The Squid's Ear Magazine


Crispell, Marilynn: Labyrinths (Les Disques Victo)

"Taken from a 1987 solo date at Quebec's venerable Festival Musique Actuelle, Labyrinths finds avant garde jazz pianist Marilyn Crispell balancing Cecil Taylor's cataclysmic and staunchly free piano style with her own melodic and spacio...
 

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Marilyn Crispell-piano


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Label: Les Disques Victo
Catalog ID: VICCD006
Squidco Product Code: 23937

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 1993
Country: Canada
Packaging: Jewel Case
Recorded live at at 5th Festival International De Musique Actuelle De Victoriaville, October 2nd, 1987.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"Taken from a 1987 solo date at Quebec's venerable Festival Musique Actuelle, Labyrinths finds avant garde jazz pianist Marilyn Crispell balancing Cecil Taylor's cataclysmic and staunchly free piano style with her own melodic and spacious take on free improvisation. The connection to Taylor is made clear on the dedication piece "Au Chanteur Qui Danse (For Cecil Taylor)" and on "Encore," both of which feature the kind of rhythmically muscular piano runs Taylor favored. Other Taylor touches include the frantic, high-note excursions found on "Labyrinths" and the emphatic, slammed-down piano chords employed throughout the set. Crispell, though, finds her own ground with a seamless mix of introspectively romantic phrasing and charged improvisation; "Still Womb of Light (For Ann Sheldon)" exemplifies this best, with its melancholic buildup and subsequent rhythmic "roughhousing" of the once delicate themes. Her keen way with cover material is also on display, as evidenced by the expertblending of major and minor chords on "You Don't Know What Love Is" and Coltrane's "After the Rain"; Crispell's abiding love of Coltrane is further expressed by excellent readings of the tenor saxophonist's "Lasy Bird" and "Over the Rainbow." One of the few solo releases from this highly original composer and improviser, Labyrinths provides a great introduction to Marilyn Crispell's catalogue."-Stephen Cook, All Music


Artist Biographies

"Marilyn Crispell is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music where she studied classical piano and composition, and has been a resident of Woodstock, New York since 1977 when she came to study and teach at the Creative Music Studio. She discovered jazz through the music of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and other contemporary jazz players and composers. For ten years she was a member of the Anthony Braxton Quartet and the Reggie Workman Ensemble and has been a member of the Barry Guy New Orchestra and guest with his London Jazz Composers Orchestra, as well as a member of the Henry Grimes Trio, Quartet Noir (with Urs Leimgruber, Fritz Hauser and Joelle Leandre), and Anders Jormin's Bortom Quintet. In 2005 she performed and recorded with the NOW Orchestra in Vancouver, Canada and in 2006 she was co-director of the Vancouver Creative Music Institute and a faculty member at the Banff Centre International Workshop in Jazz. In 2014 she led a three-week music residency at the Atlantic Center For the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, Florida, and in 2016 led a one-week residency at the Conservatory Manuel de Falla in Buenos Aires.

Besides working as a soloist and leader of her own groups, Crispell has performed and recorded extensively with well-known players on the American and international jazz scene. She's also performed and recorded music by contemporary composers Robert Cogan, Pozzi Escot, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Manfred Niehaus and Anthony Davis (including four performances of his opera "X" with the New York City Opera).

In addition to playing, she has taught improvisation workshops and given lecture/demonstrations at universities and art centers in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and has collaborated with videographers, filmmakers, dancers and poets.

Crispell has been the recipient of three New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grants (1988-1989, 1994-1995 and 2006-2007), a Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust composition commission (1988-1989), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005-2006). In 1996 she was given an Outstanding Alumni Award by the New England Conservatory, and in 2004, was cited as being one of their 100 most outstanding alumni of the past 100 years."

-Marilyn Crispell Website (http://marilyncrispell.com/bio.htm)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Still Womb Of Light (For Ann Sheldon) 7:50

2. You Don't Know What Love Is 4:45

3. Labyrinths 6:55

4. Lazy Bird 3:40

5. After The Rain 9:10

6. Au Chanteur Qui Danse (For Cecil Taylor) 8:35

7. Encore 2:30

8. Over The Rainbow 2:00

Related Categories of Interest:

May 2017
Victo
Improvised Music
Jazz
Free Improvisation
Piano & Keyboards
Solo Artist Recordings
NY Downtown & Metropolitan Jazz/Improv

Search for other titles on the label:
Les Disques Victo.


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