Marilyn Crispell, Jason Stein, Damon Smith & Adam Shead

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Claire Stefani

Marilyn Crispell at the piano.

Marilyn Crispell

Adventurous listeners will want to mark this BlueStem Jazz concert on their calendars, as it’s a rare Madison appearance by a truly one-of-a-kind collaboration. The expert improvisational trio of Jason Stein, Damon Smith and Adam Shead is joined by pianist Marilyn Crispell, a longtime member of saxophonist Anthony Braxton’s band and a 2026 recipient of a Mellon Foundation Jazz Legacies Fellowship. The four players can create densely layered, intense music together, as documented on the 2024 album spi-raling horn. 

media release: Marilyn Crispell is the winner Mellon Foundation’s 2026 Cohort of Jazz Legacies

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

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.