Marilyn Crispell

Vignettes is the first solo piano album Marilyn Crispell made for ECM, released in April 2008. It followed three trio records for the label: Nothing Ever Was, Anyway, Amaryllis and Storyteller. The American pianist, who spent 1983 to 1995 in Anthony Braxton's quartet, had by then turned towards what ECM calls an aesthetics of space, beauty and tenderness. Here the lyrical free ballads clearly outnumber the eruptive passages. Seventeen pieces mix free improvisation with written and half-written material.

The album was recorded in April 2007 at the Auditorio of Radio Svizzera in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Fifteen pieces are Crispell's own. The other two come from her circle: Cuida Tu Espíritu (Take Care of Your Spirit) is by Jayna Nelson, a flutist and Crispell's neighbour in Woodstock. Stilleweg is by the Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen. Crispell first played it in a group led by the Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker. Her Scandinavian ties go back to a Stockholm solo festival in 1992, and she wrote about them in Horizons Touched (Granta, 2007).

Seven short improvisations, numbered Vignette I to VII, are scattered through the programme, several lasting barely a minute or two. Between them stand longer pieces. Cuida Tu Espíritu unfolds over nearly eight minutes as a long, tender melody that Crispell spaces out between the hands. Sweden, titled only after it was recorded, uses suspended chords and soft, Debussy-like pedalling. Valse Triste, written during a residency at the Centre Dürrenmatt in Neuchâtel, shifts restlessly in rubato, and Axis and Ballade are older concert pieces used as material for improvisation.

In DownBeat, Fred Bouchard heard Crispell moving between jazz, classical and world music, giving "elegiac weight to piano pieces that gleam with motivic individuality". Graham Lock, in International Piano, stressed that the delicacy hides a firmer core: "a tensile, tough-minded music, its stark abstraction as challenging as it is alluring". The magazine made it a Selection, and in Germany Die Zeit called it an outstanding solo album.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2027, first released in 2008.