“The music takes you where you need to go.” — Marilyn Crispell
With Memento, the first duo release from American pianist Marilyn Crispell and Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, that sentiment becomes both guiding principle and quiet manifesto. Issued by ECM Records on March 20, 2026, and recorded at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in July 2025 with Manfred Eicher producing, Memento is an album of rare stillness and depth—lyrical, spacious and profoundly attentive to the emotional afterlife of memory.
Although this is their first duo album, Crispell and Jormin’s musical kinship stretches back decades. Crispell first encountered Jormin at a Stockholm festival in 1992, an experience she has described as transformative. Hearing him play “touched a chord” that resonated deeply within her. From Jormin and other Scandinavian improvisers she absorbed what she calls an “aesthetic of space, beauty and tenderness,” discovering that freedom in improvisation need not be equated solely with energy, velocity or intensity. The encounter subtly reshaped her artistic compass; her music, she has said, began “becoming more whole.” Their paths crossed again on Jormin’s sacred song cycle In Winds, In Light (2004), and over the years a mutual admiration matured into the quiet inevitability of Memento.
The album opens with four freely created pieces that establish its emotional terrain. “For the Children,” dedicated to innocents caught in the crossfire of global conflicts from Sudan to Gaza and Ukraine, unfolds as an act of collective mourning. Jormin’s high arco bass—its phrasing at times recalling the keening inflections of a kamancheh—threads through Crispell’s spacious harmonic architecture. The performance brims with restrained emotion, its intensity conveyed not through volume but through touch and timbre.
“Dialogue” follows as an intimate exchange, melody discovered and shared in real time. Each gesture feels provisional yet inevitable, as though both musicians are listening toward something just beyond reach. In “Embracing the Otherness,” silence becomes an active force. The upper registers of piano and bass shimmer, hover and recede, creating a fragile lattice of sound in which absence speaks as eloquently as presence. “Contemplation in D” concludes the fully improvised opening sequence with the bass in a leading role, floating above gently suspended piano chords. It is meditation in the truest sense: attentive, unhurried, luminous.
“Three Shades of a House,” a composition Jormin has previously explored with Bobo Stenson—notably on Contra la indecisión—originated as a commission to accompany an exhibition by Norwegian painter Hanne Borchgrevink. Her visual art has been described as a series of variations on a compositional theme, music rendered in form and colour. In Memento, the piece appears in two versions. “Morning” places pellucid piano at the forefront, its clarity evoking early light diffused across quiet walls. “Evening,” by contrast, yields to the dark-toned resonance of Jormin’s bass, shadows lengthening, colours deepening into dusk. Together they form a diptych of atmosphere and emotional hue.
Crispell’s “Song,” composed in the 1990s, addresses “the distance between two people.” The performance carries a sense of suspended yearning—notes placed with care, intervals stretching like unspoken words across space. The title track, “Memento,” is a miniature for solo piano, perfectly phrased and intimate. It reflects closeness rather than distance, referencing people Crispell feels connected to around the world and those she has lost in recent years. The piece becomes a vessel for remembrance—neither nostalgic nor sentimental, but clear-eyed and tender.
“The Beach at Newquay” evokes Crispell’s first visit to Cornwall while touring with saxophonist Raymond MacDonald. Standing on the shore at night, she encountered sea and stars in a moment she describes simply as magical. Jormin’s high arco bass suggests distant seagull cries, while the piano captures the vast hush of tide and sky. The music shimmers with nocturnal wonder, a memory rendered in sound.
“The Dark Light,” as Jormin explains, only hints at a larger composition he had brought to the session; the full piece was never performed. Its paradoxical title refers to counterpoint and emotional simultaneity—the coexistence of joy and sorrow. In Swedish there is a word for this intermingling of feelings: vemod, a wistful melancholy suffused with warmth. The music embodies that word without translating it. Layers intertwine, tones glow faintly, and something unnamed opens behind the contradiction—a silent song, a frozen sunbeam, a whispering storm.
The album closes with Crispell’s “Dragonfly,” written in memory of bassist Gary Peacock, with whom she recorded luminous trio sessions including Nothing ever was, anyway and Amaryllis, as well as the duo album Azure. In the month before Peacock’s death, Crispell visited him often; they would sit outside on his porch in early fall, dragonflies darting through the warm air, a chipmunk appearing for food. The piece carries that pastoral stillness. Its melody feels grounded and affectionate, a farewell shaped not by grief alone but by gratitude.
Crispell has been an ECM Records artist since 1997, debuting with her striking interpretation of Annette Peacock’s music on Nothing ever was, anyway. Her ECM catalogue spans solo work such as Vignettes, duets including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House with clarinettist David Rothenberg, and trio recordings of remarkable cohesion. More recently she has been featured in the trio of Joe Lovano on Trio Tapestry, Garden of Expression and Our Daily Bread. In 2025 she was honoured as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, a recognition of her singular voice in contemporary improvisation.
Jormin first appeared on ECM alongside Don Cherry on Dona Nostra (recorded 1993) and has since collaborated widely, including long-standing membership in the Bobo Stenson Trio. His projects range from the Nordic supergroup Arcanum to albums as a leader such as In Winds, In Light and 2023’s Pasado en claro. The first contemporary improviser elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, Jormin has also taught at the University of Gothenburg and Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, shaping generations of musicians with the same sensitivity he brings to performance.
In Memento, Crispell and Jormin distill decades of experience into music that breathes with patience and emotional clarity. The album does not demand attention; it invites it. Its themes—memory, absence, connection—are universal, yet expressed with the specificity of two artists listening deeply to one another. Space is not emptiness here but presence; silence is not void but possibility. The music moves as remembrance moves—circling, returning, illuminating from different angles. And in that movement, as Crispell’s words suggest, it takes the listener precisely where they need to go.
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