Other Galaxies : an interview with DoYeon Kim

DeYeon Kim. Photo by Hyun Park

By David Cristol

Following in the footsteps of traditionnally-trained, pioneering female Asian artists such as Japan's Michiyo Yagi and Miya Masaoka (specialists of the cumbersome koto) and China's Min Xiao-Fen (pipa, known for her duets with Derek Bailey) playing hard-to-tune instruments in free music contexts, DoYeon Kim has been a consistent presence on the scene in the past few years. A rigorously-educated virtuoso of the gayageum, a silk-string zither and variant of the Chinese guzheng, the Seoul-born musician moved to the USA to study and perform under the guidance of Joe Morris at the New England Conservatory. The acclaimed bassist/guitarist and educator helped open her ears and heart to the great wide world of contemporary composition and improvisation, from Anton Webern to Anthony Braxton, and encouraged her to find her voice. Her appetite for encounters, stunning-sounding instrument, intense vocals and theatrical flair took the scene by storm. She's played and recorded with a wide array of key artists : Cooper-Moore, Peter Evans, Satoshi Takeishi, Cyro Baptista, Brandon Lopez, Lesley Mok, Sonia Belaya, Tomas Fujiwara, Matt Mitchell, Michael Bisio as well as Europeans Elias Stemeseder & Christian Lillinger (on Intakt's "Umbra" and Plaist's "Antumbra"), these searching minds eager to marry their sounds to the distinctive ones of that most singular of apparatuses, performed by such a powerhouse individual. 2026 saw Kim's visibility increase, with performances at major festivals and the release of her debut album as a bandleader, on jazz label Tao Forms. On stage, seated cross-legged in traditional robes, she makes audiences feel like taking part in a ritual. Amidst a hefty touring schedule, the artist tells the Free Jazz Collective about her journey so far. 

Photo by Hillel Kim

Could you start by telling our readers about your instrument and training?

The gayageum has been used in both court music and folk traditions. The 12-string court gayageum and the 12-string sanjo gayageum are different in their construction, playing techniques, and musical traditions, even though both have 12 strings. There are also modernized versions such as the 18-string and 25-string gayageum. I attended the National Korean Music High School, a specialized high school for Korean traditional music, and later majored in Korean traditional music at Seoul National University, so I was trained to play and understand these different forms of the instrument.

Does your playing in free music situations maintain a link to the traditional ways of playing the gayageum? Do you see it as an expansion or a departure from those traditions?

It could be seen as an expansion of tradition, or perhaps even as exploring new territory, but I don’t really think about it that way when I play. What I focus on is what I want to say, what it means to me, and how I can communicate it as clearly and honestly as possible. For me, it’s simply a way of expressing myself through the instrument. Whether that is an expansion of tradition or a departure from it, I’m not sure. Either way to perceive it, from a listener's point of view, is valid.

Are you composing and reading from Western sheet music writing conventions, when playing the gayageum?

Yes. I read Western staff notation, usually using the grand staff. I also compose using Western notation when I write for the gayageum, although I sometimes adapt the notation to capture certain nuances of the instrument and my playing technique. I started out learning the piano and reading from scores, and am still studying scores by XXth century composers, from Bartók to Morton Feldman. 

At Joe's Pub, NY, 8 July 2025. Photo by Melanie Mor

Are your vocals connected to the Korean tradition, or does it come from another influence?

Honestly, I’m not sure. I never had any formal vocal training, so I just sing according to what I hear, feel, and imagine. I don’t consciously think about whether it comes from Korean tradition or free jazz. It’s probably a combination of all the music I’ve heard and experienced, and ultimately I just try to follow my own instincts. While in middle and high school, whenever we finished a midterm or final exam, my friends and I would go to karaoke to release all the stress. I would just scream my heart out - maybe that was part of my vocal training after all.

This year you played at New York's Winter Jazz Fest, Vision Festival, Jazztopad New York edition, Knoxville's Big Ears, and released your first album as a bandleader. How do you handle all the activity?

I feel grateful for all of it. And I don’t think any of this could have happened through my efforts alone. Whit Dickey and Steven Joerg at Tao Forms have believed in my music and supported me a lot, which made it possible for my first album as a bandleader to come into the world. And with Tyshawn Sorey, Mat Maneri and Henry Fraser, who play on the album, my ideas and what I wanted to express came through fully and honestly. My manager Matt Merewitz has also been working hard behind the scenes to promote my music, along with many other people who have helped me along the way. All of the opportunities have come from people who have believed in my music and invited me into their spaces. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has trusted me enough to invite me to be part of festivals and communities. And thanks to all of this, I’ve been able to meet so many wonderful new people - I’m grateful for these unexpected and precious connections that music continues to bring into my life.

My favorite track on your album is the epic Linear System. You seem connected with nature and the elements, from the album cover to song titles. Where does your inspiration come from?

That means a lot to me. Human beings are part of nature, and that idea is deeply connected to the way I think about the gayageum. If you look inside the sound box of the gayageum, the backboard is traditionally associated with the sky, the human, and the earth. Isn’t that beautiful? The sound feels like it connects the sky to the earth, with the human being the bridge between them. I think of music in a similar way—as something that is part of this larger natural world and connects us to something beyond ourselves. That’s why, as you noticed, the album cover also has this image of the sky, the human, and the earth. The river in the photograph is actually the sound box of the gayageum, and the snow reflects both the sky and the earth. Everything is connected. After the pandemic, I started thinking a lot about making music that wasn’t only about myself, but that could connect me to the world around and other people. As I followed that thought, I began to feel that music and the natural world were somehow one and the same. 

Isn't there a tone discrepancy between the gayageum and Western instruments - and did you call on Mat Maneri because he's an expert of micro-tonalities and would bridge the two worlds?

The first time I heard Mat play, his sound felt incredibly familiar. The way he plays around the pitch, bends notes, and moves between different shades of sound felt natural to my ears. Beyond that, his energy, charisma and expressiveness always move me deeply. So I didn’t really choose him simply because I thought he could bridge the tuning systems of the gayageum and Western instruments. I wasn’t thinking about the relationship between the two tuning systems that much, but about Mat as a person and as a musician. His music is so compelling to me, and I simply wanted to make music with him. I felt the same way about Tyshawn and Henry. I wasn’t choosing them because they could solve a particular musical problem. I was drawn to who they are as musicians and people, and wanted to hear what would happen when we played together. 

Photo by Alex Joseph

Rhythm is often neglected or discarded by free improvisers, but is definitely present in your work. What's your relationship to rhythm and music genres that have a lot of rhythm?

