Marilyn Crispell

***This just in: Marilyn has been named a 2025 NEA Jazz Master, the Nation's highest honor in jazz!***

Marilyn Crispell and Harvey Sorgen come together in the studio or on stage to explore that very moment through sound and motion. It's as if their instruments are catalysts for this immediate "composition" that can only reflect the unique aspect of us all being together at this time and this space. This concert will celebrate the duo's new release "*Forest*", forging new pathways in spontaneous musical expression.

"Hearing Marilyn Crispell play piano is like monitoring an active volcano. She is one of a very few pianists who rise to the challenge of free jazz." -The New York Times

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, Tiszigi Munoz Ensemble, and Quartet Noir (with Urs Leimgruber, Fritz Hauser and Joelle Leandre). She has toured and recorded with Anders Jormin's Bortom Quintet and with Gunhild Seim's Time Jungle. In 2018 she created a piece, ICE, for Seim's Kitchen Orchestra, performed in Stavanger, Norway. 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. In 2019 she will be a guiding artist at the Jazzdanmark Summer Session in Denmark.

Currently she is touring and recording with two different trios: Joe Lovano's Trio Tapestry (with Carmen Castaldi) and the Dreamstruck Trio with Harvey Sorgen and Joe Fonda. She also plays with Scottish saxophonist Raymond MacDonald and the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. She and MacDonald have toured and recorded, and have collaborated on art and music exhibitions with artists Jo Ganter and Melinda Stickney-Gibson, and musicians George Burt, Doug James and David Rothenberg at the Kleinert-James Art Center in Woodstock, NY (2017), and at the Jane Street Gallery in Saugerties, NY (2022). She has collaborated with Angelica Sanchez, Tanya Kalmanovitch, Tyshawn Sorey, David Rothenberg and others, and is currently playing in Michala Ostergaard's trio with Thommy Andersson in Scandinavia. Besides working as a soloist and leader of her own groups (including trios with Gary Peaccok or Mark Helias and Paul Motian), 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 Nice has and Anthony Davis (including four performances of his opera "X" with the New York City Opera in 1986).

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiHYBVjvhBE

This is an all ages event.

Marilyn Crispell  and Harvey Sorgen

Marilyn Crispell - Dreamstruck

Marilyn Crispell

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