Live at the Hungry Brain documents an American, cross-generational and free jazz quartet cæof the New York-based legendary pianist Marilyn Crispell (who will be forever remembered member of the iconic Anthony Braxton Quartet) and the Mid-West working trio of Chicagoan bass clarinetist Jason Stein and drummer Adam Shead and St. Louis-based double bass player Damon Smith, that has been working since 2021 and already released two albums (the recent one, Hum, Irritable Mystic, 2023). The album was recorded at the Hungry Brain club in Chicago in June 2023, during the quartet’s second performance. A studio session at Palisade Studios in Chicago was recorded a day after the performance in Chicago and was released as spi-raling horn (Irritable Mystic/Balance Point Acoustics, 2024).
Crispell and Smith share an abiding interest in the work of American iconoclastic painter, sculptor, and photographer Cy Twombly (1928-2011), and discussions of how his work applied to their own aesthetic ideas led the two musicians to discuss how a collaboration inspired by such ideas might look. Smith used Twombly’s works as album covers, and untitled paintings of Twombly is used for the cover of both spi-raling horn and Live at the Hungry Brain.
The album features two extended free improvisations, with enough space and time to dive in and explore the art of the moment. Stein leads the opening 34-minute «A Borderless Event», an urgent but mostly contemplative, lyrical piece with a few chaotic islands. This piece showcases Crispell’s singular, free voice. She wisely steers the trio’s rhythmic motion with her harmonic ideas, and often brings the trio into her post-Coltrane wanderlust, while intensifying the organic, open, and conversational dynamics of the quartet. The second piece, 16-minute «Bone Eaten Up by Breathing», is more introspective and with a slow-cooking dynamics, colored by the dark and woody bowing work of Smith’s bass and Stein’s bass clarinet, and masterfully abstracted by Crispell’s beautiful solo.
Exceptional, profound, and insightful free improvised performance.
Eyal Hareuveni
Jason Stein (bass clarinet), Marilyn Crispell (piano), Damon Smith (double bass), Adam Shead (drums)