Because I pluck and strike the strings with my right hand, there’s naturally a very percussive quality to the sound of the gayageum. The physical act of playing the instrument itself creates rhythm, so rhythm has always been very deeply connected to the way I play. For me, rhythm actually comes before melody. Rhythm is one of the most fundamental and instinctive forms of human communication. Before we even have words or melodies, there is something very powerful about a pulse, a repetition, a gesture, or a physical movement that allows us to connect with one another. So I see rhythm almost as a natural human language. Rhythm feels fundamental to me, whether I’m improvising freely or working with repetition, grooves, or other rhythmically driven music.

Last summer you played in New York and toured Europe in a trio with Kris Davis and Tom Rainey. How did that go?

Touring with Kris and Tom was an incredible experience. I learned a lot from them, felt very alive on stage and felt a sense of infinite possibility in the music. Kris created a supportive environment that allowed me to focus on the gayageum and explore what I could do with it. As both a bandleader and a mentor, she gave me a lot of generous advice and encouragement. The tour became something I will never forget. European audiences were warm and open, people seemed to genuinely enjoy the music and were very curious about it. The meaningful conversations we had made me feel that we were connecting as human beings, through the music, reminding me why I make music in the first place.

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"I first heard DoYeon Kim when we played an informal trio session with Tom Rainey at my practice studio. We clicked immediately musically, and I was struck by her energy, joyfulness as a player, and the command and expressive range she has on her instrument. I looked for an opportunity to include her in a project and invited her to guest on my record "Spirit, Fire Fact". At first, I had envisioned her as part of the centerpiece, Splitting Silent Stars, which I hold dear because it was composed in memory of my father, who passed away in 2024. The piece is very much about the knottiness of grief and letting go, and it is speech-like in parts. DoYeon Kim’s playing seemed to have just the right combination of wild abandon, spirituality, and gentleness that I needed. Once we started working on it, I enjoyed it so much that she became part of the rest of the album as well—often doubling the guitar to create a kind of augmented string instrument. I have since played DoYeon’s music as well, which is visceral, guttural, and elegant at the same time. I look forward to more opportunities to work together." (Ingrid Laubrock)

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DoYeon Kim, Chris Tordini, Anna Webber, Ryan Easter, Ingrid Laubrock, 
Yuma Uesaka, Ches Smith, Mary Halvorson, David Virelles. 
Photo by TF Huff (Intakt Records)

How did you meet with Ingrid Laubrock and first played together?

During the pandemic, I discovered Ingrid’s music through her album Blood Moon (Intakt, 2020) with Kris Davis, and became interested in her playing. After I moved to New York, I started going to her performances, and eventually had an opportunity to play with Tom Rainey, which led to meeting Ingrid.

How did Ingrid adapt to the specifics of the instrument, when composing?

I think she approached the piece in a special way. Rather than focusing primarily on the specific characteristics or limitations of the gayageum, she trusted me as a musician and wrote for me as DoYeon. In a way, because she didn’t try to fit the composition into a specific “gayageum framework”, I had more freedom to express myself and bring my own musical language to the piece. It felt less like adapting the instrument to a composition and more like creating a space where the instrument, the music, and I could meet naturally.

Can you tell us about the upcoming "Spirit, Fire, Fact" album, and how do you feel about playing those compositions live?

I feel honored to be part of that new album by Ingrid, it still feels a little surreal to me. The album carries the care, passion, and love of every musician who was involved in it. Tom Rainey, Brandon Seabrook, and Shawn Lovato are all musicians I admire and love listening to, and it was a great pleasure to make music together. Everyone was deeply committed from their own position, and ideas could emerge freely among us. Ingrid, as a leader, was open and flexible in receiving those ideas, while at the same time being extremely clear about her own foundation and what she wanted the music to be. Watching her lead with such flexibility and clarity taught me a great deal. I also love that the energy of the music changes when we play it live. Something new happens between the musicians and the audience in the moment. I’m thrilled to bring this music to Switzerland [at the unerhört festival in Zürich] and experience what happens with it live. Ingrid’s playing is extraordinary, of course, but I also like that her character and humanity are enclosed in her compositions. I had listened to her music and looked at her scores before, but playing her music and experiencing it from inside the ensemble allowed me to feel those qualities on a deeper and more personal level.

At the same festival you're scheduled to do a workshop.

It will be my first time visiting Zürich and meeting the students at the University of the Arts. I hope I can share something from my own experience with them, and learn new perspectives from them as well. I will also be performing some of the pieces from "Wellspring" with them.

What are your next projects and collaborations?

I’m thinking about four projects right now. The first is an expansion of the DoYeon Kim Quintet. I’ve already written music around the Five Stages of Grief, and I’d like to develop that material into a much larger project, with choir, tuba, trombone, trumpet, violin, cello, bass, percussion, gayageum, and voice. I’d also love to make a video alongside the recording, so that the project can exist not only as an album but also as a visual work.

The second project is quite different. I'm planning on creating music using electronic sounds with gayageum, drums, and voice. I think you’ll hear a completely different energy and another side of my musical world.

The third is a string trio I’ve started with Gabby Fluke-Mogul and Lester Saint-Louis. This group is focused on improvisation.

The fourth is a collaboration with a string quartet called The Rhythm Method. They commissioned me to write a new piece for gayageum and string quartet, which we’ll perform next year. What makes this project exciting is that it won’t just be about playing music — the performance will also include acting, singing, and movement. I’m looking forward to exploring how all of these elements can come together on stage.

What musicians are you listening to at the moment and can you name one you'd like to play with?

I’m currently listening to Thomas Strønen’s music, whom I recently had a chance to play with. I’m also a big fan of Barry Guy, whom I had the chance to play with in Barcelona in 2019, and I remember being completely captivated when he played his solo. He played so beautifully that, for a moment, I almost forgot that I was also performing. Given the opportunity, I would love to play with him again.

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Latest releases :

DoYeon Kim - Wellspring (Tao Forms, 2026) 

Anna Webber - It's easier to imagine the end of the world... (Intakt, 2026)

Ingrid Laubrock's Grammy Season - Spirit, Fire, Fact (Intakt, 2026) (December)

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Live :

Mark Dresser Gradience Quartet

Oct 23 : Angel City Jazz Festival, Los Angeles (US) 

Oct 28 : University of California, San Diego (US)

Nick Dunston's Spider Season

Nov 10 : Stony Brook Festival, New York (US)

DoYeon Kim solo

Nov 14 : Rockit Festival, Groningen (NL)

DoYeon Kim & Sun-mi Hong

Nov 16 : Pocket Concerts, Utrecht (NL)

DoYeon Kim Quartet

Nov 21: Jazztopad Festival, Wroclaw (PL)

DoYeon Kim & Workshopband ZHdK

Nov 26 : unerhört! Jazzfestival, Zürich (CH)

Ingrid Laubrock's Grammy Season

Nov 27 : unerhört! Jazzfestival, Zürich (CH)

Read More

I Use the Music to Use Me: The Visual Improvisation of M P Landis

By Dan Sorrells

Left: P+D 02 01 02 (2024); Right: M P Landis & Michael Sarin, May 18, 2024 at L/A Arts, Lewiston, ME

Adjacent to a drumkit, two large boards hang above a stage clad in drop cloth. A third lies flat on a small table surrounded by paint bottles and upturned pot lids that will become ad hoc palettes. Each board is covered in paper and divided into grids by white painter's tape: the small board into nine squares and the larger two into twelve. It's the end of June 2026 at the Apohadion Theater in Portland, Maine. Just ahead, the fifth meeting of painter M P Landis and drummer Michael Sarin in a collaboration they've come to call, concisely, Paint & Drums.

