Marilyn Crispell: Fearless, Deeply Sensitive and Shaping the Moment

As Marilyn Crispell talked about her multitude of recent recordings, either solo or with this trio or that quartet, she mentioned needing to pack her bags before going out on tour. She has lived in Woodstock, New York since 1977 and is comfortable there. "When I'm at home, not out recording, I look out in the morning and very much like being in this place," she explained. But when the opportunity came knocking at her door, she accepted because, "I just felt it was the right thing for me at this time in my life, to both play within a group and continue my solo playing."

Looking back over her life at age 78, she sometimes marvels at the way it has turned out. Her career, five decades in the making, didn't start out with a bang. Often, artists like to say there was always a drive within them, something abstract that fed them whenever they got hungry for work. But while Marilyn Crispell had an interest in music and studied at various schools, she never thought of it as a viable career. She was divorced and working at a bookstore on Cape Cod to make ends meet. "My friend George worked on the music side of the store," she said with a laugh. "I remember thinking life was so beautiful here, I could die tomorrow and be really happy with my life." What changed was learning about the Creative Music Studio. She moved there and met Anthony Braxton, who impressed upon her the importance of leaving space and not always playing a million notes a minute, which had earned her the label of a female version of Cecil Taylor.

Her solo playing has been compared by the New York Times to "monitoring a volcano." Crispell plays with a combination of deep reverence and rigorous gusto whether solo or with any of the numerous combos she has been a part of during her career. First and notably was a ten-year run with the quartet led by multi-brass player Braxton with Mark Dresser on contrabass and drummer/percussionist Gerry Hemingway. When Braxton decided the group had run its course, the remaining three members continued until it was just her and Hemingway. In 2024, she went on tour to support a group with Joe Lovano and drummer Carmen Castaldi called Trio Tapestry. She has been part of other intriguing trios including one with the Scandinavian rhythm section of Anders Jormin and Raymond Strid, another with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian, and one more with Harvey Sorgen and Joe Fonda. She has played with exciting young musicians like saxophonist Yuma Uesaka, who became a fan listening to her album with Joseph Jarman [Connecting Spirits (Music & Arts, 1996)]. "That record with Jarman hit me hard," Uesaka declared "The first time I heard it I was driving a car but became so drawn into the music—there is just so much going on in that album—that I struggled to focus on the road."

Crispell is part of yet another trio with Thommy Andersson and Danish drummer and composer Michala Østergaard-Nielsen, who had this to say about working with her: "Marilyn's playing is fearless and deeply sensitive—always listening, always shaping the moment. She opens up spaces in the music that continue to inspire me." Their debut album The Cave (ILK Music, 2025) was released late April.

Clarinetist David Rothenberg has recorded a quartet album with Crispell, Iva Bittova and Benedicte Maurseth, and he commented on her skills: "Marilyn Crispell is one of the greatest improvising pianists on the planet. She has a fiery side, and a peaceful side. Maybe we all have those sides but no one blends them better than she."

If I continue rattling off names from her discography, there would not be room for the interview. Suffice to say, she is in demand.

Of course, it is her mastery not names that count. Crispell has a singular stage presence which you are drawn to the way a mystic is drawn to a mountain, a beekeeper to a beehive gathering the melodious honey that flows from her fingers. When she chooses an impassioned attack, it is like a heartbeat echoing through a quiet room where each note pulses with the energy of life. When she determines that adagio is the proper course, you might imagine nightingales building their nests in the chimneys of the heart. When a piece is played alternately forte and pianissimo, it brings to mind a spider dangling from a silken thread, moving up and down like a yo-yo to continue the pattern of its web.

Crispell is most comfortable being unpredictable, which is why she never practices improvisation. Classically trained, she will run through some scales or play a little Bach. In her house in Woodstock, New York, she can test the waters of abstraction and creativity, secure in that "messing up" as she calls it is what she is striving to do, "in a good way, of course."

She loves to play John Coltrane and recorded an album titled For Coltrane (Leo Records, 1993). The song "After the Rain" is a particular favorite, one she has taken temporary custody of and is raising in her own way. It is quite fluid, her way. Sometimes the music wants to cut its own swathe, like rainwater flowing downhill pulled by gravity into valleys where creeks are merged into streams and then forging a river of sonic syrup and tang.

