Memento is the first duo recording by the US pianist Marilyn Crispell and the Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, whose association goes back to a Stockholm festival in 1992. Its eleven short pieces, four free improvisations followed by seven compositions, circle around ideas of memory and loss. The music is sparse and lyrical, and silence is treated as an active part of it.
Crispell has recorded for ECM since 1997 and was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2025. She played on Jormin's cycle of sacred songs In Winds, In Light (2004), and she has long credited him as an influence. "When I heard Anders playing, it touched a chord in me that resonated strongly." Jormin, a long-standing member of the Bobo Stenson Trio, first appeared on ECM with Don Cherry. The duo recorded in July 2025 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due, with Stefano Amerio engineering and Manfred Eicher producing.
The improvised opener, For the Children, is dedicated by Jormin to innocents caught in conflicts "from Sudan to Gaza and Ukraine", and sets his high arco lines against Crispell's solemn piano. His Three Shades of a House, first written for an exhibition by the Norwegian painter Hanne Borchgrevink, appears twice. A "Morning" version puts clear piano to the fore, while an "Evening" version belongs to dark-toned bass. In Crispell's Beach at Newquay, a memory of her first visit to Cornwall, the bowed bass imitates seagull cries. The closing Dragonfly remembers Gary Peacock.
In Stereophile, Thomas Conrad called it "a quintessentially ECM album, because of its quietude and also because of its concentrated creativity", and counted producer and engineer as full partners in the result. For Thom Jurek at AllMusic, the duo found "an intimate common language based in spaciousness and languid grace". Jazz Magazine in France gave it a Choc, and Rondo awarded five stars. Kenneth Blanchard, on the Free Jazz Collective blog, admitted that Jormin's gull cries were so convincing it took him a moment to realise the duo were not really at the beach.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2867, released on 20 March 2026, with a running time of under 39 minutes.
