Marilyn Crispell with Gary Peacock, Paul Motian: Amaryllis (ECM Records 6515177)
This haunting album, reissued in ECM’s Luminescence vinyl series, features intense improvising and memorable compositions. As Marilyn Crispell says, “There’s a great depth of communication, a rare delicacy.” It was recorded in 2000, and it’s sad to note that only the pianist is still with us. Drummer Paul Motian died in 2011, and bassist Gary Peacock in 2020.
Crispell was inspired by Cecil Taylor, and went on to play with Anthony Braxton for 12 years. “Relax, don’t play so many notes” Braxton told her on their first meeting – good advice but ironic that it came from so loquacious a player! Crispell’s debut on ECM, Nothing Ever Was, Anyway: Music of Annette Peacock (1997), featured the same trio as Amaryllis. Crispell has said that “with the ECM recordings, I like the idea of playing things so slowly that you are almost suspended in time”. The later album is more lyrical and airier – here, Crispell’s lyricism has never been clearer.
The tracks are relatively brief – they’ve been aptly described as a set of vignettes. The highlight for me is Peacock’s Requiem – an ear-worm, and unusually for a requiem, it’s at mid-tempo. There are four freely improvised ballads, though confusingly these are attributed to members of the band: Amaryllis (Crispell), Voices (Motian), M.E. (for Manfred Eicher – Motian) and Avatar (the New York studio they recorded in – Crispell). As Crispell comments, the title track “sounds completely written, but it’s not at all. Gary started a bass line, I came in with something, and we ended up playing the same lines at the same time.” That remarkable achievement adds to the wonder of Amaryllis – a gorgeous release.
Iancu Dumitrescu: Ansamblul Hyperion (Corbett vs. Dempsey CvsDCD115)
Romanian composer Iancu Dumitrescu formed the chamber group Ansamblul Hyperion in 1976. Four years later they recorded his extraordinary his first LP for Electrecord, the state record company of Ceaușescu’s repressive dictatorship. Dumitrescu (born 1944) conducts throughout, on an album that features his own radical new music plus compositions by older Romanian composers: Octavian Nemescu (1940-2020), Ștefan Niculescu (1927-2008) and Corneliu Cezar (1937-97). How such an avant-garde record came to be made in Romania is a mystery. It’s true that the Polish regime at the time seemed to look benignly on Penderecki’s avant-gardism. But that regime was relatively more enlightened than Romania’s – or just saw the pragmatic value of having a few expressive safety valves.
Dumitrescu’s album was released in 1981 and has never been reissued. It now appears on John Corbett’s excellent label Corbett vs. Dempsey. The album opens with Dumitrescu’s iconoclastic Movemur Et Sumus (1978). As the publicity explains, the composer is often regarded as a spectralist, though he distances himself from the approach taken by the movement’s French progenitors. He calls himself an acousmatic composer, though again he doesn’t belong with the style’s French proponents, who produce electroacoustic music for recorded performance. Like fellow spectralists, Dumitrescu explores the inner nature of sound, following the trail blazed by Debussy, Varèse, Messiaen and Stockhausen.
The work of all four composers here is brilliant and compelling. For me, the highlight is Ștefan Niculescu’s Sincronie (1979). I recall his work from a Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival many years ago, and this composition does not disappoint. It specifies between two and 12 performers – here there are nine, including Dumitrescu on piano – and has fixed plus improvised elements. The piece opens with solo vibraphone, and becomes a meditation that’s by turns bucolic and iridescent, dynamically expressive and gorgeously static. Octavian Nemescu’s coruscating Combinatii In Cercuri (1965) is for ensemble, with electronics added in 1980. On Corneliu Cezar’s raucous, expressionist Rota (1976), futuristic electronics are prominent, and the listener only gradually appreciates the Romanian and Balkan stylistic influences. There are acoustic preparations, and natural sounds of wind, waves and seagulls. A fine selection of avant-garde compositions, and a compelling and strangely beautiful release.
Benjamin Lackner: Spindrift (ECM Records 7528004)
Benjamin Lackner resumes his partnership with trumpeter Mathias Eick, heard on the German pianist’s 2022 ECM debut Last Decade. They’re joined by wonderful American bassist Linda May Han Oh, and a French drummer new to me, Matthieu Chazarenc – a member of Lackner’s trio before the pianist worked with ECM. The final member of the group is great American tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, one of the leaders on the instrument.
It ought to be a superb recording, and indeed in many ways it is good. This is an excellent and empathetic band, with musicianship and improvising of a very high order. The mournful Murnau is the standout track, with beautifully keening open horn from Eick. Yet as Lee Konitz used to say, the album doesn’t quite pull me in.
The reason is probably the common one that some of the composed material is rather bland, and the mood is overall too uniform. With some albums, after several listens, subtler effects come into play, and that’s true here. But though I’m warming a little to Spindrift, it still seems to conform to the unfair critical stereotype of ECM – Nordic and lugubrious, or too cool by half. The criticism is a travesty of one of the great jazz labels, but it has some purchase on a few of their releases, perhaps including this one.