Biography
An exploratory, virtuosic, rhythmic, and lyrical composer and improviser, pianist Myra Melford surfaced in 1990 through the trio recording Jump. That debut captured the core impact of her two guiding figures: pianist Don Pullen, whose percussive approach she absorbed and extended, and composer Henry Threadgill, under whom she studied during the mid-1980s. International recognition as a jazz pianist arrived by the 1996 trio release The Same River, Twice. Accolades for her expansive output, frequently marked by spiritual themes, have persisted into the present century and are documented on releases such as 2000’s Dance Beyond the Color by Myra Melford’s Crush, 2006’s The Image of Your Body by Myra Melford’s Be Bread, and 2015’s Snowy Egret. She regularly contributes as a sideman, performs in numerous duos and trios, and belongs to Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom. In 2017 she joined four other pianists on Handful of Keys with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra under Wynton Marsalis. The 2020 trio date Stormy Whisper paired her with Joëlle Léandre and Lauren Newton. Rogue Art issued the 2022 all-woman quintet session For the Love of Fire and Water by Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1957, Melford started formal lessons in kindergarten and later worked with classically trained boogie-woogie pianist Erwin Helfer. Helfer guided her through classical repertoire, then introduced twentieth-century works by Bartók and Stravinsky, and ultimately the blues. By high school she had abandoned any interest in performing classical music and discontinued formal training. She enrolled at Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington. There she noticed a notice for jazz piano lessons posted in a local restaurant. Though she knew almost nothing about the style beyond its improvisational character, she resumed study. She later recalled that Cecil Taylor’s Air Above Mountains and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come were the two albums she played almost without interruption during those years. She changed her major to music and transferred to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where Art Lande and Gary Peacock became her teachers.
In 1984 she relocated to New York City and performed with Threadgill, violinist Leroy Jenkins, Butch Morris, and others. She also took private lessons with Pullen, who, together with Threadgill, served as genuine mentors. Throughout the mid- to late 1980s she worked and recorded in a duo with flutist Marion Brandis. She assembled a trio with bassist Lindsey Horner and drummer Reggie Nicholson that documented Jump (1990) and Now & Now (1991) for Enemy. Wider notice followed the trio’s 1993 live recording Alive in the House of Saints, issued by the Swiss label HatHut.
As the decade advanced, Melford broadened her compositional palette by writing for larger ensembles with varied instrumentation. She augmented the original trio with trumpeter Dave Douglas and reed player Marty Ehrlich; the resulting quintet debuted as the Myra Melford Extended Ensemble on the 1995 Hatology album Even the Sounds Shine. She next formed the quintet the Same River, Twice, comprising Douglas, cellist Erik Friedlander, reedist Chris Speed, and drummer Michael Sarin. The group’s self-titled Gramavision debut appeared in 1996 and was followed by the 1999 Arabesque recording Above Blue.
During the same period she participated in two notable collaborative projects: the 1996 Hatology duo album Eleven Ghosts with Dutch drummer Han Bennink, and the 1999 Omnitone trio date Equal Interest with AACM violinist Leroy Jenkins and multi-reedist Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. (She had contributed to the 1997 Jarman/Jenkins album Out of the Mist.) On Equal Interest she added harmonium to her instrumental resources.
At the start of the 2000s Melford returned to the trio format with Crush, a group featuring drummer Kenny Wollesen and electric bassist Stomu Takeishi—the latter already known from Threadgill’s Make a Move and from earlier Melford sessions. Arabesque released the widely praised Crush album Dance Beyond the Color in 2000. The following year the label issued Yet Can Spring, a duo recording with former Extended Ensemble colleague Marty Ehrlich; she later revisited the duo format with Ehrlich on the 2007 Palmetto release Spark!