Fans of creative music may recognize Landis's paintings from the album covers of artists like Flow Trio , [ism] , and Sabir Mateen . His work is part of an estuary somewhere far downstream of the Abstract Expressionists: gestures that range from child-like markings to purposive strokes that convey the whole body's movement; textured clots and layers of color; obscure figures and shapes that could be letters or symbols but offer a mute refusal. But Landis will say he feels less affinity with other visual artists than he does with musicians.

Indeed, what stands out about Landis's work is how deeply committed his methods are to the same reactive, exuberant ethos that drives the free improvisers. Music—especially jazz and improvised music—has long been part of Landis's work, both in the studio and in a live setting. In a 2006 conversation with the writer Fred Schmalz, he described arriving at a point in the 1990s where he began using music "as a jumping off point to get beyond my ideas and find a way of working that transcends technique and becomes more emotional and dance-like."

Joe Maneri/Mat Maneri/Randy Peterson #1 - #4 (2001). Created live at the 2001 Vision Festival, NYC

His career in the decades since validates Mike Heffley's musing in Northern Sun, Southern Moon. "If one were a painter," Heffley wrote, free improvisation "is music that might be the most fruitful aid and stimulus to the process. It encourages one to get physical with one's tools and media, to delight in them as ends in themselves, whatever means they might develop into therefrom." Talking with Schmalz, Landis describes exactly that:

"I feel almost like the music uses me or, I guess I use the music to use me. There is a certain surrendering to what I am listening to which helps me jump right into physically moving; making marks, grabbing paint, etc. It overcomes the endless problems of decision and throws me right into the act of creating."

Some of Landis's paintings bear titles that pay tribute to the music he was listening to as he painted. But music's influence is more deeply seated.

Top: David S. Ware: Onecept triptych (mp13.01, mp13.02, mp13.03) (2013)
Bottom Left: PIANO SKY (JOE MANERI) (2003); Bottom Right: lp13.06 (derek bailey) (2013)

Landis moved from painting on street corners and in the audience at concerts to frequently painting on stage in collaboration with musicians, dancers, and other visual artists in the vibrant Brooklyn arts scene. He remains a prolific collaborator. The live performances of that period culminated in a tour with the Jump Arts American Road Project in 2002, Landis taking the stage with poet Steve Dalachinsky, dancers, and musicians like Tom Abbs, Daniel Carter, Steve Swell, and Okkyung Lee. Cisco Bradley's recounting of the tour in The Williamsburg Avant-Garde touches on Landis's intense engagement with his materials and an approach to live painting that's still present in Paint & Drums:

"[Landis] would paint through the entire evening of performances, with two wooden panels covered in paper on which to work. One panel was covered by one large piece of paper, while the other panel had multiple smaller pieces stapled to it. Landis described his process: 'I painted the whole board, not thinking about where one piece of paper stopped or started. I liked how it gave the work a sense of being midstream, like capturing a sound in time.' He added, 'The intensity of the music made the painting intense. It felt like I was doing months' worth of painting within a few hours.'"

Left: american road project 1L (2002); Right: j.a.a.r.p. [#12.] (2002)

It was during his time in NYC that Landis met Sarin, then drumming in the storied Thomas Chapin Trio (just one facet of his deep and continued embeddedness in the New York avant-garde). Nearly two decades later, Sarin lamented that he never had a chance to see Landis paint in a live setting and asked if he'd be willing to collaborate. Two performances were arranged in May 2024, and the duo have now met three more times in 2026.

A Visual Musician

There's an enticing trap, or at least a long stroll to a dead end, in approaching the relationship between Landis's paintings and free jazz. It is to interpret them as somehow "representing" the music. Landis is clear on this: "I don’t mean for [the music] to define the work because I’m not interested in making visual representations of music, or anything for that matter. These paintings and drawings are artifacts of a creative process; a recording of my reactions to not just music, but to life and my living it."

Establishing that the relationship is indirect, two smaller traps await, both common responses to abstract music and painting. Treading carefully between them, I'm likely to get a foot caught in each. The first comes from the dismissive "Even I Could Have Done That" school of art criticism; the other adopts a transcendental tone that inflates the abstract nature of these artforms until they're lofted into the clouds. Something like "overwhelming directness" versus "overweening mystery," to borrow from Stanley Cavell.

Left to Right: MONK 3. THINK OF ONE (2005); MONK 4. HACKENSACK (2005); MONK 5. 'ROUND MIDNIGHT (2005)

The first response is an almost defensive tensing in the face of such directness. A move to immediately let the air out before the overweeners get too jazzed up. "I get it. Your painting is like free jazz: random and improvised and spontaneous." Nothing enigmatic here. You don't really have to know anything, you just have to do.Splatter the paint, whack the drum, toot the horn. This attitude tends to badly underestimate the skill that's required to achieve the allegedly facile result, but there's something perceived here, a focus on the plain fact of bodies in action, that can't be entirely dismissed. The process, the doing, is integral—it's what's insisted by these artforms, what we can always sense even when we try (willfully or otherwise) to bracket it out. In viewing pieces like the "Monk Work" paintings, those initial impressions of sheer spontaneity belie the fact that, just as in lots of jazz and improvised music, accumulated experience and an incredible depth of consideration are channeled into an application of skill, shaping an ongoing process that didn't have a specific end in mind when things got underway.

What get overlooked are all the particularities: the whorl of circumstance, body, and action that actually birthed that painting or moment of music. Landis's painting isn't merely like free jazz because both can be loud and break rules. Many of his pieces represent a series of events and decisions through time—sometimes over weeks and months—that are fervently attuned to intention and accident and their intertwining.

Left : 16.35T (2016);Right: 19.155 (2019)

We often fall back on visual metaphors when trying to talk about music, but the counterintuitive thing about Landis's paintings is that their material likeness to music is not visual, but temporal: they are "impossible" images that inscribe action-through-time in the same way that music does as it plays out. This sense of movement-across-time leaps from their surfaces. Looking at a piece like 16.35T, I really do find myself reaching for musical concepts: there's a staccato rhythm to the marks, which have a lively motion in their stacks of contrapuntal bands. There's dissonance in the dabs of glowing green, which seem to punctuate moments in the painting's development.

