NEA Jazz Master Marilyn Crispell – Jason Stein, Damon Smith, & Adam Shead at The North Street Cabaret – Madison, WI

Marilyn Crispell – piano Jason Stein – bass clarinet Damon Smith – double bass Adam Shead – drums, percussion

BLUESTEM PRESENTATION | The quartet of NEA Jazz Master Marilyn Crispell, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, double bassist Damon Smith, and drummer Adam Shead constitutes an intergenerational ensemble grounded in long-form collective improvisation, extended formal development, and a shared commitment to relational listening practices. Emerging from the long-standing trio of Stein, Smith, and Shead, the quartet was formed in 2023 following Smith’s invitation to Crispell, establishing a collaborative framework rooted not in project-based production but in continuity, process, and sustained ensemble inquiry.

The group’s work has been documented on spi-raling horn (Irritable Mystic Records, 2024) and Live at the Hungry Brain (Trost Records, 2025), recordings that articulate a performance practice characterized by dynamic density modulation, emergent structure, and the negotiation of intensity and restraint. These recordings situate Crispell’s pianistic language—shaped through her historic association with Anthony Braxton and her foundational role in post-1960s creative music traditions—within the trio’s established improvisational ecology, producing a hybrid ensemble language that resists hierarchical soloist/accompanist models in favor of distributed agency and collective form generation.

A central conceptual dimension of the quartet’s aesthetic is its sustained dialogue with the visual art of Cy Twombly. Smith and Crispell’s long-standing engagement with Twombly’s work provided an early conceptual catalyst for the ensemble’s formation, with Twombly’s gestural abstraction serving as a shared reference point for thinking about physicality, inscription, and non-linear form. Twombly’s paintings appear on the covers of both recordings, functioning not as illustrative programmatic sources but as parallel models of embodied mark-making and emergent structure. Critical discourse has drawn analogies between the quartet’s improvisational processes and Twombly’s calligraphic surfaces, emphasizing the co-presence of volatility, fragility, accumulation, and spatial tension.

Through extended-duration performance, the quartet develops large-scale formal coherence through micro-level interaction, treating time, density, and texture as primary structural parameters. Their practice situates itself within lineages of free improvisation and experimental jazz while articulating a distinct ensemble identity based on processual form, collective authorship, and interdisciplinary conceptual exchange. The quartet’s work functions not as stylistic synthesis but as an ongoing research practice in sound, abstraction, and collective imagination.

https://marilyncrispell.com/ https://www.jasonsteinmusic.com/

https://www.adamsheadmusic.com/ https://balancepointacoustics.com/