The Equal Interest and Crush projects highlighted her growing command of the harmonium, and in 2000–2001 her interest in that instrument and in North Indian classical, devotional, and folk traditions led her to Calcutta on a Fulbright grant. She spent nine months studying harmonium with Pandit Sohanlal Sharma. Before leaving she also voiced an intention to explore qawwali with Sufi musicians during the visit. After returning she resided for a time at an upstate New York ashram, then began recording music shaped by those travels, beginning with the 2004 Arabesque release Where the Two Worlds Touch by Myra Melford’s the Tent. The project drew on poems by thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi and featured Melford on piano and harmonium alongside her Crush bandmates, former Same River, Twice member Speed on tenor saxophone and clarinet, and trumpeter Cuong Vu.
Rumi’s poetry likewise supplied the title and impetus for the next album, The Image of Your Body, the debut recording by her Be Bread ensemble. The sessions took place in December 2003, only eight months after those for Where the Two Worlds Touch. Melford created Be Bread specifically to explore material informed by her Indian studies; the album presented her on piano and harmonium with bassist Takeishi, trumpeter Vu, guitarist Brandon Ross, and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee. Cryptogramophone released The Image of Your Body in 2006; in the liner notes Melford characterized the music as “layers of simultaneous activity, not unlike life in modern-day India: a continual bombardment of the senses and a mingling of the peace of the ancient with the hustle of the present.”
Between the recording and release of that album, Melford left the East Coast in 2004 for a faculty position as Associate Professor of Improvisation and Jazz in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. The academic appointment did not curtail her performing and recording activity; over the ensuing decade she launched numerous new projects, among them a return to the piano-trio format—this time as co-leader rather than sole leader—with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson in Trio M. The ensemble issued The Big Picture on Cryptogramophone in 2007 and The Guest House on Enja/Yellowbird in 2012. Chamber Music America commissioned her composition The Whole Tree Gone, which appeared on the 2010 Firehouse 12 album of the same name by a sextet version of Be Bread that included Takeishi, Vu, Ross, Wilson, and clarinetist Ben Goldberg.
She continued to record in duo settings, including the 2007 Perspicacity release Heart Mountain with violinist/violist Tanya Kalmanovitch and the 2009 Libra Records live recording Under the Water with pianist Satoko Fujii at Berkeley’s Maybeck Recital Hall. Another duo venture, ::Dialogue::, paired her with clarinetist Goldberg. In 2010 she joined drummer Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom, which released its self-titled debut that year. Although many of these projects featured solo piano interludes, her first entirely solo piano album, Life Carries Me This Way, appeared on Firehouse 12 and contained eleven original compositions inspired by drawings (reproduced in the booklet) by Sacramento artist and family friend Don Reich, who died in 2010.
In 2012 Melford assembled the new quintet Snowy Egret, comprising bassist Takeishi, guitarist Liberty Ellman, trumpeter Ron Miles, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, to present compositions inspired by Eduardo Galeano’s Memoria del Fuego trilogy at the Jazz Gallery in New York. The following year she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award, the latter underwriting programming at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In November 2013 Melford and Snowy Egret presented the Galeano-inspired material within the multimedia project Language of Dreams, which also incorporated dance, video, and spoken word, at Yerba Buena Center. Enja/Yellowbird released the quintet’s self-titled debut album in March 2015. The next year she appeared on Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom album Otis Was a Polar Bear and recorded the duo album Dialogue with Goldberg. She then joined electric harpist Zeena Parkins and koto player Miya Masaoka for the 2017 trio recording MZM.
That same year she was one of five pianists featured on Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s Handful of Keys under Wynton Marsalis. In 2018 Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret issued The Other Side of Air and participated in the collective live recording 12 from 25, both released by Firehouse 12. The following year the newly formed Tiger Trio of Melford, bassist Joëlle Léandre, and flutist Nicole Mitchell appeared on Glitter Wolf alongside Boom Tic Boom.
Léandre and Melford recruited vocalist/composer Lauren Newton for the freely improvised 2020 Rogue Art date Stormy Whispers. In 2021 trumpeter/vocalist/composer Sarah Wilson’s archival sextet recording Kaleidoscope, originally made in 2012 and featuring Melford with violinist Charles Burnham, bassist Jerome Harris, guitarist John Schott, and drummer Matt Wilson, was released by Brass Tonic Records.