The paintings have no telos, just as improvised music isn't about getting to the end of playing. They aren't planned and realized ends or even a representation of an instant or "the now" but rather they are a holding-open, a paradoxical attempt to spatialize temporality, or express it all at once. The time-taking is the work in the way music is the running of the clock. This temporal nature is never more apparent than during live performance. There, we see the changing cadences of painting, the transformation of color and form as new strokes merge with old, the accumulation of layers that continually supplant the painting's character, even as glimpses of its previous features remain.

Brice Marden once said of Jackson Pollock, "He doesn't apply the image; he lets the image evolve out of the activity." Landis: "I like to push what I make ‘til it feels right, in some inner logic kind of way, even when that leads me to something that might look off or clumsy, but in a way that attracts me." All of these evolved and evolving particularities are exactly why just anyone couldn't create that painting or improvise those sounds. Those unrepeatable elements in concert with the artist's grappling are what constitute the work. If such painting or music could be said to have "content," this is all it could possibly be, and encrypted. You may be physically capable of executing the work, but you could never be existentially capable—you have no access to its means of creation.

Top, Left to Right: wd3060 (2006); wd2034 (2004); wd5625 (2013)
Middle, Left to Right: wd5921 (2014); wd6016 (2014); wd6058 (2014)
Bottom, Left to Right: wd6831 (2016); wd7972 (2019); wd6562 (2016)

This idea of paintings as ledgers or accretions of activity is hyper-concentrated in the wd series ("warehouse drawings"). Landis produced 10,000 wd pieces in the nearly thirty years between October 1996 and March 2025. Nearly all began as a folded piece of paper that Landis would carry with him throughout the day, often marked with notes, reminders, shopping lists. "Later in the studio, I chronologically staple them to boards, usually working on 20 at a time, drawing and painting on them, often in multiple layers over many days, weeks and sometimes months in response to whatever is happening in my world at each session."

Like a recording of an improvised performance, the wd paintings are the record of happenings that can't ever be restaged, a ledger of events that could never be repeated exactly so. Their accumulation of texture, their creases and sometimes ragged edges, are evidence of their travel through the real world, are the grounding reminders that, however abstract the visuals, they are the products of a creative drive that is selfsame with Landis, moving through life. Though Landis has retired the wd series, hints of their methodology have emerged in a new FP series created on small pieces of folded hand-made paper.

Left to Right:   FP26.78 (2026); FP26.103 (2026); FP26.174 (2026)

Paintings from the wd series often made their way back to music, and the influence began running in the opposite direction. Several have been used as album art, and over the years musicians would ask Landis if they could use a painting as inspiration for music. Most notably, Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille took a number of wd pieces and projected them in the studio while recording, which was subsequently released asI Wish I Didn't Dream.

During the pandemic, Landis began a series of smaller, heavily contingent paintings called "Notes." Each month, he starts dozens, which he lays around the house or beneath paintings in the studio, allowing them to gather stains and marks of daily life. "Notes" can be shuffled and combined into larger pieces called "Compositions," forming the basis of graphic scores. In 2024, the Cannery in Penobscot, Maine staged a series of concerts in which "Compositions" were performed by musicians like E. Jason Gibbs, Phillip Greenlief, Leslie Ross, Steve Norton, Laura Cromwell, and others.

Top, Left to Right: Note 138 (2020); Note 126 (2020); Note 154 (2020); Note 1131 (2026)
Bottom, Left to Right:   Note 964 (2025); Note 1121 (2026); Note 1 (2020); Note 702 (2023)

Accepting that there's something more than brute, unskilled doing behind such vast and varied artistic output, the "overweening" approach—a propensity I admit I must actively temper—starts from trying to articulate the interesting whatness of all those coalesced particularities . But it can be quick to flight and risks overstating its case. In seeking some ultimate source for often dumbfounding glimpses into a pure creative stream, it also risks leaving the artist behind entirely. Firebrand critic Robert Hughes famously had little patience for this. He once wrote that all of the "verbose obeisances to the Ineffable" in discussions of Mark Rothko's work tended "to be coercive, because of a deep uncertainty about the nature of his art." (I'm not sure what Hughes would make of something like Paint & Drums, though I can imagine him satisfied, standing before the large paintings at the end of the show, still gleaming and dripping.)

Hughes's warning is not unfounded, but it's also dismissive of the role uncertainty and small-i ineffability play in the experience of art like Landis's (or Rothko's, for that matter). We find the ineffable creeping up not because this sort of art is a direct mainline to the transcendent Godhead or a manifestation of universal Truth, but because it carries the possibility of ringing within us some deeply sympathetic tone, a personal and close-feeling resonance that never quite carries through into words. This isn't absolute or guaranteed. In truth, it is fleeting and infrequent. But we each know our own private tone and we hope in our encounters to feel that vibration. Returning to Cavell, in "Music Discomposed" he says these kinds of art are "known by feeling, or in feeling," and this underlies our anxiety and difficulty in communicating this knowledge:

"I want to tell you something I've seen, or heard, or realized, or come to understand, for the reasons for which such things are communicated (because it is news, about a world we share, or could). Only I find that I can't tell you; and that makes it all the more urgent to tell you. I want to tell you because the knowledge, unshared, is a burden . . . It matters, there is a burden, because unless I can tell you what I know, there is a suggestion (and to myself as well) that I do notknow."

This uncertainty is not a defect. It is an essential component of the improvised musical set, and of Landis's practice as he steps into his studio each day and faces dozens of paintings in various stages. And, Hughes's self-certainty aside, I think it is also the essential, brightly dark core of our aesthetic experience of these works. It's the same doubt the skeptic amplifies until it distorts into nothingness, easy to dismiss. Uncertainty—not-quite-knowing—is the grip that pulls the artist into the stream, and it's also the grip that gets us by the collar and stops us, to look or to listen. Picking up a paint brush or a saxophone are also attempts to convey news about a world we share, or could.

Left: 15.14 (2015); Right:20.03 (2020)

"Somehow Precise, Intense, and Vague All at Once"

The heading is Michael Gallope's description of what he calls music's "affective inconsistency," but it also beautifully captures Landis's paintings and the particular energy of his live collaboration with Sarin.

One of the more charming aspects of Landis's and Sarin's partnership is that they still aren't quite sure of it. Each time, they gently ease into a start and there's always some hesitation about whether they've finished. This thread of uncertainty runs through the whole performance, is what fuels the excitement, but it also feels more palpable than during a musical improvisation.

