Pianist Marilyn Crispell is a long-standing, singular figure who operates in the post-Coltrane musical continuum, to borrow a term that comes from one of her key collaborators, Anthony Braxton. Besides her membership in Braxton’s celebrate quartet with Mark Dresser and Gerry Hemingway, she has worked extensively as both an associate and a leader with Reggie Workman, Barry Guy, Paul Motian and Joe Lovano. She’s recently been recognized with a Mellon Foundation grant, the Instant Award in Improvised Music, and an NEA Jazz Master Fellowship. Now in her late 70s, she could easily settle for victory laps at high-level festivals, but instead has continued her practice of playing with younger musicians and ensembles. She’s the perfect candidate for a musical date with Smith, a powerful instrumentalist with a long-standing practice of engaging with inspirational elders including Peter Kowald, Wolfgang Fuchs, Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Kaiser.

The trio and Crispell convened for a weekend in the middle of June 2023 to play a concert at the celebrated titular venue, followed by a day in the studio. That session yielded the CD spi-raling horn, which was released in 2024 on Shead’s Irritable Mystic label. Live At The Hungry Brain was issued on LP by the Austrian Trost label late in 2025, but given the current needlessly chaotic state of international commerce between the USA and the rest of the world, prior to winter’s end 2026 American purchasers could not lay hands on a disc if they didn’t know a member of the band.

While spi-raling horn presented the four musicians deeply mining discreet ideas, Live At The Hungry Brain captures the developmental arc of the ensemble in action. Its first track, “A Borderless Event,” unfolds over nearly 34 minutes, which wrap around the LP but come as a single file in the digital format; the second, “Bone Eaten Up By Breathing,” lasts 15:42. It begins with a quietly intense exchange between bass and drums, which is quickly sharpened by short, ascending bass clarinet phrases and centered by a few strategic piano notes. From that point, the changes come quickly, but never with undue haste. The four musicians eschew the foreground/background default of jazz, instead concentrating on collective generations of energy, harmony and shape which are varied by contractions in density as one or more players drops out and the others multiply the complexity of their playing; some of the most exciting moments are duo exchanges that range from clashes of jagged sound masses to hushed dalliances in lyrical territory. Crispell’s rich chords and dizzying runs can’t help but change the trio’s sound, but she is a canny guest, balancing assertiveness with suggestive enhancement. Shead and Smith are a fountain of dynamic, aerated sound, by turns bursting, prodding and subliminal. And Stein sounds just great in this setting, freed of the role constraints that distill his playing in Natural Information Society and able to draw support from Crispell’s voluminous harmonic contributions. His intricate exhortations balance the turbulent romanticism of Crispell’s playing; this splendid performance engages the heart as well as the brain.