Rogue Art issued For the Love of Fire and Water in 2022. Recorded over two days in July 2021 at Firehouse 12’s studio in New Haven, Connecticut, the all-woman Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet comprised the pianist, guitarist Mary Halvorson, drummer Susie Ibarra, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, and cellist Tomeka Reid.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1957, Melford started formal lessons in kindergarten and later worked with classically trained boogie-woogie pianist Erwin Helfer. Helfer guided her through classical repertoire, then introduced twentieth-century works by Bartók and Stravinsky, and ultimately the blues. By high school she had abandoned any interest in performing classical music and discontinued formal training. She enrolled at Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington. There she noticed a notice for jazz piano lessons posted in a local restaurant. Though she knew almost nothing about the style beyond its improvisational character, she resumed study. She later recalled that Cecil Taylor’s Air Above Mountains and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come were the two albums she played almost without interruption during those years. She changed her major to music and transferred to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where Art Lande and Gary Peacock became her teachers.
In 1984 she relocated to New York City and performed with Threadgill, violinist Leroy Jenkins, Butch Morris, and others. She also took private lessons with Pullen, who, together with Threadgill, served as genuine mentors. Throughout the mid- to late 1980s she worked and recorded in a duo with flutist Marion Brandis. She assembled a trio with bassist Lindsey Horner and drummer Reggie Nicholson that documented Jump (1990) and Now & Now (1991) for Enemy. Wider notice followed the trio’s 1993 live recording Alive in the House of Saints, issued by the Swiss label HatHut.
As the decade advanced, Melford broadened her compositional palette by writing for larger ensembles with varied instrumentation. She augmented the original trio with trumpeter Dave Douglas and reed player Marty Ehrlich; the resulting quintet debuted as the Myra Melford Extended Ensemble on the 1995 Hatology album Even the Sounds Shine. She next formed the quintet the Same River, Twice, comprising Douglas, cellist Erik Friedlander, reedist Chris Speed, and drummer Michael Sarin. The group’s self-titled Gramavision debut appeared in 1996 and was followed by the 1999 Arabesque recording Above Blue.
During the same period she participated in two notable collaborative projects: the 1996 Hatology duo album Eleven Ghosts with Dutch drummer Han Bennink, and the 1999 Omnitone trio date Equal Interest with AACM violinist Leroy Jenkins and multi-reedist Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. (She had contributed to the 1997 Jarman/Jenkins album Out of the Mist.) On Equal Interest she added harmonium to her instrumental resources.
At the start of the 2000s Melford returned to the trio format with Crush, a group featuring drummer Kenny Wollesen and electric bassist Stomu Takeishi—the latter already known from Threadgill’s Make a Move and from earlier Melford sessions. Arabesque released the widely praised Crush album Dance Beyond the Color in 2000. The following year the label issued Yet Can Spring, a duo recording with former Extended Ensemble colleague Marty Ehrlich; she later revisited the duo format with Ehrlich on the 2007 Palmetto release Spark!
The Equal Interest and Crush projects highlighted her growing command of the harmonium, and in 2000–2001 her interest in that instrument and in North Indian classical, devotional, and folk traditions led her to Calcutta on a Fulbright grant. She spent nine months studying harmonium with Pandit Sohanlal Sharma. Before leaving she also voiced an intention to explore qawwali with Sufi musicians during the visit. After returning she resided for a time at an upstate New York ashram, then began recording music shaped by those travels, beginning with the 2004 Arabesque release Where the Two Worlds Touch by Myra Melford’s the Tent. The project drew on poems by thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi and featured Melford on piano and harmonium alongside her Crush bandmates, former Same River, Twice member Speed on tenor saxophone and clarinet, and trumpeter Cuong Vu.
