Biography
A collaboration of Marilyn Crispell & David Rothenberg.
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 the Henry Grimes Trio, Quartet Noir (with Urs Leimgruber, Fritz Hauser and Joelle Leandre), and Anders Jormin’s Bortom Quintet. In 2005 she performed and recorded with the NOW Orchestra in Vancouver, Canada and in 2006 she will be co-director of the Vancouver Creative Music Institute and a faculty member at the Banff Centre International Workshop in Jazz.
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Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds Sing (Basic Books, 2005), also published in Italy, Spain, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Germany. His feature-length documentary Why Birds Sing was shown on BBC4 in June, 2007. Rothenberg is also the author of Sudden Music: Improvisation, Art, Nature (Georgia, 2002), Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes (Codhill Press, 2001), Hand's End: Technology and the Limits of Nature (California, 1993), and Always the Mountains (Georgia, 2003).
Rothenberg's music connects the living sounds of the natural world to the traditions of global rhythmic innovation and improvisation. Inspired by the melodies and beats of birds, insects, whales, water, and wind, he blends spontaneous musical inventiveness with a sense of rhythm, exhuberance, and the listening to nature.
As a clarinetist David Rothenberg has performed and recorded with Marilyn Crispell, Jan Bang, Scanner, Hamid Drake, Glen Velez, Karl Berger, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Nils Økland, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. He has seven CDs out under his own name, including "On the Cliffs of the Heart," named one of the top ten releases of 1995 by Jazziz magazine.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.