Press on Myra Melford

"...a strikingly facile technique with a passionate, imaginative improvisational ability."   (Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times)

"In the next millennium, jazz will be based on personal vocabularies like Melford's, drawing on, but also radically adapting, blues, swing, and a breadth of other 'traditional' qualities. It will still be 'jazz' if its players interact as they do here, closely and for singular effect, with expressive intent behind their virtuosic performances." (Howard Mandel, Jazziz)

"Melford can be rhythmic, romantic, stoic, wry, and lusty but most of all daring - all in one tune.   More importantly she's reconnected music to motion, leaving today's straightlaced young men in suits, who have dominated recent jazz in her wake." (Stuart Nicholson, The London Observer)

"Myra Melford is a virtuoso pianist who comprehends the breadth and depth of the jazz tradition." (David Rubien, SonicNet)

"Myra Melford is the genuine article, the most gifted pianist-composer to emerge from jazz since Anthony Davis." (Francis Davis, Stereo Review)

"Myra Melford's marriage of electronics, post-Cecil Taylor barrel-house piano, and East Indian devotional music made for an entertaining hour of experimental sounds Sunday night at On the Boards... Melford, a spirited performer whose limbs flew out in four directions during some of her more liberated passages, spent some time on the floor singing and playing the harmonium...One of her most intriguing pieces was "My Face of Us All," a piece she composed for butoh dance. It shared a structural similarity with John Coltrane's "Meditations," but Melford took the listener on a journey through communal, rather than individual, suffering and deliverance."

(Music Review Earshot Jazz Festival, by Bill White, Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Melford's voice is firmly individual, with flashes of everyone from Red Garland to Cecil Taylor, Bud Powell and Igor Stravinsky, ... but she has taken all these disparate influences ... and fashioned her own distinctively brisk, commonsensical, and eloquently persuasive approach." (AllAboutJazz.com)

Press on Heart Mountain:

"Happy accidents of circumstance are the soul of improvised music, a point vividly proved by this new duo session from two well-traveled New Yorkers ... The disc's 18 short, gemlike free improvisations include mysterious textural scrabbles and aggressive jousts, microtonal meditations and limpid, drone-based reveries. The most impressive quality of the set is the sheer selflessness with which two strong players merge into a common spirit. A traditional ballad, "Kailash," closes the set on a note of gentle sublimity. (5/6 stars Steve Smith, Time Out New York)

Press on Spark!:

"With new CDs, several leading jazz vocalists and instrumentalists focus on points of origin and comfort zones. For singers Dee Dee Bridgewater and Luciana Souza, that means exploring personal roots in fresh musical contexts. For pianists Matthew Shipp and Myra Melford, and for reedman Marty Ehrlich, it involves returning to favored formats."

"Two versions of Marty Ehrlich's "Hymn" frame this duet recording with pianist Myra Melford. The first begins with clipped tones from Mr. Ehrlich's alto saxophone, answered by Ms. Melford's staccato stabs; Mr. Ehrlich's tone grows fuller, his notes slowly forming phrases, with Ms. Melford sliding gently into two-hand gospel form. On the second, Ms. Melford plays the tune outright for nearly two minutes until Mr. Ehrlich find a sidelong entry note; from there, the two begin something of a deconstruction. These musicians, each insider heroes of jazz for well more than a decade, can find many avenues in and out of a given musical situation."

"This disc is dominated by savvy original pieces, especially two powerful linked tunes by Ms. Melford, and mines the work of other undervalued composers. Robin Holcomb's "Up Do" proves a showcase for Mr. Ehrlich's technical mastery and expressive range. Andrew Hill's "Images of Time" offers an example of the duo's ability to express balladry and bebop without convention. Throughout, glorious details abound: A note grows gnarly, then flute-like near the end of "Images of Time"; drone-like piano overtones color the start of "Night," helping to frame Mr. Ehrlich's clarinet melody. Mr. Ehrlich and Ms. Melford both play in and lead numerous groups of varying instrumentation; this pairing, documented previously on 2000's wonderful "Yet Can Spring" (Arabesque), is an important home base." (Larry Blumenfeld, The Wall Street Journal, Oct 6th, 2007; Page W7)

Press on Big Picture and Spark!:

One glance at their respective song titles hints at the diverse approaches of Trio M's members, who on the surface seem to have little in common beyond that first initial. There's Myra Melford's mysterious, evocative "Secrets To Tell You," Mark Dresser's direct, no-nonsense "For Bradford" and Matt Wilson's tongue-family-in-cheek "Naive Art." But as Melford's title tune suggests, a larger context exists in which all of these elements engage one another.

Her writing for the trio, unlike the hypnotic atmospherics of 2006's The Image Of Your Body, is suggestive rather than enveloping. It seems like the scaffolding has been removed, allowing the essence to show through the structure. "brainFire And bugLight" is the perfect opener. With Melford's demonstrative theme sounding a flourish to announce a series of divergent episodes, like a cerebral variety show.

Twice the trio takes an unexpected bluesy turn, in Dresser's smoky, late-night groove "Modern Pine" or Wilson's drunken burlesque "Naive Art." the ever-adaptable Wilson wryly draws the humor out of his compatriots' playing, particularly on the throbbing, percussive "Free Konomics," while providing illuminating color to the tunes, most beautifully on the intimate "Secrets To Tell You." the album may not all hang together as a cohesive whole, but it provides a variety of scintillating interactions.

Melford finds an even more compelling partner in a fourth "M," altoist Marty Ehrlich. Having played frequently in duo settings over the last decade, the pair achieves a chemistry that, while not as explosive as the title implies, welds their voices with a rolling inner fire. The album opens and closes with two different arrangements of Ehrlich's "Hymn" — the opener more of a communion, with Melford singing the gospel while Ehrlich howls like a Pentecostal preacher; the closer more of a silent prayer. The gospel influence springs up again, mixed with a New Orleans flavor, in the saxophonist's "For Leroy," dedicated to the late Leroy Jenkins, with whom both worked.

Despite the sinuous swing of Ehrlich's "Blue Delhi" and their blustery take on Robin Holcomb's "Up Do," most of the album maintains a somber tone, embodied by a pair of Melford tunes inspired by the poet Muhammad al-Jawahiri, who, Melford points out in her liner notes, "spoke so eloquently on a previous war in Iraq." That in mind, Melford offers two distinct approaches to the current conflict: the downcast, trancelike "A Generation Comes And Another Goes" and the insistent but hopeful lyricism of "I See A Horizon." (Shaun Brady, Downbeat)

All about Jazz
by Kurt Gottschalk
January 13, 2005
(download article)