1996 · Album
Destiny
Recorded 1994, Women of the New Jazz festival, HotHouse, Chicago · Okka Disk · Produced by Not specified
Three Masters Meeting for the First Time
Only their second time playing together, yet the chemistry sounds like years of collaboration.
Destiny captures something rare: three of jazz's most uncompromising improvisers meeting in real time with almost no rehearsal, and sounding like they'd been waiting for each other their whole careers. Marilyn Crispell, Fred Anderson, and Hamid Drake recorded this at Chicago's HotHouse during the 1994 "Women of the New Jazz" festival, and the three-way conversation they build feels both immediate and inevitable.
Crispell brings controlled intensity to the piano, moving between percussive attack and surprising delicacy depending on what the moment asks for. Anderson's tone is unusually warm here—no harsh split tones or alienating textures, just direct melodic voice in dialogue with Crispell's harmonic pushing. Drake anchors everything without ever sounding merely supportive; his drumming breathes and shifts alongside the others, suggesting rather than stating the pulse.
For Drake, this sits somewhere between his avant-garde work and his more accessible projects—neither entirely abstract nor grounded in conventional swing, but something in between that lets each musician's personality emerge fully. AllMusic reviewer Joslyn Layne called it "an incredible performance by a stunning group of musicians whose skill and chemistry completely sidestep the fact that this is only the second time that these three great jazz improvisers ever played together." The Penguin Guide gave it 3½ stars, suggesting a genuine meeting of minds rather than a masterpiece, which may be closer to the truth: this is three equal voices finding unexpected rapport, not a transcendent moment, but a genuinely earned one.
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