Rumi’s poetry likewise supplied the title and impetus for the next album, The Image of Your Body, the debut recording by her Be Bread ensemble. The sessions took place in December 2003, only eight months after those for Where the Two Worlds Touch. Melford created Be Bread specifically to explore material informed by her Indian studies; the album presented her on piano and harmonium with bassist Takeishi, trumpeter Vu, guitarist Brandon Ross, and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee. Cryptogramophone released The Image of Your Body in 2006; in the liner notes Melford characterized the music as “layers of simultaneous activity, not unlike life in modern-day India: a continual bombardment of the senses and a mingling of the peace of the ancient with the hustle of the present.”
Between the recording and release of that album, Melford left the East Coast in 2004 for a faculty position as Associate Professor of Improvisation and Jazz in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. The academic appointment did not curtail her performing and recording activity; over the ensuing decade she launched numerous new projects, among them a return to the piano-trio format—this time as co-leader rather than sole leader—with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson in Trio M. The ensemble issued The Big Picture on Cryptogramophone in 2007 and The Guest House on Enja/Yellowbird in 2012. Chamber Music America commissioned her composition The Whole Tree Gone, which appeared on the 2010 Firehouse 12 album of the same name by a sextet version of Be Bread that included Takeishi, Vu, Ross, Wilson, and clarinetist Ben Goldberg.
She continued to record in duo settings, including the 2007 Perspicacity release Heart Mountain with violinist/violist Tanya Kalmanovitch and the 2009 Libra Records live recording Under the Water with pianist Satoko Fujii at Berkeley’s Maybeck Recital Hall. Another duo venture, ::Dialogue::, paired her with clarinetist Goldberg. In 2010 she joined drummer Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom, which released its self-titled debut that year. Although many of these projects featured solo piano interludes, her first entirely solo piano album, Life Carries Me This Way, appeared on Firehouse 12 and contained eleven original compositions inspired by drawings (reproduced in the booklet) by Sacramento artist and family friend Don Reich, who died in 2010.
In 2012 Melford assembled the new quintet Snowy Egret, comprising bassist Takeishi, guitarist Liberty Ellman, trumpeter Ron Miles, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, to present compositions inspired by Eduardo Galeano’s Memoria del Fuego trilogy at the Jazz Gallery in New York. The following year she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award, the latter underwriting programming at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In November 2013 Melford and Snowy Egret presented the Galeano-inspired material within the multimedia project Language of Dreams, which also incorporated dance, video, and spoken word, at Yerba Buena Center. Enja/Yellowbird released the quintet’s self-titled debut album in March 2015. The next year she appeared on Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom album Otis Was a Polar Bear and recorded the duo album Dialogue with Goldberg. She then joined electric harpist Zeena Parkins and koto player Miya Masaoka for the 2017 trio recording MZM.
That same year she was one of five pianists featured on Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s Handful of Keys under Wynton Marsalis. In 2018 Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret issued The Other Side of Air and participated in the collective live recording 12 from 25, both released by Firehouse 12. The following year the newly formed Tiger Trio of Melford, bassist Joëlle Léandre, and flutist Nicole Mitchell appeared on Glitter Wolf alongside Boom Tic Boom.
Léandre and Melford recruited vocalist/composer Lauren Newton for the freely improvised 2020 Rogue Art date Stormy Whispers. In 2021 trumpeter/vocalist/composer Sarah Wilson’s archival sextet recording Kaleidoscope, originally made in 2012 and featuring Melford with violinist Charles Burnham, bassist Jerome Harris, guitarist John Schott, and drummer Matt Wilson, was released by Brass Tonic Records.
Rogue Art issued For the Love of Fire and Water in 2022. Recorded over two days in July 2021 at Firehouse 12’s studio in New Haven, Connecticut, the all-woman Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet comprised the pianist, guitarist Mary Halvorson, drummer Susie Ibarra, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, and cellist Tomeka Reid.
Albums
Tomorrow Land
2024
MZM
2017
Snowy Egret
2015
Everything Here Is Possible
2014
Heart Mountain
2007
Eleven Ghosts
1998
Singles
