny-Clark (see 1979’s “Le Voyage”), to “Light of the Bluejay” premiered by his Electric Bebop Band. All of the material is transformed by Crispell’s sensitive touch.
There is something essential in Motian’s writing that links it with Thelonious Monk’s (as a young drummer Paul played with Monk) and Crispell has isolated this quality. Motian’s tunes can seem both naïve and sagacious, both in the jazz tradition and from somewhere else entirely. In Paul’s case his melodic sense is likely influenced by the Armenian and Turkish music he heard in his childhood. The principles that drive the tunes are much like those that drive Motian’s drumming, well described by Bill Shoemaker in Jazz Times:
“Motian’s signatures are to be found in counterintuitive responses to the unfolding music: He chooses silence where many drummers knee jerk their way through a flurry of chops, and slips a cubist sketch of tune’s rhythmic implications into the niches most drummers simply ride through.”
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