She is attracted to the visual arts, poetry, dance, nature, reading and Buddhism for which she has been given a dharma name that I have sworn not to reveal. But all of this runs secondary to her composition and playing. The music is more important than gold and reputations. Reading the following interview will bring insight to just how important it is to Marilyn Crispell and those who listen to her.

She plays with cats—both human and feline.

All About Jazz: Good morning, Marilyn. Can you tell us—meaning the collective "us"—about the tour you are on or maybe it is better to say the dates you have been playing?

Marilyn Crispell: I would definitely call it a tour. We had ten concerts and just before that I had a solo concert at the Berlin Jazz Festival. And the next day, the trio played there with Joe Lovano and Carmen Castaldi. We started in Berlin then went to Nürburg, Germany and on from there through Europe. One interesting thing is that we played in Bulgaria. That was the first time I had been there, and it was in a city called Plovdi. It's the second largest city in Bulgaria and is built on top of these amazing Roman ruins. You could go out of the little guest house where we were staying, and just walk across the street to the ruins.

AAJ: It must go all the way back to the Roman Empire.

MC: The city is older than the Roman Empire. It's one of the oldest cities in Europe, and on our one day off on the tour after the concert, the promoter and his wife and daughter took us all around, including a trip to this music school where some of the teachers played for us. One of them played a Bulgarian bagpipe. Absolutely amazing. It had a very eastern sound. And then we drove all over looking at different Roman ruins, having dinner at this wonderful outdoor place with a big fire pit in the middle of the table. And there were cats, lots of cats. I've never seen so many cats. Usually, I pay attention to that because I'm a big cat person.

AAJ: The cats were probably all strays.

MC: The people in the communities feed them and take care of them. The cats look well fed and healthy, and they hang out in the ruins. That's where they live,

AAJ: Maybe they work for their room and board by eliminating the rodent population.

MC: I guess they do. Same as in Rome. The first time I was in Rome, I went to the Coliseum and that was filled with cats. At a certain time of day, these women would come out with plates of pasta for the cats because they caught the rats.

AAJ: Well, let's go to another type of cat. What's it like playing in a combo with Joe Lovano?

MC: Joe and Carmen are wonderful musicians, and I like playing Joe's music. It allows me to play many of the different types of things that I like. He is a very passionate man, plays with all his heart, which is a lot of what it's about for me. It's very professional. Being on tour, everything goes smoothly.

AAJ: Looking through the liner notes in the album Our Daily Bread (ECM, 2023), Lovano talks about looking through the crystal ball of reflections to explore the power of three. Do you have any thoughts on what that means? Creating within all 12 grace notes?

MC: He is just talking about this piece that we play where I lay down a carpet in D Minor, and it stays there for the whole piece. It's almost like in Indian music when you have tambura playing underneath the solo instrument. I'm not sure exactly why he calls it grace notes. He has his reasons for his titles, and they could have to do with extra musical things like notes of grace or something as opposed to actual grace notes.

AAJ: The title song, "Our Daily Bread," reminded me in a way of music from Vespers evening prayers in the Jewish tradition. I admire your ability to sound like you're in the moment when you're playing. There is nothing outside of that world.

MC: Well, you have to be in the moment. Where else would you be?

AAJ: During your solos, it sounds as if the energy of the universe is flowing through you. Maybe that is a lofty way of putting it, but it's what I'm picturing.

MC: That's kind of what it feels like when I'm really in the place where I can get out of my own way. I've heard many musicians say this, that they are a vehicle for the music that comes through them. Each person has a different background and each person is different, so each vehicle is different. The music is going to be different. But it's spending years and years studying, listening, and playing to prepare the ground for that music to come through you and express itself through your personal being.

AAJ: The author Steven King talks about automatic writing, where the words just come to him without him realizing he is writing.

MC: In a way, it's similar. I'm thinking of this piece "Amaryllis." That particular piece, which I love, was not written. Manfred Eicher from ECM came into the studio while we were recording, and he had the idea that we should try to play some freestyle ballads. I had never thought about doing that before. For me, free music had always been about energy, and it was like a light bulb going off in my head. Something obvious that you just didn't think of before. Gary Peacock started to play this very simple repeating line, and it just went on like that for the whole piece. I listened for a minute and then just started playing, and that melody came out. It wasn't like I thought of it beforehand in any way. When I listen to that piece, though, it sounds very much like a written composition.

AAJ: Amaryllis is a flower, so why choose that as the title?

