Azure Gary Peacock & Marilyn Crispell

• 1 Patterns 07:15
• 2 Goodbye 06:18
• 3 Leapfrog 05:47
• 4 Bass Solo 03:08
• 5 Waltz After David M 09:23
• 6 Lullaby 06:38
• 7 The Lea 02:43
• 8 Blue 05:42
• 9 Piano Solo 02:27
• 10 Puppets 03:40
• 11 Azure 06:03
• Total Runtime 59:04

Info zu Azure

'Azure” präsentiert die Duette zweier großer Improvisatoren, die ihre Kongenialität schon vor langer Zeit bewiesen haben. Gary Peacock und Marilyn Crispell machten einst im Trio mit dem verstorbenen Paul Motian auf ECM-Alben wie 'Nothing ever was, anyway' und 'Amaryllis' exeptionelle Musik.

Aber auch als Duo haben sie eine umfangreiche gemeinsame Historie – die bisher allerdings noch nicht auf einem Album dokumentiert war. Mit dem ihnen gemeinsamen Sinn für lyrisches Spiel, ihren individuellen Kompositionsstilen und ihrem profunden Background in Sachen freies Spiel erweisen sie sich als außergewöhnliche musikalische Partner.

Das in ihrer Heimat in Upstate New York aufgenommene Album enthält Stücke aus der Feder von Peacock ('Lullaby', 'The Lea', 'Puppets') und von Crispell ('Patterns“, 'Goodbye', 'Waltz After David M'), Duo-Improvisationen ('Azure', 'Blue', 'Leapfrog') und ausgesprochen erfindungsreiche Klavier- und Bass-Soli.

Marilyn Crispell, piano
Gary Peacock double, double bass

Recorded January and February 2011 at Nevessa Production, Saugerties, NY
Engineered by Chris Andersen
Produced by Gary Peacock and Marilyn Crispell

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.

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.

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About the album:
Gary Peacock and Marilyn Crispell made outstanding music together in her trio with the late Paul Motian, the three kindred spirits recording the ECM albums Nothing ever was, anyway (1997) and Amaryllis (2001) – each a modern classic. The New York Times called the pair “two of the most beautiful piano-trio records in recent memory.” The Peacock-Crispell duo project also has a history, albeit one undocumented on disc – until now, with Azure. This extraordinary new album proves that these two musicians’ shared sense of lyricism, their distinctive compositional styles and their profound backgrounds in free improvisation make them exceptional musical partners in the most intimate of settings.

The album’s highlights range from the sublimely melodic (the Peacock-penned “Lullaby”) and lyrically pensive (Crispell’s “Goodbye”) to the athletically bracing (Crispell’s “Patterns”) and folksong-like (Peacock’s moving “The Lea”). Then there are the duo’s freely improvised pieces of astonishing cohesiveness (including “Blue” and the entrancing title track), as well as utterly absorbing solo features for each instrument. The album’s title, Azure, came from Crispell, from “the sense of spaciousness I felt with the music,” she says. “The image of an open blue sea or sky came to me.”

The duo conjured the aura of Azure at Nevessa Production, just outside Woodstock – the town in Upstate New York that Crispell has called home for nearly 36 years. (Nevessa is also the studio where Crispell recorded her 2010 ECM duo album with clarinetist David Rothenberg, One Dark Night I Left My Silent House.) Peacock lives not far away, in more rural environs. Along with their shared geography and longstanding musical ties, Crispell and Peacock have in common a certain life rhythm. “We have a connection via meditation and Buddhism,” the pianist points out. “We have even meditated together while on tour.”

The two musicians have substantial histories playing in ensemble settings, of course – including Crispell with formative years in the Anthony Braxton Quartet and Peacock with his ongoing association in the ever-popular trio with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette. But Crispell and Peacock are consummate duo players, with the bassist having made acclaimed duo albums for ECM with guitarist Ralph Towner and pianist Paul Bley, not to mention other studio pairings with the likes of guitarist Bill Frisell and pianist Marc Copland. Crispell not only has the ECM album with Rothenberg to her credit but many other tête-á-tête recordings with the likes of drummer Gerry Hemingway, drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo, saxophonist Tim Berne, saxophonist Joseph Jarman and multi-instrumentalist Stefano Maltese and pianist Georg Gräwe, among others.

“I’ve looked forward to making this album with Gary for years,” Crispell says. “He and I have played a lot of duo tours, and we’ve always wanted to document our partnership – but it just never came to pass. It was so great to finally have the chance to do it.” Reflecting on Peacock’s qualities as a musician, she adds: “Gary plays with huge spirit and soul – he’s a very strong player, but he’s able to be both strong and sensitive. He has been a widely influential musician, of course, and to me, he’s such an integral part of the ECM sound. I have definitely been able to explore the more lyrical side of music with Gary, and I’m more conscious of space and form with him.”

After years as a highly kinetic energy player in a post-Cecil Taylor mode, Crispell has been “moving in a more lyrical direction over the past decade or so, which is nice – it has opened up another dimension in her playing,” Peacock says. “Marilyn has this deep experience as a player in free, unstructured music, different from my long history of playing standards. When I first met her, she really played with a reckless abandon. But I soon found that she has a serious command of the instrument. There is a high level of craft in what she does that is very alluring.”

On Azure, Peacock’s lyrically grooving, deeply substantive “Bass Solo” improvisation leads into Crispell’s melody-rich composition “Waltz After David M,” the album’s most expansive piece. Crispell’s own solo improvisation, “Piano Solo,” is a brief play of shadow and light, with clouds of dark chords pierced by percussive stabs of silver – the ideal introduction to Peacock’s off-kilter piece “Puppets,” which features his arco playing.

Crispell’s favorite moments on the album are the “call-and-response” pieces, the freely improvised “Leapfrog,” “Blue” and “Azure.” She says: “When Gary and I improvise together, there is a lot of trust and close listening, which is very special. And when he goes into a groove or a blues feeling, like on `Blue,’ it’s just incredible to play over. I love it.” For his part, Peacock says: “There is nothing premeditated about those call-and-response pieces – they are very much in the moment. It requires a lot of listening, as I make a statement and she responds and vice versa. You have to have an open mind – even no mind, a clear mind – in order to play music of worth in that way.”

In March, a tribute concert in memory of Paul Motian at Symphony Space in New York City included a duo performance by Peacock and Crispell that was one of the evening’s highlights – a turn on Motian’s “Etude”/“Cosmology” that was an instance of communion at a deep level. On June 14, Peacock and Crispell will perform a duo concert at the Rubin Museum in New York to celebrate the release of Azure.

Booklet für Azure