Ralph Ellison wrote, “And yet, who knows very much of what jazz is really about? Or how shall we ever know until we are willing to confront anything and everything which it sweeps across our path?”
I first saw Marilyn Crispell in the summer of 1989. She was playing with the Reggie Workman Ensemble at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz. After the show, I bought their LP and she just signed it for me.
Up until then, that concert was one of the most memorable I had ever attended. It really marked the beginning of my journey into the deeper waters of that Big River called Jazz.
In the mid-1980s, it was really difficult to learn about Jazz, when it was living in the shadows of Rock and Disco. In those days before the internet, you had to go to record stores and read the backs of album covers to mine any information you could. If you were interested in more contemporary jazz music, that task was infinitely harder, because most record stores did not carry this music. Subsequently, two jazz magazines became seminal to my Jazz journey: The Wire and CODA. Only these two magazines consistently reported on the new Jazz happening at that moment, like Marilyn Crispell and Anthony Braxton’s music. When I lived in northern Germany, most months I could buy The Wire from the nearby British Army base. If they didn’t get their normal shipment, I’d have to drive up and buy it at the Bremen Hauptbahnhof - city center train station.
Once I moved back to California, I subscribed to The Wire. CODA was easier to find, in that it was a Canadian publication.
Forces in Motion
The Wire covered Anthony Braxton pretty closely. One of their writers, Graham Lock, was fascinated with Braxton’s Quartet - Marilyn Crispell was the pianist for his quartet from 1983 to 1995. The Wire’s May 1988 issue had a book review of Lock’s book, Forces in Motion. I got the book for Christmas that year. It covers Anthony Braxton’s 1985 tour of England. During this tour, Lock joined the Anthony Braxton Quartet entourage and wrote about all their concerts (maybe 18 of them in all?) and, in between, spoke to the musicians about jazz, their personal problems, and their views of life. There is, however, very much more buried in this book, as Lock takes us through an excellent analysis of Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman that puts the Art Ensemble of Chicago into its true context. We’ll spend some time on the trail of the Art Ensemble of Chicago a little further in our journey. There are also serious observations about Sun Ra. At this point in my life, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra were not on my radar. This book pretty much single-handedly opened my eyes and ears to a completely new style of Jazz. For that, I owe Graham Lock huge gratitude.
Even though I had not seen Marilyn Crispell (or Anthony Braxton for that matter) before that show in Santa Cruz, I had been reading about her in The Wire, which placed two Crispell albums, Gaia and Labyrinths, on their list of top albums of the 1980s. However, these records were impossible to find. So I wrote Marilyn a letter asking her how I could get a hold of them. I got her address in the back of Lock’s book, where he stated, “ Copies of the untitled manuscript containing ‘some notes on my compositions’ can be ordered from Marilyn Crispell”, then gave her address in Woodstock, NY. And with that, we struck up a correspondence. We exchanged letters, and she invited me to her show when she next came out to the Bay Area.
I met Marilyn Crispell for the first time at Koncepts Cultural Gallery in Oakland in the fall of 1990. She was the headliner this time: the Marilyn Crispell Trio with Reggie Workman on bass and Gerry Hemingway on drums.
It was great to finally meet Marilyn, but it was also awkward, as these types of meetings often can be. She was very kind and humble and remains one of my musical heroes. She is truly one of the finest modern jazz pianists alive today.
Creative Music Studio
The Creative Music Studio or CMS, as it is more commonly known, was founded in 1971 in Woodstock, New York by Karl Berger, Ingrid Sertso, and Ornette Coleman.
Karlhanns Berger began his career in his hometown of Heidelberg as a vibraphonist and would have a tremendous influence on the development of modern jazz. Of his early days in Germany, Berger recalls, “The Cave 54 was a very special jazz club. Since Heidelberg was the headquarters of the American troops and there were several military bases in the surrounding area, all of which had their 'army bands', many excellent jazz musicians from these bands played in the 'Cave' in the 50s and 60s. It was like in New York: a different session every evening! I belonged to the house band and jammed with the Americans all the time. "
But in 1961, Karl Berger did not exactly know what his destiny would be until it was revealed the instant he and his wife, the singer Ingrid Sertso, heard the opening bars of Ornette Coleman Quartet’s LP: This is Our Music, when each turned to the other and said: “This is what we want to do.” The quartet’s trumpeter (and World Music pioneer) Don Cherry, paved the way. Karl encountered him in a Paris cafe. Then, as he explains, “I did something I never did before and will probably never do again. I walked up to Don and said: ‘My name is Karl Berger and I want to play with you.’ Don Cherry was a very intuitive cat. He looked me over for a second and said, ‘Rehearsal is at 4:30.’”