Left: M P Landis and Michael Sarin, May 15, 2024 at the Apohadion Theater, Portland, ME
Top Right: P+D 04 01 03 (2026); Bottom Right:P+D 03 02 02 (2026)

In the audience, witnessing the real-time change in the paintings draws out tensions between arising aesthetic judgments and a curiosity about what continuing will yield. As elements emerge in the paintings, there are times when things "feel" finished, or where particular sections or forms satisfy some personal preference. I find myself becoming protective, secretly wishing that further actions will spare a notable swirl of black or a blaze of orange that still burns though layer after layer. I wasn't alone. At several of the performances, others talked about fearing a painting was "ruined" at points during the show, feeling satisfied with a certain stage of the process and forgetting that the process must continue, that the painting in the moment they esteemed it also arose by that process. After the April 2026 performance, one enthusiastic young audience member bantered with Landis about the range of emotions he felt during the show: "At one point, I actually felt angry with you, man! I thought you fucked it up!"

Imagining how you think someone should be behaving toward certain sounds or stimuli also leads to subverted expectations. I wonder if the way Landis is moving should be more . . . what? Theatrical? Synchronized? Wouldn't that be inauthentic? How do I suppose live painting and drumming should look, and where'd those ideas even come from? It feels like the risks of improvising are magnified. And are they greater for M P? Notes melt away, but marks on canvas remain.

Left: P+D 01 02 04 (2024); Center: P+D 01 01 03 (2024); Right: P+D 02 02 08 (2024)

It's all quite different from watching two musicians improvising. At times they seem at odds, or moving just past one another. Sarin whips himself into a storm, a deluge of creative energy that—in my mind—is an arc of electricity shooting across the stage to directly animate M P's limbs. But Landis is opening a paint bottle or looking for a brush. All that, just dissipated! But has it? I presume bolts of lightning, but am likely missing the charged potential in the air. In some ways, it becomes easier to sense these shifting emotions when there's a visual element, a continuing remnant. In music alone, things often move so quickly that only the most egregious "missteps" or a complete failure to gel create notable feelings of resistance in the witness. Here, things move as fast, but your eyes are drawn to the canvas, which holds on to the movement of the performance like streaks of light in a long exposure.

Through all these contours, there's an unmistakable resonance between what Landis and Sarin are doing, if not an equivalence. I feel an immense mental force that wants to draw their activities into a neat consonance, but it's like pushing repelling magnets together. As Landis has always maintained, the painting doesn't "represent" the sounds any more than the reverse. Instead, there's a joyous, if ambiguous, exchange of energy. You can see that it's mutually reinforcing. Sarin is palpably exhilarated. The propulsion of his drumming spurs Landis into action, and the emerging images become mutable graphic scores, giant ever-changing "notes" urging Sarin further. The exact how just evades a tight grasp. Together or separately, the painting and drumming are abstract art that many would accuse of being untethered. But there's something stubbornly literal in their doing. The paintings are just that: caked and layered paint, ink, and pastel, thick and viscous or water-thinned and dripping. The drums: driving, rhythmic, sometimes crashing, deafening, sometimes the faintest texture of hand's skin on drumskin. It is all, plainly, what it is, a frustrating tautology because there is yet, as Sarin said at the end of the most recent performance, an alchemy.

"Whole" and "Divided" Painting from Paint & Drums 4, May 9, 2026 at the Loove Annex, Brooklyn, NY

Fever Bed

To quote another M-P, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in "Cézanne's Doubt" that "before expression, there is nothing but a vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there." I'd gently propose shifting the sense of the word "work": M-P wrote l'œuvre, a finished piece of art, an "artifact" of the creative act. I'd like to read it as the doing, le faire, le travail—the undertaking of creating.

I often sense that vague fever while listening to improvised music, like the back of my hand against a warm forehead, and admittedly less often when facing a painting. I vicariously feel it in the dim light, watching Landis and Sarin on stage. Still, I sense in myself an inhibiting self-consciousness, like I'd never be able to start, even as I also discover expectations and opinions welling up and fading away as the performance plays out. Once in motion, there's an odd sort of courage in continuing to mark the canvas, to pound the drum, but I wonder if the central task of the improvising artist is to continually overcome that uneasy inertia and just begin. An unstopping at imagination's edge that risks mistake and awkwardness and dissatisfaction to possibly reach something that at best can only be hazily made out, and not at all while sitting in caution and doubt. Unsure if you can know you've reached it. Something about the feeling of reaching.

Left: FEVER BED (MAT MANERI TRIO) (2003); Right:manifestation (before fire music) (2001)

See much, much more of M P Landis's work, including video clips and other pieces from the Paint & Drums performances, on his Instagram or Facebook pages. You can see what Michael Sarin is up to on his Instagram page.

All photos of paintings used with the artist's permission.

All performance photos by Dan Sorrells.

 

 

 

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An interview with Myra Melford

Photo by Gil Corre

By David Cristol 

The US pianist and composer is busier than ever. New albums, a freshly launched Bandcamp label, teaching in Berkeley, writing for large ensembles in Europe, new bands to tour and record with : Myra Melford is in control and on a roll. During a stopover between Paris and Italy, The Evanston-born artist talked to David Cristol on a sunny June morning in the South of France.

– Can we start with your new piano duo release with Satoko Fujii, かたらひ (Katarahi)on RogueArt ? You previously collaborated on Under the Water [Libra Records, 2009] . How did the connection come about and how do you go about playing together ?

Myra Melford [MM] – Satoko and I met in 1994. I was playing a solo concert at a little club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Club Passim. After the concert, I discovered that Paul Bley was there, and he had brought Satoko with him. She was a student or ex-student of his. So it was Paul Bley who introduced us. But she was in Boston and I was in New York, so we didn't see each other much, but stayed aware of what the other was doing. After I moved to Berkeley in 2004, she came to the Bay Area and we arranged to do a two-piano concert at the Maybeck House in Berkeley. That was our first meeting at the piano. That happened around 2007 and the record came out a couple years later. It was completely improvised. We didn't talk about anything, just played. And learned a lot from that experience. Over the years, I played some concerts with her in Japan, we played in San Francisco in 2015, and started getting concert invitations in Europe. We thought, instead of playing completely free, let's each bring compositions that allow for a lot of improvisation, but where we have some common focus and we can plan a little bit so that there's variety in what we're doing, so that it’s not so dense all the time. By having a roadmap or idea about what an improvisation might be about, we could create more space and feature one or the other, understand a little bit more how to go about it. We played in Europe maybe once every couple of years. And then got this opportunity to play at the Leibnitz Jazz Festival. That was supposed to happen during the pandemic, but it got postponed and only actually happened in the fall of 2024.

– And that’s the new recording?

MM -Yes. It was recorded by Österreichischer Rundfunk, the Austrian radio. They did a really great job, and it was in the back of our minds that we would consider it for a live record. But it wasn't until we heard the recording and were happy with its quality and with our playing that we decided we wanted to release it. Our playing is complementary and compatible. We each have a different way of playing, and a different way of composing. But when we get together, I think on this new record especially, sometimes you can't tell who's playing, even though we're on different channels. We also switch pianos in the middle of the concert, which makes it even more confusing. I like the idea that we're creating one sound together rather than being these two separate pianists who must be identifiable.

