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Myra Melford - Biography
A fearless musical adventurer – in both her composing and playing – Myra Melford has followed a fascinating path since determining to forge a career in music in 1980. Having studied classical piano into her teens, she had no real exposure to jazz until college. Improvisation rekindled her early love of the piano, and she plunged in to develop a signature style.

At the keyboard, Melford recasts the blues and boogie-woogie of her native Chicago, folds in elements of the music of Eastern Europe and India, and blends them with the rangy, percussive avant-garde approach she cultivated in studies with Don Pullen and Henry Threadgill. This personal musical vocabulary is further enriched by a lush lyricism and organized by an architectural sense of composition that she derived from classical training.

As veteran critic Francis Davis wrote: “(She) is the genuine article, the most gifted pianist/composer to emerge from jazz since Anthony Davis."

With more than 30 recordings in her catalog – including 19 as leader or co-leader – Melford currently divides her time between teaching, composition and performance.

Since 2004, she has been on the music faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where she has developed and taught a series of courses in contemporary jazz and improvisation-based music for performers and composers. She also lectures on innovations in jazz since the 1960s and other topics in contemporary improvised music.

Her ongoing performance projects include:

Be Bread – Featuring Brandon Ross, guitar and banjo, Cuong Vu, trumpet, Ben Goldberg, clarinet, Stomu Takeishi, bass, and Matt Wilson, drums, Be Bread is an electro-acoustic band that is a vehicle for Melford’s harmonium in addition to piano, reflecting her extended studies of Indian music. Be Bread released The Image Of Your Body on Cryptogramophone in 2006, and will release a second recording, The Whole Tree Gone, on Firehouse 12 Records in October 2009.

Trio M – A leaderless project with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson, Trio M explores compositions by each band member while maintaining a commitment to spontaneous improvisation. Unbound by notions of genre, form or conventional technique, Trio M erases the distinctions between frontline and accompanist, requiring each player to shape the music’s flow as it unfolds. Trio M’s debut recording, Big Picture, was released in 2007 on Cryptogramophone.

Myra Melford/Marty Ehrlich – A collaborative duo that released its first recording, Yet Can Spring (Arabesque), in 2001, and a followup, Spark! (Palmetto), in 2007, Melford and Ehrlich share a love of improvisation within an intimate setting in which ideas and feelings are exchanged freely and musical boundaries ignored.

Happy Whistlings– Melford’s newest project, which made its debut in October 2008, is a work inspired by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s Memory Of Fire: Genesis that combines notated and improvised sections in a collage format. While the debut performance featured alto saxophonist Matana Roberts, guitarist Mary Halvorson and percussionist Harris Eisenstadt, the work is flexible enough to be interpreted by different musicians.

In addition to these projects, Melford continues to pursue other occasional projects, including: collaborative work with dancer/choreographer Dawn Saito, architect Michael Haberz and Butoh master Oguri; duets with pianist Satoko Fujii; with Out To Lunch (with Russ Johnson, Roy Nathanson, Brad Jones, and George Schuller) which performs the music of Eric Dolphy and related repertoire; AMR (Afterlife Music Radio) with Ben Goldberg, Shahzad Ismaily and Mathias Delplanque; and as a member of the quintet Big Air (with trumpeter Chris Batchelor, saxophonist Steve Buckley, tuba player Oren Marshall and drummer Jim Black). She also makes guest appearances under the leadership of other artists such as multi-reedist Roscoe Mitchell; flutist Nicole Mitchell; and drummers Allison Miller and Alex Cline.

The breadth of her work is part of a continuum of exploration that Melford has followed since beginning her formal musical studies with Art Lande, Gary Peacock and others at the Cornish Institute in 1980. After moving to the East Coast in 1982, she spent the remainder of that decade studying with musical innovators like Ran Blake and Jaki Byard, working with artists like Leroy Jenkins, Joseph Jarman, Henry Threadgill and Butch Morris, and developing the distinctive voice heard on Jump, Now & Now and Alive In The House Of Saints – the three records made with the acclaimed Myra Melford Trio with Lindsey Horner on bass and Reggie Nicholson on drums.

In the late ’90s, her projects included the stellar The Same River, Twice, an acoustic improvising chamber ensemble with Dave Douglas on trumpet, Chris Speed on reeds, cellist Erik Friedlander and drummer Michael Sarin, Crush, an electro-acoustic trio/quartet that featured electric bassist Stomu Takeishi, drummer Kenny Wolleson and trumpeter Cuong Vu, and Equal Interest, a collective trio with Joseph Jarman and Leroy Jenkins.

Melford’s strong inner drive for innovation and her ongoing search for new sounds and new directions in her music led her to the harmonium, a small hand-pump organ traditionally used in Indian and Pakistani classical and devotional music. In 2000, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study North Indian music on the instrument with Sohanlal Sharma in Calcutta, where she was in residency from September 2000 through May 2001.

After her return from India, she turned her attention in the fall of 2001 to The Tent, a quintet of players drawn from Crush and The Same River, Twice. The band toured both as a quintet in Europe and as a drummerless trio of piano/harmonium, bass, trumpet and electronics.

As she looks toward the next decade, Melford is continuing to explore Butoh and multi-media collaborations, amplifying and processing the sounds from inside the piano, along with two new projects: Portable World, a 12-piece improvising ensemble; and Life Carries Me This Way (acoustic, amplified and processed piano, and harmonium) with support from the Hellman Family Fund and UC Berkeley.