MC: At the time I recorded that album, I was going through some personal things, which involved an amaryllis, and that's why I called both the piece and the album that name.

AAJ: ECM has recently reissued the album. Were you in Germany when the album was recorded?

MC: No, we were in New York. Manfred used to fly over here a lot, setting up recording sessions. But he hasn't been here since the pandemic.

AAJ: He is considered an icon. What is it like working with Manfred Eicher?

MC: He's like one of the musicians. He has great ears. Gary Peacock used to always say he has the best ears in the business. He definitely has a concept of what he does and does not want to hear. And if he doesn't like something you played, he will ask you to play that particular line again. He will make suggestions if he thinks something needs to be changed. I never find him overbearing, and I usually think his suggestions are good. He has said things to me like, I want you to be able to do everything you do. In other words, he was not trying to micromanage everything. And then after the music is recorded when he puts it together, he always decides the order of the pieces in a way that he feels makes them work together the best.

AAJ: There is an art to that. I've spoken to several people in different forms of music, and they all have different ideas on how music should be arranged, as you say, or sequenced. You recorded a second album with that particular trio right around the turn of the century. Nothing Ever Was, Anyway was your debut on ECM. So how would you describe the differences in the two albums?

MC: Actually, there was a third album, Storyteller, with Mark Helias playing bass instead of Gary. All are piano, bass, drums trios. The first one was all compositions of Annette Peacock, and she was very particular about how everything should be. I ended up inviting her to come conduct us because I thought that would help in our interpretation, and it did.

AAJ: Were Annette and Gary Peacock still married at the time?

MC: Oh, no. That was when they were much younger. But they were friends and he lived not that far from where I live in Woodstock (New York) where Annette also lived. First, I had the idea to do a solo recording of her music. She had moved to this area and we became acquainted, became friendly, and I suggested doing that, and she replied, "Well, Gary doesn't live far away. We could ask him to be part of it." And I thought, well, I had never played with Gary or met him, but it sounded like a great idea and if that was going to happen, I would ask Paul Motian to join us. Paul and I had played together for years as a duo and in a trio with Reggie Workman, and so that's how that trio came to be.

AAJ: It was a true collective effort. You and Motian each composed four songs for the album and Peacock wrote three. The last was a rendition of "Prayer" by Mitch Weiss.

MC: Yes, he's a friend of mine up here who composes. All of the trio records had each of us contributing songs.

AAJ: Amaryllis is such a thoughtful and touching record. I was wondering if you could give your impressions of each song you wrote or its genesis. Whatever you would care to say.

MC: Someone had given me an amaryllis. I had been wishing the amaryllis was from someone else and thought it might be, and then I found out that it wasn't.

AAJ: "Silence (for P.)" is for Paul Motian?

MC: No. That was the person I wished had given me the amaryllis.

AAJ: What of the song itself? How did it come to you?

MC: This was all 20 years or so ago, and I don't really remember exactly. I think I was just sitting at the piano playing some things, and those chords presented themselves. It almost has a feeling of a chorale. In fact, I'd written a chorale version of it for horns that I played with some students of mine in Buenos Aires. So, a few of the chords were there, and then I just elaborated on them.

AAJ: You make it sound so simple and effortless. What about "Avatar?"

MC: "Avatar" I think was the name of the studio where we recorded. Manfred might have named that piece. When I'm recording, I'm listening so intensively and involved in the mixing, the editing and all that, but I think that was an improvisation.

AAJ: What can you say about the three songs Gary Peacock wrote: "Voice from the Past," "Requiem" and "December Greenwings?" To my ears there are similarities between your songs and Paul Motian's, but Gary's have a different flavor even though it is the same three players.

MC: Gary never wrote a lot of music, but he thought a lot about the things that he did write. So, they were worked out carefully. He wasn't one of those people like Paul who just sat down and wrote piece after piece of music. I liked "Requiem" a lot because it had a little bit of an almost medieval feeling in the harmonies, which I could really relate to. And "Voice from the Past" was just beautiful. I think that was Manfred's favorite song of Gary's. He loved that one and "December Green Wings." I don't know the process by which Gary wrote them, but I would assume he started with an idea just like I do, and then kind of elaborated on it from there.

AAJ: What can you say about Paul Motian's pieces?

MC: "Voices" was an improvisation from what I recall. "Conception Vessel / Circle Dance" is something like a meridian in Chinese medicine. "M.E." was obviously for Manfred.

