Myra Melford’s solitary pursuit on Life Carries Me This Way is at once meditative and peaceful. It might easily be suggested by the music that the all-pervasive metaphor on the record is that of a river or an ocean; the vehicle that carries the musician on her journey the direction of the future, for that is where she appears to be going. The music certainly says so. And it does so in an imaginative, an exquisitely far-reaching and a most beautiful manner. The charts are composed with an epic sensibility and they are extremely elastic and creative. Mostly this is because Ms. Melford is made almost entirely of music. Her creative genius knows no bounds. She seems to sit at the piano and simply put her hands on the keyboard. Her hands and fingers seem hot-wired to inner synapses of her brain and that part of her is, in turn, hot-wired to her very soul. Thus there is no telling where her inspiration comes from; simply that it does and that this is a wondrous thing when it is absorbed into her music and that music is in full flow.
Although there appears to be a somewhat random flow of the music from the chart “Park Mechanics” on the music might actually be more interconnected than might be suggested by the titles of the rest of the charts. Sometimes it feels that the journey is an inter-galactic one, what with a “Red Beach” and a “Red Land”. But the music might not necessarily be suggesting that. In fact, each chart has a visual touchstone. These are the paintings by the artist Don Reich. However, their beauty and their impressionistic interpretations are in the proverbial eye of the beholder; in this instance that would be the pianist who is left to her musical devices to glean what she may from each of the canvases. What she sees certainly melds with the paintings, but each also is a moving picture—a moveable feast for the eyes and the ears.
Ms. Melford is the kind of pianist who puts great stock on imagery as well as that which is so suggestive that it can only be that the title of the chart is only a starting point. From there on Ms. Melford creates the music with astounding poetics and mastery of pure tone. So strong is the urge to arrive at pure tone that Ms. Melford might repeat notes; even phrases, until she finds the tone that she is looking for. “Piano Music” and “Japanese Music” are two such pieces of music where she arrives at that magical essence that she appears to have been searching for from the start of the pieces. In “Sagrada Familia” she is at her most adventurous. However, by and large Ms. Melford’s playing is contemplative and soul-searching rather than narrative.
One of the most rewarding aspects of the album is the connectivity of its songs. This facilitates the utter enjoyment of the music as an extended suite; one which can be listened to over and over again. Whole new meanings emerge with each new listening of the recording. This gives the music a timeless quality and makes Ms. Melford an altogether alluring pianist.
Track List: Park Mechanics; Red Beach; Red Land (For Don Reich); Piano Music; Japanese Music; Attic; Curtain; Moonless Night; Barcelona; Sagrada Familia; Still Life.
Personnel:: Myra Melford: piano.
Label: Firehouse 12 Records | Release date: October 2013
Website: firehouse12records.com | Buy music on: amazon
About Myra Melford
For pianist, composer and Guggenheim fellow Myra Melford, the personal and the poetic have always been intimately and deeply connected. Raised outside Chicago in a house designed by the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Melford grew up literally surrounded by art. Where most of us find the beauty in our childhood homes through the memories and associations we make within its four walls, Melford saw early on that aesthetic expression could both be built from and be a structure for profound emotions.[showhide type=”post” more_text=”More…” less_text=”Less…”]
Over the course of a career spanning more than two decades, Melford has taken that lesson to heart, crafting a singular sound world that harmonizes the intricate and the expressive, the meditative and the assertive, the cerebral and the playful. Drawing inspiration from a vast spectrum of cultural and spiritual traditions and artistic disciplines, she has found a “spark of recognition” in sources as diverse as the writings of the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi and the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano; the wisdom of Zen Buddhism and the Huichol Indians of Mexico; and the music of mentors like Jaki Byard, Don Pullen, and Henry Threadgill.
The latest incarnation of this ever-evolving cross-disciplinary dialogue is Language of Dreams, which will premiere in November 2013 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The multi-media work is inspired by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, a history of the Americas told through indigenous myths and the accounts of European colonizers. The piece will combine music for Melford’s quintet Snowy Egret with narration by a multi-lingual actor, dance by Los Angeles-based choreographer Oguri, and video by Bay Area filmmaker David Szlasa.
While Language of Dreams is her most ambitious project to date, it is not the first time that Melford has constructed a piece from such a wealth of disciplines. In 2006, the Walker Arts Center premiered Knock on the Sky, a piece inspired by Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” and Kobo Abe’s novel Woman in the Dunes, in which Melford collaborated with New York City–based choreographer/dancer Dawn Akemi Saito and Austrian architect Michael Haberz.
Snowy Egret, Melford’s latest working group, made its debut in 2012. The quintet comprises some of creative music’s most inventive and individual voices: trumpeter Ron Miles, guitarist Liberty Ellman, bassist Stomu Takeishi, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Melford’s spacious, contemplative, exploratory compositions have long attracted and almost demanded such forward-thinking artists. Her past ensembles have included Be Bread, with Cuong Vu, Ben Goldberg, Brandon Ross, Stomu Takeishi, and Matt Wilson; The Same River, Twice, with Dave Douglas, Chris Speed, Erik Friedlander, and Michael Sarin; Crush, with Takeishi, Vu, and Kenny Wolleson.
Melford also currently is one-third of the collective Trio M with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson; their most recent CD, The Guest House, was one of 2012’s most acclaimed releases. She also performs in the duo ::Dialogue:: with clarinetist Ben Goldberg and will release her first solo album in October 2013, a collection of work inspired by the paintings of the late visual artist Don Reich.
Melford’s musical evolution has long run in parallel with her spiritual search, a personal journey that has led her to Aikido, Siddha Yoga, and the wisdom traditions of the Huichol people of Mexico’s central highlands. Sonically, that quest is expressed via her wide-ranging palette, which expands from the piano to the harmonium and electronic keyboards or to amplifying barely audible sounds in the piano’s interior. Her playing can build from the blissful and lyrical to the intense and angular, with accents from Indian, African, Cuban and Middle Eastern musics or the cerebral abstraction of European and American jazz and classical experimentalism.
While Melford’s music continually reaches toward a state of transcendence, it still remains deeply rooted in the blues traditions she heard growing up in the Chicago area. In 1978, she first encountered violinist Leroy Jenkins, her introduction to the AACM, whose boundary-free, adventurous approach to jazz remains an influence. She would go on to study with Jenkins, together forming the collective trio Equal Interest with multi¬reedist Joseph Jarman in 1997.
Melford moved to the east coast in 1982 and began performing in New York City’s thriving Downtown scene, making her recorded debut as a leader in 1990; she has since released more than twenty albums as a leader or co-leader and appeared on more than 40 releases as a side-person. In 2000, she spent a year in North India on a Fulbright scholarship, immersing herself in the region’s classical, devotional, and folk music. Melford relocated to the west coast in 2004, joining the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as an associate professor of contemporary improvised music. There, she engages students in the theory and practice of improvisation, employing diverse creative strategies.
Her work has earned Melford some of the highest accolades in her field. In 2013 alone, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Performing Artist Award and a Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts for her efforts to re-imagine the jazz program at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She was also the winner of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music. She has been honored numerous times in DownBeat’s Critics Poll since 1991 and was nominated by the Jazz Journalists Association as Pianist of the Year in 2008 and 2009 and Composer of the Year in 2004.
(Source: myramelford.com)[/showhide]