Karl became Cherry’s pianist and eventually appeared in New York City to record Symphony For Improvisers in 1965.
Don introduced Karl to Ornette Coleman and a friendship evolved. That was his introduction to the New York jazz scene. Berger found the atmosphere so inspiring that he and Ingrid decided to settle there, even though the working conditions were dire for jazz musicians in New York.
Berger continues: “In Europe, we ate fresh food and intensely interacted with our friends and colleagues. In America, people ate out of tin cans and cut themselves off from each other. So actually we were quite miserable here, until Marion Brown insisted upon showing us Woodstock around 1971.” Next, through an existential exercise in irony otherwise known as a joke, a peaceful revolution was begun. “Let’s start a non-profit musical workshop up in Woodstock,” Karl suggested to Ornette Coleman. “Would you do this with us?” “Sure,” answered Ornette, “you do the non-profit part…and I’ll do the profit.”
Here’s a nice photo of Don Cherry at the Creative Music Studio.
Unfortunately, the CMS had to close down operation in 1984, due to lack of funds. However, it has had a recent revitalization with CMS 2.0, under the leadership of artistic directors: Billy Martin, Steve Bernstein, and Peter Apfelbaum. Interestingly, back in 1976, at 15 and 16 respectively, Bernstein and Apfelbaum were the youngest participants in CMS history. So the Creative Music Studio has created another musical re-awakening.
In Forces in Motion, Marilyn Crispell told Graham Lock that before she ever played jazz, she made a living playing piano for dance classes in Boston. She remembers telling a friend, a jazz fan, “I told him, if I were going to improvise this is how I’d do it, and I improvised atonal stuff the way I do now. It was really crazy, nobody would listen; he said, it’s OK, you can do that, but I went no, no, no. Then, later I heard a Cecil Taylor record and it was YES, YES, YES! It was like a door opening.”
She continues, “I was interested in medicine. I was working in hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, as a secretary. By the time I finished at the New England Conservatory of Music I was sick of music, I needed a break.” That break lasted six years. She moved to Cape Cod and felt herself drawn to music again - not as a pianist, but singing Bonnie Raitt songs in a rock and blues band. “I just wanted to sing. I felt like I was able to get into something emotionally through singing more than I could in piano.” Then in 1975, while at a friend’s house, she had an epiphany that changed her life. “One night he was out of the house and I put on A Love Supreme and something happened, the spirit of it, just caught me. I was twenty-eight years old and, ah, I said to myself, I have to learn to play this music. I loved it so much.”
Soon after, she attended the Creative Music Studio and ended up staying on, first as a student and then as a teacher. It was at CMS that she met Anthony Braxton. He invited her to sit in with his group. She recalls, “At our gig Anthony placed a beer in my hand and said, ‘Relax, don’t play so many notes.’ I was playing like a thousand notes a minute, and he was the first person to make me think of space and breadth and phrasing, as opposed to a constant barrage.”
After a trip to Sweden in 1992, Marilyn Crispell began to take on a noticeably lighter touch to her playing, which can be best heard on her ECM LPs: Azure with Gary Peacock released in 2013, and her fine solo LP Vignettes released in 2007. I particularly like Gathering Light, but I was unable to link it to this edition. I have added it and a few other beautiful songs to this newsletter’s accompanying Spotify playlist: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.
Finally, here is Marilyn playing a live version of John Coltrane’s Dear Lord and sounding like she did when I first heard her on that Spring night in 1989.
Here’s a fun picture of Marilyn Crispell from a back issue of The Wire that brings out some of her sense of humor.
Next week, we’ll take a journey a little further down that Big River called Jazz and follow it into the even deeper jazz waters of Anthony Braxton….
If you like what you’ve been reading and hearing so far on our journey, please share my newsletter with others - just hit the “Share” button at the bottom of the page.
Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.
Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….