– There aren't many live recordings in your discography.

MM –I like live recordings, but haven’t released many. An early one was Alive in the House of Saints [Hat ART, 1993] . And then, 12 from 25 with the Blu-ray documentary [Firehouse 12, 2018] , from my 2015 retrospective at The Stone. It's nice when you get a good recording and you don't feel like you have to edit it too much. For the duo we only had to take out a few coughs, nothing major. 

Myra Melford Trio at The Stone, NYC 2015 - credit Gil Corre

DC – Did you have in mind references to previous duos on the instrument ?

MM –I can only speak for myself : it was kind of completely new. I was familiar with the recording of Cecil Taylor and Mary Lou Williams and also with Marian McPartland's show and all the piano duos that happened there. But really it was something new to discover, and not something I had thought about for a long time.

– Do you often record your concerts ? Are there live recordings in your archive that you might release at some point ?

MM –I used to record a lot of my gigs on my phone or some small device like that, but I don't do that anymore. The idea was mainly to be able to listen to how some new music I’d written was working. Most of the concerts that I play now are recorded, if not by someone I know in the audience, then by a professional engineer. If it's being recorded, I always ask for a copy. There are several things that might potentially come out. I'm just starting a Bandcamp label. First I'm releasing my back catalog for which the rights have come back to me and which are no longer available or which the record labels are no longer selling. They've let them go out of print in some cases. The idea is that eventually I'll start to release some live concerts.

– How about the third Fire and Water Quintet [with Ingrid Laubrock, Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid and Lesley Mok] album that will come out on RogueArt ? Will it be a suite like the previous ones, to be listened to in one sitting ?

MM –This one is different. It's a set of pieces that in my opinion all fit together, but I didn't have an order to start with, as I did with the previous records. I wrote it as individual pieces. I like the order that we chose as a sequence, but it's not necessary to listen to the full thing at once.

– How did your writing for this group evolve over the years?

MM –It mostly evolved from the first record to the second record. For the second record, I was deliberately writing for the people in the band, thinking about how I wanted to feature each of them. On the third record, it's like I had absorbed or internalized a lot of their playing and approach. While I was writing the music, I was again thinking about who I would like to feature and how, but it was more open-ended than on Hear the Light Singing where each piece was going to feature a different person. This time it was more about breaking things down into duos and trios. I have been continuing to use some of my earlier approaches and strategies but also trying to develop some new concepts in terms of counterpoint and working with different cells of ideas. 

Fire and Water Quintet (Jazz em agosto, 2023). Photo Vera Marmelo

– You have a new trio with two members of the quintet. Did the trio idea arose from composing for the quintet?

MM –Not exactly, although the writing is similar and the trio plays some of the same music. I wrote some music for the trio that I ended up expanding for the quintet, and this is the first recording of it. In other cases, I imagined some departures from how I work with the quintet. Part of it was purely practical. It's pretty hard to tour with a quintet all the time. It's expensive, people are busy. I wanted to have a smaller unit that could be a continuation of the ideas that I've been exploring with Fire and Water. So, inviting Ingrid Laubrock and Lesley Mok made great sense. We've done several concerts together and are starting to work on some music for a recording. The band is called SOX 2. It's a a biomedical term that comes from generative gene therapy. It's something about how genes can regenerate. The person who wrote the liner notes for the quintet record explains it very clearly.

– Your all-female quintet is not only women, it's women from different origins, backgrounds, generations. Was that in your mind when forming the band?

MM –That's right. But that’s in the back of my mind. In the forefront of my mind are musical personalities. How does someone play? What's their sound? How do they approach improvisation? Can I imagine them performing my music? That is always the first concern. The second thing is my liking to have, as was already the case with Snowy Egret, different generations and backgrounds involved in the band. The quintet is a continuation of that idea. It's important for audiences to not only see a band of fantastic women players, but also that we are able to get together and make something together, even though we come from different backgrounds.

– How did you hear about each of them? Did you see them live at festivals or listen to their albums?

MM –Both. I had played with Mary and with Tomeka already, mostly through working with Nicole Mitchell. Ingrid came to see me very early after I moved to California. She was interested in some of the things I learned from Henry Threadgill and which I in turn shared with her. I followed what all of them were doing. Originally it was Susie Ibarra in the quintet. She's on the first album. Mary was playing in Tomeka's quartet. Mary and Ingrid had played with Kris Davis, and I was aware of what everybody was doing. These were all people I'd like to play with, and wondering what would happen if we all got together and played ? It went very well, and that's when I decided to turn it into a band. Our very first gig was part of my second Stone residency in 2019. In addition to doing several nights of current bands that I was either part of or leading, I decided to do one night of free improvisation. And I asked this group of people to do it with me. At the time I was starting to work on some new compositions. For the evening I ended up creating a roadmap of different duos and trios with some notated material, text scores, this kind of thing. It was quite open, but there was a little bit of the material that I then incorporated on For the Love of Fire and Water . After that show, I fleshed out the compositions and turned them into a suite that we could record.

– Like you, they're fluent in both composition and improvisation, active in both fields.

MM –For me it's more about blurring those fields, blurring the boundaries. But yes. Let me tell you about Lesley. I had written a second set of music that became the Hear the Light Singing recording. And we did a tour of that. We were going to do some more gigs and a recording, but unfortunately, Susie Ibarra wasn't available to do the tour with us. I started to look for a drummer that could learn the music with us and make the recording. I asked a couple of friends who they’d recommend and Lesley’s name came up. I called the other members and they were super into it. We got together and they played great right from the start. It's wonderful having them in the band, totally great.

– When you start a group, do you think, let’s do this one thing and then we'll see what happens? You sometimes have two recordings with a group, but three, like with Fire and Water, is pretty rare.

MM –That's right. Usually two records is about as far as I go with a band. And that's spread out over a few years. It comes both out of necessity or practicalities and because I wish to renew the writing and playing. I mean, if offered the opportunity to do a new tour, I want to have some new music ready and bring it out there. But in that case it's also that this band is really special and there seems to be room for expansion, like I could maybe develop music that would take us into some new territory. That’s what I am hoping to do. We're playing in Ottawa next month and going to do a tour in Europe in October, so maybe it’ll continue.

– When did you start using guitar?