AAJ: "Morpion" is puzzling. They are little crabs or in French it is referring to bratty kids.

MC: I once asked Paul about titles, and he said, "Well, I don't know. Just pick them."

AAJ: Have you done an amount of duo playing with Motian?

MC: We never recorded anything as a duo though, or I think we did one duo on "Amaryllis." It was very intense, and at first Manfred didn't want to include it, but I was really lobbying for it. Finally, he figured out a way to include it by putting it in the order of pieces to make it work. There were a few times when he didn't want to include something that I really did want to, and he usually ended up finding a way to make me happy.

AAJ: Listening to the entire album, what struck me is there seems to be a lot of space left. Music almost slows to a crawl or stop where you're either waiting for somebody to come in or moving on to the next

. MC: There are different kinds of silences. I talk about this with my students. There are silences where everything just comes to a dead stop and the momentum is lost, and then there are silences that you breathe through so that there is a kind of connection between what happened before and what happens after that. The silence is actually part of a phrase as opposed to just stopping. Also, allowing things to happen, not trying to push or rush them, letting them be what they want to be. And at the end of a piece to allow the notes to ring, if it's that kind of a piece, to ring until they fully disappear.

AAJ: Let's shift to your background. What was your first experience with the piano?

MC: I must've been about six or seven years old, and I was born in Philadelphia. My mother was taking piano lessons. We had an upright piano down in the basement that she would play. I had a toy xylophone and children's records, and I would listen to the records and then I would play the melodies on the xylophone. So, my parents decided, oh, she should have piano lessons. And they hired a teacher to come to the house, I was absolutely terrified of her. I would run down to the basement and hide whenever she came, They would have to come down and get me. I guess eventually I got used to her, but I always felt intimidated. And then when I was 10, my family moved to Baltimore and there was a woman there who came to teach me for a while, That woman suggested that they send me to Peabody Conservatory, Prep department, in Baltimore. And while I was there, I met this incredible woman who taught at the conservatory. She taught theory, harmony, composition, and incorporated a lot of improvisation into everything that we learned. If we learned an interval, we would have to improvise a little piece using that interval. The class would clap a rhythm, and you would have to sit down at the piano and play a perfect fifth or a major third, different ones all over the piano in time to what they were clapping. Even if piano wasn't your instrument, you had to be able to do that. That training was absolutely invaluable and was a solid foundation for what I've done since.

AAJ: I haven't looked at any sheet music, but I'm not hearing a lot of thirds in your music, which are mostly western chords. Maybe you're using fourths often, a more open interval.

MC: When Coltrane was playing with McCoy Tyner, Tyner really started using a lot of harmonies and fourths. That is pretty much when that started in the world of jazz. I do like that sound. A Love Supreme is the record that got me into jazz. I didn't really connect with jazz until I was about 28 years old. That recording was so powerful that it basically changed my life and created a path that I have followed for the past 50 years. It was not just about the music; it was about the feeling and the love in the music. Something I couldn't really explain, but it affected me deeply.

Afterwards, I heard about a teacher in Boston and went to study with him for a couple of years just to get some background because I was coming in from classical music and didn't have any background in jazz, even though I'd heard it on the radio. I did a lot of work for two years, basically did nothing else. I totally immersed myself in listening and transcribing and learning about extended harmonies and playing chord changes in time, something that was done in Bach's time and somehow got lost. Bach would just write basic notation for chord changes, and everybody was expected to be able to have a knowledge of theory and harmony and be able to interpret that.

AAJ: Besides learning from this teacher so long ago, what were you doing personally back then?

MC: I was living on Cape Cod working in a bookstore. I had recently gotten divorced; I was married for six or seven years and stayed friends with my husband. At the time this all happened, I was living with a guy who was a jazz and blues pianist. He worked in the record store that was attached to the bookstore, owned by the same people. So, the people from the bookstore could go into the record store and take records and open them and play them in the bookstore, which is what I did. And that's where I first heard Keith Jarrett, the Köln Concert. I also had been earning a living playing and improvising for modern dance classes. Basically, I was living with my friend George on Cape Cod and working in the bookstore. And I remember feeling at a certain point that life was so beautiful because I loved the Cape very much, living by the sea, which I miss that up here in Woodstock. I felt really content, really happy, and I remember thinking to myself, I could die tomorrow and I would feel happy with my life. Little did I know that my life was just going to explode and go in a completely different direction.

