Marilyn Crispell
For the obvious starter, she does not play bebop; she doesn’t even refer to that watershed idiom in her music, which falls into the area generally referred to as “free jazz” or “the avant-garde.” She does not “swing” in any traditional sense. Her music does not fit the externally imposed theme-and-variations format used by the young neoboppers; the structure instead arises from the free flow of her galvanizing improvisations. Although she uses such elements as tone clusters, dissonant voicings, and blurringly fast percussive melodies, she doesn’t play like Cecil Taylor, who pioneered such techniques; Crispell thus disproves the assertion that “all that free stuff sounds alike.” And she presents an obvious contrast–enhanced by the fact that her appearance in town was part of the Women of the New Jazz festival–to “young men in suits,” the flip but telling epithet that describes the Marsalis-spawned wave of talented young players aping the sounds and styles of decades past.
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In a recent New York Times article recapping the jazz war, Peter Watrous painted the conflict as one between critics jadedly calling for more experimentation and cerebralism and the musicians who, led by Mr. Marsalis, have made clear their preference for more familiar idioms in easily assimilated contexts. And, said Watrous, it is clear that in establishing a new conservativism that will dominate jazz into the next century, “the musicians have won.”