MM –I have been playing with guitar for quite a long time if you go back to be the band Be Bread with Brandon Ross. That was more or less a quartet that had either Cuong Vu on trumpet and electronics or Brandon Ross on guitar, banjo and electric guitar. I like the combination of piano and guitar. In some ways, the inspiration for that came from doing a project of Henry Threadgill's, where I performed with guitar quartets, of which Brandon was part of. We did a couple pieces. One was « Over the River Club » from Song Out of My Trees [Black Saint, 1994] and the other was « Noisy Flowers » from Makin’ a Move [Columbia, 1995]. I like that sound. And it's about particular players. I worked with Brandon for quite a while, and when I put Snowy Egret together, I invited Liberty Ellman on guitar. Both of them had played with Threadgill. Mary has this big personality on guitar, effects and a very different sound to Liberty. Now they play great together in Ches Smith’s Clone Row. I wanted to keep working with guitar and I wanted to work with Mary. She has a very distinctive sound. I had done a project called Happy Whistlings around 2008, which was with Mary, Taylor Ho Bynum, Matana Roberts, Stomu Takeishi. It was music for the [writer, journalist] Eduardo Galeano project, Language of Dreams , that was eventually recorded by Snowy Egret. Mary played in one of the early iterations of it, and I loved playing with her. I knew I wanted to get back to having her play my music at some point. So this was the perfect opportunity. All the people I work with have their own creative expression which is original and strong, yet they always serve the compositions.

– You always pick the best bass players – Mark Dresser, Michael Formanek, Nick Dunston, Joëlle Léandre…

MM –Gosh, I'm so lucky to play with so many great bass players. Everybody's got a particular feel for time and comping and soloing and how they express rhythm. I'm looking for people who are complimentary to how I like to play the piano and the kind of music I'm writing. I'm fortunate that all these great bass players have been willing to play with me.

– You just toured again with the Tiger Trio [with Joëlle Léandre and Nicole Mitchell] . How did that go?

MM –It was great, we always have a good time when we get together. We hadn't played in about three years. We have two albums out. Or three if you include the one that's a live recording in Joëlle's Lifetime Rebel box set. We don't get to play often enough, but whenever we do, it's really fun. We're all coming from very different places in a way, but when we get together, something special happens. It is all improvised, we don't bring any compositions.

– The most recurring format in your discography is the trio. Is it your favorite?

MM –Well, I would say the quintet is my favorite. It's just a little harder to work with a quintet, to tour, organize schedules, have enough money to pay everybody. So I would say those are my two favorite formats, although I like duos, quartets and solo as well. With a trio, you have everything you need. You've got three different voices, so that not everybody has to play all the time, or you can change the roles fluidly from background to foreground, accompanying or being featured. And I like to do it with all kinds of instrumentations, from Equal Interest with violin and woodwinds [Leroy Jenkins and Joseph Jarman] to this new SOX 2 trio with Lesley and Ingrid, and the classic piano, bass, and drums association, like Splash, Trio M or my early trio. They're all fun and different, but it's easier to work with three people, you don't have a lot of parts to organize. It's less complex in some ways, but it doesn't have to be because everybody is capable of playing either very simply or playing a lot – like with Splash.

– Can you tell us about that trio [with Michael Formanek on bass & Ches Smith on drums and vibraphone] ? You put out a recording last year on Intakt, and took it on tour.

MM –As I was saying, composing for a trio, I have less parts available, right? You can only have three things going on at once. What's new for me about this trio is that Ches also plays vibes, so I have a second melodic instrument that can either play with the bass or with the piano while somebody else takes a different role. I love the combination of piano and vibes together. With musical personalities that bring something unique to my music, if I record something with Splash and then record the same tune with the quintet, it is performed completely differently. I can arrange some of the same material for quintet or trio. I wrote some interludes for Splash, and then adapted those to the quintet and they sound completely different. « Chalk », for instance, is a piece that can be played by various instrumentations and personalities, it's coming out different every time yet retains the essence of the composition. I do « Chalk » with Splash, with the quintet and also with Satoko.

– You don't have many solo recordings. Your solo piano set at the 2024 Novara Jazz festival was stunning.

MM –Just one, Life Carries Me This Way [Firehouse 12, 2013, reissued as a double LP in 2017] . Which is a studio recording. And I agree the live concert in Italy was strong. I just played another solo in Mantua, that also went very well. They recorded it. Maybe that would be something to consider for release on my label.

– You have been inspired by the works of painter Cy Twombly for some time.

MM –In the mid-90s, I wrote « Drawing in the Dark » for my band Same River Twice. That composition was inspired by Twombly. I had just gone to see a retrospective of Twombly's work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That's what started the whole thing. I wasn’t aware of his art before, and remember feeling a strong affinity with the energy and gesture and the way his work looked in this gallery when I walked into it. In the back of my mind, I thought, that looks like how I play the piano. So that's what I've been doing for the last five years. It's a project that's being supported by the University of California, and was originally meant to be an evening-long performance comprised of several ensembles, Snowy Egret, Fire and Water and maybe Tiger Trio or MZM [Melford’s trio with Zeena Parkins and Miya Masaoka] , small group things that would culminate in one big improvised orchestra piece. Because of COVID, I wasn't able to make that happen. So I started thinking of it as installments, starting with Fire and Water’s For the love of Fire and Water , and then Hear the Light Singing, and then Splash, and then the upcoming Quintet record, titled Sure Grand Out, and finally an installation in which I will perform a solo piece. The title was inspired by a book, of, not exactly poetry – or maybe it is poetry. Someone had deconstructed a diary from a long time ago that she had found in the Midwest of the United States. Diary entries had be written every day, but the woman who then deconstructed it only took a few words out of it. One line was « a good rain, flowers come fast, sure grand out ». Those are titles I thought kind of worked within my relationship with Twombly's work. I am going back to Italy to work on the final installment of the Twombly project. I'm collaborating with two artists from Chicago, photographer and visual artist and videographer Sandra Binion, and Lou Malozzi, an experimental sound artist. We're creating an installation of our reflections and responses to Twombly's work. This will be the final chapter, and then, I think it's time to move on to something new.

– You have a taste for enigmatic song and album titles. How do you choose them?

MM –I usually find titles after the pieces of music are composed. I keep a list of possible titles around subjects or areas that I'm interested in, and had a number of titles related to Twombly, from writings I've read about him and his work. And I certainly get ideas from poetry and literature. And then some of the new music that I've written in the last year was inspired by the idea of regenerative gene therapy, and regeneration in general, like how the heck are we going to start to really address the climate issues. I talk with my students a lot. I teach at the university of California where the students are studying every subject you can imagine. Many great musicians who play in my ensembles or study with me are pre-med or going to become engineers or astrophysicists. I was talking with one of my pre-med students about this idea of regenerative gene therapy and she was the one who suggested where to look and what to read.

– Teaching, playing, composing, touring, traveling – what is the thing you enjoy the most ?

MM –I'm going to say that without making music, none of the rest makes sense. Performing and composing are central to everything. What's been great for me about being a professor at UC Berkeley is that my students and colleagues are very inspiring and it's been a really good synergistic experience that informs my music. I go out and perform my music in the world and have something that I feel good about sharing with my students when I come back. So, for the most part, it works as a whole. It's a bit tiring sometimes to try to juggle all these things. But on the other hand, if I didn't go out and perform new music, I don't think I'd have the inspiration to teach. So I have to do it all.

