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American pianist Myra Melford studied with Don Pullen — she has the percussive approach of Duke Ellington and Cecil Taylor, not the classical arm-weight touch of Tatum and Bill Evans. Like John Zorn, Ethan Iverson and Dave Douglas, she's a polystylist rather than an artist with a signature style. Her muscular trio features Michael Formanek (bass) and Ches Smith (drums, vibraphone). She wrote all the compositions on Splash as part of her Cy Twombly project — hence such titles as "To Dribble, To Smear, To Splash" and "A Line With A Mind Of Its Own". The opening "Drift" sets the tone with its out of kilter rhythms, while "The Wayward Line" is freer. "Streaming" is about the most colossal piece of furious free jazz imaginable. Smith's stripped down approach is a consistent delight, as is his switching between drums and vibes. One of Melford's finest releases.

—The Wire

Cy Twombly was on the cusp of 30, an American artist beginning his expatriate life in Italy, when he submitted a rare statement of purpose to the journal L’Esperienza Moderna. “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history,” he wrote, articulating an idea that would forever be linked to his work. “It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization.”

This insight provides one useful handle on “A Line with a Mind of Its Own,” a defining track on the mesmerizing debut album by Myra Melford’s SPLASH. Beginning with a theme etched in elastic accord by the members of the group — Melford on piano, Michael Formanek on double bass, Ches Smith on drums and percussion — the piece yields to an open realm of possibility, while keeping the original idea in mind. “I wanted to play with the metaphor of a line in jazz,” Melford explains, “and push and pull against that, with this idea that there are three independent things going on — but they’re all hooked up, more or less, with a sense of forward momentum. I was really thinking about that feeling that I get from Twombly: that his lines might start out a certain way and end up someplace completely different, and still work as a composition.”

Melford has made a conscientious study of Twombly’s work and creative practice since her first immersion 30 years ago, via a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. (Her initial thought at the time: “This feels like how I want to play the piano.”) Over the last several years especially, Melford has mined this fascination with prolific musical results. Her quintet Fire and Water, which has released two excellent albums on the RogueArt label, is named after a series of Twombly paintings in the collection of the Museum Brandhorst. She has also created a set of Twombly-related music for MZM, a trio with Zeena Parkins on harp and Miya Masaoka on koto, and plans to expand on similar concepts in a duo with bassist Joëlle Léandre.

SPLASH represents another interdisciplinary response to this artistic legacy, and opens a new chapter in Melford’s august career as bandleader. “It’s been a long time since I’ve led my own trio,” she says, recalling her working unit of the early 1990s. Trio M, with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson, has been a productive outlet over the last two decades, but also an expressly cooperative affair. “Here I was able to extend some of the ideas I’ve been working with in Fire and Water,” Melford says. “I just felt like these guys would get it.”

Formanek and Smith are alert listeners and adept shape-shifters, as they’ve proven time and time again. Among their points of overlap is Formanek’s Elusion Quartet, which has released two fine albums, Time Like This (Intakt CD 313) and As Things Do (Intakt CD 399).

Together with Melford, unpacking this music, they’re able to evoke the gestural dynamism and surging volatility that gives Twombly’s work so much of its power. Their expressive range of timbres — as Formanek plays arco, and Smith pivots to vibraphone — creates chamberlike options for Melford as a composer and improviser. (It’s one of the things she carries over from Fire and Water, where she has the luxury of scoring her music for piano, guitar and cello.)

Each of the three untitled interludes on this album features one member of the trio as a soloist, with the other two musicians working loosely from a score. In “Interlude I,” Melford explains, “Ches and I are keeping these cells in time, but don’t have to stay together, so that we can go out of phase while still creating a coherent harmonic background for Michael.” A similar model holds true on “Interlude II,” on which Melford is the featured improviser. She describes “Interlude III” this way: “In a lot of Twombly’s paintings at a certain period, he would allow the paint to drip down the canvas, but it would start from a flower, or a boat exploding, or whatever.” A similar elaborative abstraction guides the ensemble actions behind Smith’s drums and vibraphone.

“The Wayward Line” — whose title and intention echo “A Line with a Mind of Its Own” — is one of two compositions that were conceived for SPLASH but first documented on the 2024 Enja album Tomorrowland, by Lux Quartet, which Melford co-leads with drummer Allison Miller. (The other tune is “Drift,” rendered there as “Intricate Drift.”) Another piece, “Dryprint,” was recorded both by Lux Quartet and Melford’s band Snowy Egret under the title “Dried Print on Cardboard.”

The Twombly references elsewhere in this program run from translucent to opaque. “Freewheeler” obviously invokes a 1955 work on canvas, made with house paint, crayon, pencil and pastel. “Chalk” isn’t a reference to materials so much as a specific painting — Untitled, 1970, at the Menil Collection in Houston — that features three coiled lines scrawled across the canvas. In an effort to emulate that calligraphic variance, Melford says, “I came up with pitch sets, and the directions were to create loops using any number of those pitches in a repetitive pattern that could change speeds.”

And “Streaming” alludes indirectly to a series of monumental paintings known as A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things, which feature whorled peony blooms in red wax crayon. Melford designed a through-composed piece with an unruly center — “where we get into that sort of knotty improvisation that’s really just about one complex sound.”

Here and throughout Melford’s engagement with the Twombly oeuvre, the art comes not out of direct translation, but rather a shifting alignment of action and implication. The music doesn’t need to be understood through this lens, but couldn’t have come into focus without it. An assessment by the critic Margaret Sheffield, writing for ArtForum in 1979, could equally apply to the work at hand: “Twombly’s linear style is full of seeming contradictions, incisive yet wandering, primitive yet elegant, sensual yet cerebral.”

— Nate Chinen, January 2025

NATE CHINEN is the author of Playing Changes: Jazz For the New Century. A former critic for the New York Times, he serves as Editorial Director at WRTI, and writes a Substack newsletter called The Gig.