AAJ: What was your teacher's name?

MC: Charlie Banacos. He had taught at Berkeley, but then he branched off and created his own private teaching practice. He was a famous jazz teacher all over the world. He had a seven-month waiting list, and in those days, there was no computer, no phones, nothing like that, no CDs. It was all about LPs and cassette tapes. He would have students in Japan, and they would send him a cassette of their lesson, however long it took to come through the mail, and he would send back a cassette with his comments. That is how he was teaching. It's hard to believe how far we've come in a relatively short time.

AAJ: Is piano the only instrument you have played?

MC: There was harpsichord and I studied violin for a year. I was really interested in the violin and viola. When I was a student at New England Conservatory where I got my bachelor of music degree, there just wasn't time to do all that. I was studying composition, orchestration and all but I did study harpsichord.

AAJ: After two years of transcribing, did you go from there to playing or further schooling?

MC: I didn't really have a lot of confidence yet, ready to go out and play with people. But I did a few solo concerts. I remember one of them was at a place called the Stone Soup. It was a small venue, might even have been a bookstore in Boston. I have no idea if it still exists. Probably not. But anyway, the piano was missing three very important notes right in the middle of the keyboard, like middle C and a couple other notes. I remember saying to the owner of the place that the three really important keys are not working on the piano. And he said, "Well, all the rest of them work. Do you want to do the concert or not?"

AAJ: I'm betting you did the concert. How did you compensate for the missing keys?

MC: I have no idea. I just didn't use those three notes, obviously. But while I was living there in Boston, I had various musician friends and one, Charlie Mariano, talked to me about this place, the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, where they play your kind of music. I was playing pretty avant-garde stuff and coming from a place in classical music where I was writing much more contemporary dissonant things. And I was listening to Cecil Taylor. That was the direction I was going in, so we drove up here together, and I met Carl and his wife, Ingrid.

They ran the school, and he invited me to come up for a summer session. After the summer, I went back to Boston, got my stuff, moved to Woodstock and never looked back. I've been up here for 47 years. The Creative Music Studio was an amazing place, guiding artists from all over the world. It would be a five-week program on the grounds of this old motel that they had bought. And they had a lot of contemporary jazz musicians, improvisers, composers, creative musicians. John Cage was up there, Christian Wolff, Ursula Oppens , Frederick Chesky, and a lot of teachers from all over the world, from Africa, India, China, Japan, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, Sierra Leone, Mali, Senegal and South Africa. They all came and taught music from their cultures, and it was just an amazing, unique place. It's where I met most of the people I've played with since.

AAJ: Some of those styles must have seeped into your playing. For example, I hear some African percussion rhythms.

MC: Absolutely. I was going to say that—African, some Indian, some Japanese—the feelings I would get from that music. But yes, I was very into the rhythms of African music and the juxtaposition of different rhythms together. Somebody would be playing in 4/4, somebody would be playing in 3/4, and not even keeping the same pulse, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3. Not even like that. It would be more like 1, 2, 3, 4, (speeding up 2x tempo) 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. I used to experiment with that kind of thing in my groups, a collage concept that I shared with Anthony Braxton, that originally came from listening to Charles Ives.

AAJ: Would you name one or two pieces of yours that contain those rhythms?

AAJ: Yes, specifically "Ahmadu/Sierra Leone." That one was a piece that I wrote to incorporate those ideas. That's on a CD called The Kitchen Concert (Leo Records. 1991), with Gerry Hemingway and Mark Dresser, who were my bandmates in Anthony Braxton's Quartet.

AAJ: Where did the title come from?

MC: One of the teachers at the Creative Music Studio was Ahmadu Jarr from Sierra Leone. He is a drummer who lives in Sweden. He married a Swedish opera singer. The recording was made from a concert at The Kitchen in New York City, February 1989. On the cover, actually, there's a funny picture of the three of us in the kitchen of the jazz café in London. They let us go in there and fool around and be silly while taking pictures. For example, I'm tasting soup and Gerry has a dish towel over his shoulder. It looks like we work in the kitchen.

AAJ: Is the Creative Music Studio where you first met Anthony Braxton?

MC: I met Anthony Braxton there when he heard me playing in a workshop. It felt like it was meant to be, part of a plan. We played a duo concert at Creative Music. And then the following year he did a creative orchestra, several concerts combined for a recording in Europe. And that was my first experience of having a real gig that wasn't just me playing solo on a piano with three missing keys. My first flight was on Icelandic Air to Cologne. Before I knew it, I went on the road playing with all sorts of musicians. Most of them I'd never heard of before.

