Home to the world’s oldest football and Braveheart’s sword, Stirling in Scotland plays host this weekend to some of the world’s most inventive avant-garde jazz musicians at the Le Weekend festival which begins tomorrow.

The event has celebrated all things creative for over a decade, and the thirteenth and final foray into the improvised unknown provides a galimaufry of exhibitions, performances, film screenings and workshops.

American pianist and composer Marilyn Crispell – best known as a member of Anthony Braxton’s classic quartet from the 1980s and early-90s – plays at the Tolbooth Auditorium on Saturday with Scottish saxophonist Raymond MacDonald. The pair also perform at the London Jazz Festival next month at London’s Vortex club on 17 November.

Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Crispell was brought up in Baltimore and went on to study at the New England Conservatory and the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock. Known for her style of romantically-inflected free improv, she has since recorded for ECM with Gary Peacock and Paul Motion on the Annette Peacock-inspired Nothing Ever Was, Anyway, followed by several more trio recordings, a solo album Vignettes and most recently a collaboration with clarinettist David Rothenberg entitled One Dark Night I Left My Silent House.

Crispell’s fellow former member of the Braxton quartet, drummer Gerry Hemingway appears on Sunday with sax man John Butcher in a one-off performance specially conceived for the Le Weekend festival. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 for his contributions to the creative arts, Hemingway has gone on to record Devil’s Paradise and The Whimbler with his own quartet on Clean Feed Records.

Le Weekend also offers the rare opportunity to experience some of the influential avant-garde albums in their Classic Playback Series – Horace Tapscott’s The Dark Tree, The Soft Machine’s Volume Two and John Zorn’s celebration of the music of Ennio Morricone, The Big Gundown can be enjoyed in full at the Tolbooth Café Bar. So if you have ever considered kicking back with a beer to the soundtrack of John Zorn, Stirling is clearly the place to be this weekend. 

– Ben Davies

For more info go to www.leweekendfestival.com