Myra Melford

“(She) is the genuine article, the most gifted pianist/composer to emerge from jazz since Anthony Davis.”  
Francis Davis, Philadelphia Inquirer

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

"Melford is an explosive player, a virtuoso who shocks and soothes, and who can make the piano stand up and do things it doesn't seem to have been designed for."
David Rubien, San Francisco Chronicle

"…hyper-virtuosic pianism…"
Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune

"…a captivating, original voice."
Mike Shanley, JazzTimes

"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

Be Bread

There’s always room in the precincts of improvised music for a new album by the pianist Myra Melford. “The Whole Tree Gone” (Firehouse 12),…is a knockout by any standard, including the bar set by her previous work. Ambitious but approachable, suffused with airy warmth and restless calm, it unpacks a suite of lyrical compositions. Be Bread, Ms. Melford’s coolly intuitive cohort, girds every structure with a pliable integrity, making these pieces feel both supple and sturdy. Ms. Melford leads from within the stir, meting out her pianism in surges or shimmers, according to the music’s needs.
—Nate Chinen, New York Times (01/24/10)

This is chamber music with attitude. Each richly voiced cut is different in construction and mood, drawing on a wide range of world music influences, yet the outcome remains distinctive and unclassifiable. The Whole Tree Gone is yet another outstanding release from Firehouse 12, and a triumph for Melford.
—John Sharpe, AllAboutJazz.com (01/12/10)

Like her mentor, Henry Threadgill, Melford has a talent for effortlessly interweaving seemingly incongruous elements into cohesive multi-layered compositions, yielding a singular aesthetic that blurs the line between the written and improvised. Lyrical, adventurous and conceptually expansive, Melford's compositions are among the most compelling of her generation. Featuring finely tuned arrangements and buoyed by her sympathetic peers, The Whole Tree Gone is a high water mark in Melford's extraordinary oeuvre.
—Troy Collins, Point of Departure (02/2010)

“Myra Melford’s got chops, and she knows what to do with them.”
—Keith Moliné, The Wire (03/2010)

These are pieces chock-full of great writing and great playing, and they never lose their way.
—Jon Garelick, Boston Phoenix (02/02/10)

[She] has set yet another new standard of excellence in the modern progressive world of jazz…another triumph for Melford in that her hot streak of extraordinarily original projects keeps rolling on and upping the ante.
Michael G. Nastos All Music Guide

There is an episodic but very coherent quality to the leader’s compositions that makes them soar and swoop into life as a bird in flight with the measured, at times discrete use of key changes or counterpoint increasing a very rich emotional backdrop.
Kevin Le Gendre 2010-03-30, BBC Review

Philip McNally calls Be Bread, the group on pianist/composer Myra Melford‘s latest release, The Whole Tree Gone (Firehouse 12 Records), “an interesting 6tet made up of master musicians on instruments not frequently combined in Jazz. And in the best Jazz tradition, all of these accomplished players are given the freedom to express themselves clearly within her compositions. Constrained by nothing but beauty and deep expressiveness, this is music with every resource available, and you must hear it.”
The Jul/Aug/Sep 2010 issue of Cadence

"Pianist-composer Myra Melford has long managed to defy easy descriptors, working both inside and out and pushing her music into terrain with musical vocabulary both unique and, in its way, traditional. So it’s no surprise that her new electro-acoustic band Be Bread follows a similar course, creating an enticing fusion of free elements, tonalities and meters borrowed from other cultures, and post-jazz musings. She also offers up new and workable ideas concerning the tricky blend of electric and acoustic instruments…."
Josef Woodard, JazzTimes

“An estimable merger of electro-acoustic improvisation with Eastern song forms, The Image Of Your Body demonstrates how Melford’s luminous writing transcends the boundaries of genre and style.”
Troy Collins, AllAboutJazz.com

Happy Whistlings

"Melford’s “Happy Whistlings” was an exciting suite based on the writings of Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano. With a strong new band comprised of three of New York’s most talented young players – Harris Eisenstadt, Mary Halvorson and Matana Roberts – she worked through a series of pieces that seemed to morph seamlessly every couple minutes."
AllAboutJazz.com

"Stringing together sections of an arresting new suite… (the quartet) played with erudition and drive, in various formations, with parts drifting in and out like visitors to a room.."
Nate Chinen, New York Times


Myra Melford/Marty Ehrlich Duo

"(They) continue to make beautifully thorny music together. Lyrical, eclectic, and adventurous…"
Steve Futterman, The New Yorker

"Saxophonist Ehrlich and pianist Melford are two of the more refined musicians to have come out of the Downtown New York scene of the ’80s and ’90s. In contrast to many of their less-gifted cohorts of that era – for whom irony was a first language and porous chops were often a badge of honor – both made music notable for its intellectual rigor and unselfconscious beauty. Spark! evidences the duo’s further commitment to creating music that adheres to traditional structural and aesthetic concepts, while stretching them to fit their distinctive needs."
Chris Kelsey, JazzTimes


Trio M

"Trio M is a band with a loving commitment to the jazz avant-garde, especially as it was expressed in the 1970s, a sort of frontier era."
Nate Chinen, New York Times

"Through multiple sources (Mississippi to India), structures (blocky to abstract), textures (dense to airy), moods (ruminative to rambunctious), this trio establishes itself as not only one of the most virtuosic playing today, but one of the most consistently engrossing. The threesome examines every motif from seemingly every angle possible…."
Derk Richardson, The Absolute Sound

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

Downbeat
by Yoshi Kato
(download article)