Myra Melford in the Press

New York Times: Myra Melford Builds Anew With an All-Star, All-Woman Quintet

The pianist’s latest group fills its recent album “For the Love of Fire and Water” with idiosyncratic life.

Quotes

“Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret is Jazz’s most dynamic quintet. Impeccably accomplished and deeply satisfying, The Other Side of Air... is important not because it’s radically new but because it’s powerful and compelling.”

— The Nation

““Pianist-composer Myra Melford has often placed her music at the fulcrum between gleaming beauty and turbulent unrest. This is music with an endless capacity for elasticity and surprise, along with an affirming spirit of coherence.””

— NPR Best 50 Albums of 2018

““In the nearly three decades she’s spent in the public eye, the accomplished piano improviser, composer, and bandleader has worked her way through a wide span of ensembles and projects, putting her poetic stamp on each while also responding vigorously and sympathetically to each setting, situation, and fellow musician.””

— The National Sawdust Log

““Melford... can trace elegant filigrees of shimmering brilliance and delicate fragility, each note so exactingly placed that a single breath might threaten to shatter its evanescent beauty.””

— Jazziz

““Berkeley pianist/composer Myra Melford writes music that bristles with possibilities, suggesting blues cries and celestial chimes, ecstatic prayers and whispered confidences. Surrounding herself with some of jazz’s most exquisite instrumental voices... she lets Snowy Egret swoop and soar on the group’s second album, using the compositions as maps for impromptu journeys into unpredictably shapeshifting realms.””

— Best Albums of 2018, The San Jose Mercury News

““Beautiful music crafted with exquisite taste and expertise.””

— Bird is the Worm , Best of 2018

““[G]ripping intensity and enigmatic interaction. ””

— The Sydney Herald

“The Other Side of Air, the latest album by this chamberesque ensemble, lands high on my year-end list — and not just because Melford, a pianist and composer, devised such a vivid set of ideas on the page. It's also due to the elegant combustion of this band, which was even clearer in person, with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Stomu Takeishi working the engine room.”

— The Best of 2018, NPR Music Staff Picks

“A true masterpiece.”

— Eyal Hareuveni, Salt Peanuts

Myra Melford: Both Sides Now - JazzTimes

For more than 30 years, Myra Melford has toiled in the avant-garde fields. Today the mainstream is beginning to...

February 2019 Issue - Jazziz (Read PDF 23Mb)

In this issue, we delve into the raw yet refined art of pianist Myra Melford, chat with Larry Grenadier about hi...