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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 Joe Lovano's Trio Tapestry, the Henry Grimes Trio, the 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, and in 2025 was on the faculty of the International Creators and Collaborators Workshop at Bard College, and led a residency at the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation in Guelph, Canada. Currently she tours and records solo, with Joe Lovano's Trio Tapestry, and with a Scandinavian trio led by Danish drummer/composer Michala Ostergaard-Nielsen. She has collaborated with Angelica Sanchez, Tyshawn Sorey, Tanya Kalmanovitch, David Rothenberg, Raymond MacDonald, Harvey Sorgen and Joe Fonda, Camila Nebbia and Lesley Mok, Yuma Uesaka, Jason Stein, Damon Smith and Adam Shead, and others. In addition to working as a soloist and leader of her own groups (including past trios with Gary Peacock (or Mark Helias) and Paul Motion, Gerry Hemingway and Reggie Workman (or Mark Dresser), Crispell has performed and recorded extensively with leading players on the American and international jazz scene. She's also performed and recorded music by contemporary composers Robert Logan, Pozzi Escot, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Manfred Niehaus and Anthony Davis (four performances of his opera "X" with the NYC Opera in 1986) In 2006, Crispell organized a performance of Cy Twombly Dreamhouse, a project she worked on for a year after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, incorporating music, dance, and slide projections of 12 Twombly Works on Paper, at the Kleinert/James Gallery in Woodstock, NY. In 2017 and 2022, she collaborated with Scottish and American visual artists and musicians on the projects Drawing Sound (at the Kleinert/James Gallery) and In Real Time and Space (at the Jane St. Gallery in Saugerties, NY). These projects integrated music with graphic scores, and in Drawing Sound, also included animation based on the music and artwork. Participants included musicians Crispell, Raymond MacDonald, George Burt, Doug James, and David Rothenberg, and visual artists Jo Ganter and Melinda Stickney-Gibson. Musicians also contributed artwork, and there were concerts and workshops as well as the exhibitions. The online catalogue for the Drawing Sound exhibition can be viewed at www.woodstockguild.org/PDF's/DrawingSoundCatalog.pdf In addition to playing, she has taught improvisation workshops and given lecture/demonstrations at universities and art centers in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, and has collaborated with videographers, filmmakers, dancers and poets. AWARDS 2026 Jazz Foundation of America/Mellon Foundation Jazz Legacy Fellowship
An instructional video/DVD, "A PIANIST'S GUIDE TO FREE
IMPROVISATION: KEYS TO UNLOCKING YOUR CREATIVITY," is available
from Homespun Tapes, Box 340, Woodstock, N.Y. 12498. VISUAL ART COLLABORATION SHORT BIOGRAPHY Marilyn Crispell has been a composer and performer of contemporary improvised music since 1978. For ten years, she was a member of the Anthony Braxton Quartet and the Reggie Workman Ensemble, has been a member of Joe Lovano's Trio Tapestry since 2018, and has performed and recorded extensively as a soloist and with players on the American and international jazz scene, also working with dancers, poets, film-makers and visual artists, and teaching workshops in improvisation. She has been the recipient of three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship grants, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust composition commission and recipient of a 2025 NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship award, an Instant Award in Improvised Music (Berlin, Germany), and a 2026 Jazz Foundation of America/Mellon Foundation Jazz Legacy Award. WORKSHOPS IN IMPROVISATION Workshops in improvisation are designed to encourage personal creativity, heighten sound awareness and explore various elements and methods of improvisation. Ways of listening to and relating to each other, the relationship between sound and silence, between improvisation and composition (developing awareness of the logic of a good improvisation), historical perspectives on and examples of improvisation, and the relationship between music and other art forms and disciplines are explored, as well as whatever topics of interest may arise during the workshops. During the workshop/residency period, large group improvisations are structured and may be preformed at the end of the session. People at any level and of any age are welcome to participate. General workshops (as opposed to workshop with professional musical ensembles) may include those at various levels of musical experience. Marilyn Crispell's Archive is at Columbia University, NYC. SELECTED RECENT PODCASTS Soundwalker / Marilyn Crispell: To Be In the Moment Jason Crane / The Jazz Session #52 Dave Douglas A Noise From the Deep / ANDFTD #57 Pablo Held Investigates Adam Shatz / Myself With Others Monk Rowe / Jazz Backstories Podcasts Keith Davis / Notes on Jazz! #26
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