page 122 -
- may 2005
MARY ANNE DRISCOLL
and PAUL MURPHY,
INSIDE OUT,
CIMP 314.
Point of Reference / High Street / The Footbridge / Elene / Cymbalism / Thea / Out There / Byron’s Tune / Sonny / New Way/ Off the Top / Inside Out / Quick Study / Another Way / Fair Trade/ Epilogue. 69:15.
Driscoll, p; Murphy, d. Canton, NY, June 15, 2004.
Paul Murphy’s quintet disc Red Snapper, recorded in 1982 but released only last year by Cadence Jazz, was among other things a welcome addition to the Jimmy Lyons canon. It also featured the mysterious trumpeter Dewey Johnson, whose discography is otherwise confined to just two (remarkable) albums, Coltrane’s Ascension and Paul Bley’s Barrage; and it gave a glimpse of the virtually unknown pianist Mary Anne Driscoll.
Paul Murphy, Mary Anne Driscoll by Bob Rusch
Driscoll and Murphy were frequent playing partners in the 1970s and 1980s San Francisco scene, before drifting out of contact; Inside Out reunites them after a thirteen-year hiatus. Given the Lyons association, you might expect Driscoll to be a Cecil Taylor acolyte, but she’s actually hard to pigeonhole: her left hand is waywardly independent (a bit like Borah Bergman) and she takes a fluttering, irregular path around the keyboard: listening to her is like trying to follow the flightpaths of a pair of hyperactive butterflies. She can pummel the piano with the best of them, but if free pianists tend to fall into two camps—the dark and the light—she’s definitely in the latter. The partnership with Murphy is at once empathetic and full of contrasts: her quizzical every-direction-at-once approach versus his head-down drive, her gusts and scrabblings and confetti-handfuls of notes versus his grounded rolling pulse. It’s a source of frustration that Murphy’s (sometimes very insistent) drumming obscures Driscoll’s piano for lengthy passages; but if you can handle this, it’s a disc that deserves to be heard: Driscoll is a genuine discovery.
Nate Dorward
