Mary Anne Driscoll & Paul Murphy
Inside Out
(CIMP)
by David Dupont
For Inside Out CIMP impresario Bob Rusch hosted a reunion of the Mary Anne Driscoll-Paul Murphy duo. The pianist and drummer worked together extensively in the 1970s and 1980s, but had gone their separate ways and, until this date, hadn’t played together for 13 years. The resulting session both testifies to their strong musical connection and to the freshness engendered by renewing that musical tie after so many years.
Not that either had abandoned music; Murphy in particular has been active both in free and more conventional settings. His always-precise playing here demonstrates why he would be in such demand—even when he’s roaring away, each stroke is distinct and clear. And he responds to Driscoll’s sweeping atonal gestures with the right percussive architecture, helping to give them shape and dimension. He provides a wash of cymbals that ring underneath her jangling clusters and snaps snare and tom tom tattoos underneath her churning runs. On “Sonny” the two lock together in a series of brief episodes with Murphy cracking each to a close. He echoes and compresses that structure in his own solo with a rapid-fire rat-a-tat bearing just the faintest echo of one of his early models, Gene Krupa.
For her part, Driscoll delivers a dramatic display of Tayloresque piano. Her work is full of sweeping waves of chromatic figures. Despite what some may read into the title, little of this would be considered “inside” music; Driscoll limns the outer reaches of tonality relenting only occasionally. On “
Yet in Murphy’s company Driscoll plays more like a percussionist. As the session moves on, the sameness of the melodic-harmonic structures begins to wear, and I wanted the jumpy, restless rhythms to resolve. Still, at their best—the slowly unfolding “High Street” and “Thea” for example—their interaction creates its own unique resonance.
Review Courtesy AllAboutJazz.com