Memento Marilyn Crispell & Anders Jormin

• 1 For the Children 05:45
• 2 Dialogue 04:39
• 3 Embracing the Otherness 03:37
• 4 Contemplation in D 05:35
• 5 Three Shades of a House – Morning 03:12
• 6 Three Shades of a House – Evening 01:50
• 7 Song 03:13
• 8 Memento 01:24
• 9 Beach at Newquay 04:10
• 10 The Dark Light 01:46
• 11 Dragonfly 03:03
• Total Runtime 38:14

Info for Memento

Memento, the first duo release from US pianist Marilyn Crispell and Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, is an album of lyrical and subtle music-making, with compositions and improvisations that circle around ideas of memory and loss.

Crispell previously appeared on Jormin’s cycle of sacred songs, In Winds, In Light (2004), and has long credited the Swedish bassist as an influence on her own musical thinking. “When I heard Anders playing, it touched a chord in me that resonated strongly,” she has said, of a first encounter at a Stockholm festival in 1992. Subsequently absorbing what she perceived as an “aesthetic of space, beauty and tenderness” in the playing of the Scandinavian improvisers, she felt her own music “becoming more whole.” There was a growing recognition that freedom in improvisation need not be measured only in terms of energy and intensity.

Recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in July 2025, with Manfred Eicher producing, Memento begins with four freely created pieces: The opening “For the Children” Anders Jormin explains, is in memory of innocents caught in the crossfire of global conflicts, from Sudan to Gaza and Ukraine. Jormin’s evocative high arco playing – almost kamancheh-like in the phrasing – inside the spontaneous framework created by the piano, brims with emotion. The sombre, thoughtful “Dialogue” is a creative exchange of ideas, exploring melodic material shared in the moment. “Embracing the Otherness” is magically sparse, with silence as an active component, and both players negotiating the upper range of their instruments. And “Contemplation in D” with double bass as a lead voice over floating piano chords is a meditation to conclude the fully improvised component of Memento.

“Three Shades of a House” is a composition that Jormin has featured in his work with Bobo Stenson (see the album Contra la indecisión). Originally a commission to accompany an exhibition by Norwegian painter Hanne Borchgrevink – whose works have been described as a game of variations on a compositional theme, music in form and colour– the piece is presented here in two versions. A “Morning” version has pellucid piano to the fore. An “Evening” version is given over to dark-toned bass.

“Song” is a composition by Marilyn Crispell which dates back to the 1990s. Marilyn says it is “about the distance between two people.” The title track “Memento”, meanwhile, a perfectly phrased miniature for solo piano is about closeness, referencing “people I feel connected to all around the world, and the many people I miss, including family and friends lost in the past few years.”

“The Beach at Newquay” depicts Crispell’s first visit to Cornwall, on tour with saxophonist Raymond MacDonald: “Standing on the beach at night. The sea and stars: magical.” Jormin’s high arco bass adds seagull cries.

“The Dark Light”, Anders Jormin says, “became a piece just slightly hinting at one of the compositions I brought for the recording; we never played the composition it in its entirety. The contradictory title refers to counterpoint, to several layers in music and to the emotions of both joy and sadness we can sense and share at the same time. We even have a special Swedish word for this; vemod. A silent song, a frozen sunbeam, a whispering storm, the dark light...something opens up behind the contradictory words...”

Finally, there is Crispell’s “Dragonfly”, a warm, rural-sounding piano piece, written in memory of Gary Peacock. Crispell and the late bassist made some fine recordings together including the trio sessions Nothing ever was, anyway and Amaryllis and the duo album Azure. Marilyn: “Gary was a close friend as well as colleague. In the month before he died, I would visit him and we would sit outside on his porch. It was early fall, the weather was beautiful, and there were a lot of dragonflies and little animals – especially a chipmunk he fed – who would come to visit him…”

Marilyn Crispell, piano
Anders Jormin, double bass

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 was 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 Niehaus and Anthony Davis (including four performances of his opera "X" with the New York City Opera in 1986).

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). She is also the recipient of a 2025 National Foundation for the Arts Jazz Master Fellowship, a European 2025 Instant Award in Improvised Music and a 2026 Jazz Foundation of America/Mellon Foundation Jazz Legacy Fellowship. In 2006 she performed her Guggenheim project, Cy Twombly Dreamhouse, with music, dance and slide projections at the Kleinert-James Art Center in Woodstock, NY. 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.

Anders Jormin
was born 1957 in Jönköping, Sweden. After intense studies, he left Musikhögskolan in Göteborg with diplomas in double-bass and improvisation / pedagogy in 1979.

Today as a double bass-player and composer, AJ is a frequent and highly respected performer on the international concert scene. As a musician in great demand, AJ has recorded and toured with many of the legends in jazz. Among others : Gilberto Gil, Lee Konitz, Elvin Jones, Joe Henderson, Don Cherry, Charles Lloyd, Mike Mainieri, Joe Lovano, and Jack deJohnette, as well as Kenny Wheeler, Albert Mangelsdorff, Tomasz Stanko, Dino Saluzzi, John Surman, John Taylor, Marilyn Mazur, Arve Henriksen, Mark Feldman , Paul Motian, Joey Baron, Tom Rainey , Jon Balke, Vertavo string quartet , Ann-Sofi von Otter, Norma Winstone and Marilyn Crispell. For many years, AJ was also a front figure in one of Scandinavias foremost ensembles, "Entra".

AJ today performs regularly all over Europe, USA/Canada, and Japan, but has also for shorter periods performed and studied ethnic music in Cuba and Mocambique. At the present AJ is a member of Bobo Stenson trio, and the unique swedish group "dr Dingo". AJ is also constantly creating new projects of his own, highly appreciating challenging work on local and national level as well as his international obligations. AJ is an "ECM recording artist".

Booklet for Memento