Some years ago Cecil Taylor, patriarch of jazz extremities, surprised fellow pianist Marilyn Crispell with a knowing appraisal. “He said he heard in my music that I was going to spearhead some kind of new lyricism,” Crispell says now. “And I thought: ‘What a bunch of shit! How dare you say that!’ Because that wasn’t the predominant feature in my music at the time.” Laughing at the recollection, she adds: “But he heard something that I didn’t even hear.”

What Taylor had heard was a hint of the luminous, idyllic melancholy that now suffuses Crispell's work. For the past five years or so, she has honed an aesthetic of quiet introspection and breathless discovery -- the sort of ambience often ascribed to Bill Evans but rarely to any representative of the jazz avant-garde. This is all the more remarkable for what preceded it, as Crispell -- a formidable presence in new music since the late 1970s -- harbors a reputation for restive, bristling dissonance and a slashing rhythmic drive. In a New York Times profile this fall, Adam Shatz likened the stylistic shift to "Jackson Pollock deciding he'd rather paint like Vermeer."

For her part, Crispell describes the new lyricism as "an emerging quality," not unlike a bulb coming into blossom. (It's no accident that her most recent ECM album, Amaryllis, takes its name from a winter-blooming flower of the Andes.) "I've been trying to be in touch with what I really am hearing," Crispell muses, speaking by phone from her home in Woodstock, New York. "What I've noticed is that I'm moving away from a kind of angst-ridden, Viennese, Schoenberg-ian kind of tonality. Not necessarily into a self-indulgent romanticism, but more into a kind of... a pure lyrical quality, more abstract."

That Crispell invokes Arnold Schoenberg should come as no surprise; like many classically trained pianists of her generation, she shoulders his influence. ("I love Schoenberg, by the way," she clarifies, careful not to seem ungrateful.) It goes without saying that the 20th-century composer loomed large at both the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore (which she attended during her teenage years, after spending a childhood in Philadelphia) and Boston's New England Conservatory (where she pursued an interest in chamber music). But her career in improvisation was inspired by other muses.

It was in 1975 -- after a six-year hiatus from music, during which she worked in psychiatric hospitals -- that Crispell first heard John Coltrane's album A Love Supreme. "It was like an epiphany," she explains, apparently still awed. "I felt this incredible presence of love, a very strong and powerful energy. All I wanted at that point was to be in that music, a part of that music. I remember asking whatever energy was present in that moment to help me do that." Crispell spent the next two years studying with prominent Boston-based instructor Charlie Banacos, who imparted a foundational understanding of jazz harmony. Then she attended Karl Berger's Creative Music Studio in Woodstock -- where she met some of the most adventurous minds of the era, including Taylor and saxophonist-composer Anthony Braxton.

Crispell toured Europe with Braxton the following year, beginning an association that would span some 15 years and nearly a dozen albums. Mostly through her work in this context, she became known as a virtuosic, incendiary stylist with a ferociously percussive touch -- in other words, an apostle of the Church of Cecil. Her discography as a leader, which begins with the powerful Spirit Music (Cadence) in 1981, modifies this perception only slightly. Crispell evinces a strongly individual voice, both in the way she leads a group (see Highlights from the Summer of 1992 American Tour, on Music & Arts) and in the way she shapes her flowing solo recitals (like the excellent Live at Mills College, 1995, also Music & Arts). Yet in almost every regard, her Taylor/Braxton allegiances remain consistently clear.

Which partly explains the unexpectedness of Nothing Ever Was, Anyway (ECM), which Crispell recorded in 1996. That album, one of the most haunting piano trio albums of the past decade, marked the first milestone on a surprising and unfamiliar path. But such things rarely happen overnight. A few years prior, Crispell had shared a Stockholm festival bill with the Swedish bassist Anders Jormin. "Hearing him play was a catalyst," she says, describing the meditative sound of Jormin's ensemble. "It just touched something in me, some lyrical quality that was awakening." That quality soon found a vehicle in the music of avant-garde composer-vocalist Annette Peacock, who moved to Woodstock at around this time. "We became friends," says Crispell. "I had always loved her music, and decided I wanted to do a recording of it." Nothing Ever Was, Anyway -- featuring Crispell, Paul Motian on drums and Gary Peacock (the composer's ex-husband) on bass -- was the ethereal result.

If Crispell's "new lyricism" sparked an outcry within the avant-garde community, it went largely unheard, drowned out by a cavalcade of fulsome praise. "The transition period was just a little strange for me," the pianist now allows, "because once again it was taking me somewhere. I could almost say that I didn't choose it, it chose me. There was just this force driving me to do it." In other words, she was gripped by an urge not unlike the one sparked by A Love Supreme. And, as evidenced by last year's exquisite Amaryllis -- which features songs by Crispell, Peacock and Motian, plus four free-improvised tracks -- this urge has yielded her most vividly personal work to date.

Yet this music is, in fact, no less demanding -- technically, physically, spiritually -- than earlier, stormier fare. So it makes sense that Crispell foresees a convergence: "It was kind of like a pendulum, swinging very much in one direction and very much in another direction. What I feel is happening now is that it's coming to some point of balance." She pauses. "Which isn't to say that it might not change again, radically, in some way."

Marilyn Crispell plays a free solo piano concert on Mon., April 22, 8 p.m., Houston Hall, 3417 Spruce St., 215-898-6533.

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