AAJ: That must have really accelerated your learning curve, playing in his quartet? How long did you stay?

MC: It was ten years. Playing with Anthony taught me a lot about the use of space and silence and breath, and the use of composition in improvisation. It didn't begin that way; we were just playing quartet music, improvising on a head. Then he began to have an interest in integrating improvisation into a composition. Towards the end of my time with Anthony, even the solos within the pieces were written out.

When you play with the same people, in the same quartet setting for ten years, it's something like being married. When Anthony was teaching at Wesleyan and had just received a MacArthur Grant, his interest was going in a different direction. He felt like we had reached a plateau, so like in a marriage we had a divorce, an amicable one. We knew what each other was going to play; there were no surprises. That's what I think he was feeling. But the other three of us in the quartet thought there was still something worth continuing, to see what would come out of the music.

AAJ: From those 10 years, a decade with Anthony Braxton, what was your takeaway? Something that you learned that you carried on within your music?

MC: First of all, I felt there was a real connection between me and Anthony with our musical aesthetics. And I felt that there was a connection to the contemporary sounds. His music required a lot of sight reading of difficult music. And I felt like I might not have been able to do that had I not had that classical music experience where I did a lot of sight reading. But playing with Anthony, that was really my first experience of being in an ensemble, of playing together with other people, learning to listen, which I thought we really did as opposed to people being soloists. It was more about a group dynamic. People did play solos, of course, but it wasn't about showing off what you could do. It was about the group and the music sounding good. His compositions were inspiring to me. I used to study how he put lines together. He taught me a lot about leaving space and not just playing a million notes a minute, which is what I started out doing.

AAJ: So, the quartet disbanded. What did you do after that?

MC: I kept on playing with Reggie Workman's ensembles, playing with Barry Guy, the British double bassist with his London Jazz Composers' orchestra and with the Barry Guy New Orchestra (BGNO) in trios with Barry and drummer Paul Lytton.

AAJ: At some point, you began playing duo settings with Gerry Hemmingway.

MC: We've done tons of stuff. I've probably played more with Gerry than anybody else over the years. We have two duo recordings. He was in my trio with Reggie Workman, with Mark Dresser. He was in many of my projects and groups.

AAJ: Could you speak some of Cecil Taylor? Anything I've read about you talks about him being a mentor. You thought very highly of his playing.

MC: He was a huge influence, probably the most important influence, him and John Coltrane. First of all, I felt a connection to the energy and brilliance of his music, and also the aesthetic and the harmonic makeup of what he was doing. Not exactly the word I'm looking for, but the kinds of harmonies he used. I could relate to those also because they were in that contemporary vein that I had come from. And when I first heard him, it was really the energy that I reacted to, maybe harmonic landscape, maybe that's what I'm looking for anyway. But after years of listening to him, I suddenly heard the music in a different way. I actually heard the themes and blues, and it wasn't just energy. There were a lot of thematic elements happening that my brain had kind of glossed over at the beginning. That's why I think you have to listen to things for a while. To be able to understand a piece usually doesn't always happen right away.

AAJ: There are so many different types of players, composers, musicians from different cultures. Does it feel as if there are endless spaces to explore?

MC: It is just so wonderful what everybody, all the people from all these different cultures bring to jazz. And jazz is the kind of music where that can happen. It evolves. It's like a process. A friend of mine said he thinks of jazz as a verb and not as a noun, not set in stone. And no disrespect to what came before. That's absolutely essential to be aware of and to give credit to. But so many things have grown out of that original jazz and blues. For me, that's one of the most amazing things about the music.

AAJ: Verbs are very active. Or they can be. And I suppose sometimes people like to think of jazz more like a museum piece. Hang a portrait on the wall.

MC: I think Amiri Baraka spoke about that very thing in his book, Blues People that he did not see jazz as something to dust off and put in a museum. I know some people do see it that way. But part of that could possibly come from a perception or a lack of respect and acknowledgement for that original music. Museums are not bad things. It's where we see a lot of things we never would see otherwise. However, I personally don't want to get stuck there, and all the people I play with, none of them want to get stuck. They want to be able to evolve and have that freedom. And that's really a lot of the beauty of it, that it has inspired so many different kinds of music all over the world.

Comments