– What about the [Canadian clarinet player] François Houle Quintet you’re a member of, and uses graphic scores or at least color indications ?

MM –We use both. It started as a trio with me, Joëlle and François. We played at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal a few years ago, we had scores and some notated material. And then the group expanded to include Gordon Grdina and Gerry Hemingway and it became more like text scores where François would give us indications, colors to look at and ideas. That's what we did in Novara. Last spring we did a few gigs in Canada. And we're going to perform in Guelph in September. François would like to record it. He did one recording that I couldn't make, with Alexander Hawkins and Joëlle. The next thing is to record in the configuration that we'll be playing in Guelph.

– If you had an unlimited budget to work on some specific project, what would you like to achieve that you haven't already?

MM –That's a good question. I guess I just want to be able to keep doing what I'm doing. I have some concerts coming up in the fall with Splash. Now that Michael Formanek lives in Lisbon, I have to bring him to the US twice, maybe three times. The only reason I would like not to worry about money is so I can keep doing what I'm doing. And, as the next idea comes in, have funding for it, as it’s the hardest thing to manage. I've been fortunate to get some very nice funding over the years, but it doesn't last forever and I'm again in the situation where there are so many things I want to do and I just don't know where the money's going to come from yet.

– You got some awards and grants in recent years.

MM –One was from the Doris Duke Foundation. I got that and the Albert Award and the Guggenheim. Those prizes have enabled me to do everything I've done the last few years.

Now that I'm getting to the culmination of the Cy Twombly project, I'm starting to think about writing for larger ensembles. I've got two commissions for next year. One is for the Kitchen Orchestra in Stavanger in Norway, and the other is for an ensemble called Studio Dan in Vienna. Ingrid has been writing for them. I'm writing a piece that I can do variations of with each of those bands next May and June. And I'm co-composing a piece for improvising pianist and orchestra with a colleague from UC Berkeley named Carmine Cella, which we will premiere next year as well. So I've got lots to do. I'm kind of allowing these things to happen, as seeds, to see what might come next. 

Arles, 2019. Photo by Gil Corre

– Do you enjoy writing for larger ensembles?

MM –I do. I haven't done a lot of it, so I'm looking forward to it and figuring out how I want to do it, rather than following someone else's model necessarily.

DC – You worked with Wynton Marsalis and a big band.

MM –Yes, that was a traditional big band. They call it the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. We played one of my compositions. That was fun, I have to say. I didn't know what to expect when I went into it, because I come from another, freer school, so to speak. But I felt welcome. I loved all the guys and Ted Nash did a great arrangement of my piece, which I performed with them.

– Do you listen to a lot of music?

MM –Mostly trying to listen to the new stuff that's coming out, from people I play with. And I don't do a very good job of keeping up with it. Soon as I see something new coming from someone I know, I go check it out. And if it's something that really inspires me, I'll go back and listen to it a lot. Other times I might not get back to it. I'm not going back to older music much these days.

– How about listening to your own recordings?

MM –I don't like to do that, but if I have to, for a project or something, I will. But I can’t say I enjoy it. It's partly because I hear things that I know what I was going for and didn't quite achieve. But you know, I feel good about the music I've done overall.

– You often are your own producer. How does the relationship with the record labels happen?

MM –It's different with each label. I’ve learned that it's important to retain control over my own work, and as much as possible own the rights to it. I've been fortunate that there have been labels that have wanted to put out my music, and we've been able to talk about which project or projects might make the most sense. I think it's good to not be only with one label these days. It's a difficult time for labels and a difficult time for musicians. And it's nice to be able to share your music to different audiences and on different platforms. Just having opportunities to get my music out there is the most important thing.

– There was a point when you didn't release a lot of records. Now it might seem as you have accelerated a bit.

MM –It’s true. I have more projects now. Some of those are collectives, like Trio M or Lux Quartet. I have the Quintet and two different trios that are part of the same constellation, so to speak. And I don't know if it's getting older and feeling like, I want to make sure I accomplish these things and get them out in the world, or just that there are more opportunities to release things since I’m doing more things.

– You’ve played with drummer Allison Miller for a number of years, and were a member of her band Boom Tic Boom.

MM –I’m not in that anymore. We did some concerts with the original band last fall, but I think Allison's moved on with Boom Tic Boom. Instead, we're co-leading the Lux Quartet.Allison made a number of really nice records that I got to play on. I like the first one called Live in Willisau [Foxhaven Records, 2012], and the most recent one, Glitter Wolf [Royal Potato Family, 2019] on which I also play harmonium. She has a new band that she's still calling Boom Tic Boom but it’s a completely different line-up.

– What else have you been involved in recently?

MM –I've been playing with some musicians in the Bay Area. I was invited to collaborate on a project, as a performer, called Insect Life, which is Ben Goldberg on clarinets, Ben Davis on cello, Raffi Garabedian on tenor and Danny Lubin-Laden on trombone. They invited Hamir Atwal and me to play with them. There should be a recording of that coming out next year, maybe on Ben's label [BAG Production Records]. And I've been playing in a trio with Ben Goldberg and one of my students, Matt Muntz, a fantastic bass player. Matt is getting his PhD in composition at UC Berkeley and he, Ben and I have a trio that we're going to record next fall. Ben Goldberg, cellist Ben Davis and I have a new trio project that we're going to try and record as well. I love playing with Ben [a collaboration that harks back to duo performances in the US and Europe from 2012 onward, the album Dialogue and Myra being part of Goldberg’s Orphic Machine project in 2015].

Myra Melford & Ben Goldberg in 2013. Photo by Jean-François Laberine

Addendum...
 

- Which are your three favorites among your own albums, the most artistically successful in your opinion?

MM - This is a tough one. I'll say :

Snowy Egret - The Other Side of Air (Firehouse 12, 2018)

Fire and Water Quintet - Hear the Light Singing (Rogueart, 2023)

Myra Melford Splash (Intakt, 2025)

- Could you recommend three albums from other artists that you currently enjoy?

MM - 

Ches Smith - Clone Row (Otherly Love, 2025)

John Carter - Fields (Gramavision, 1988)

Anna Webber and Matt Mitchell - Capacious Aeration (Tzadik, 2023)

I haven't checked out Mary's new album with Ambrose Akinmusire yet - looking forward to that! 

Current and upcoming releases:

• Myra Melford « Splash » (Intakt, 2025)
• Myra Melford/Satoko Fujii « かたらひ (Katarahi) » (RogueArt, 2026)
• Ben Goldberg/Myra Melford/Danny Lubin-Laden « Trouble Trouble » (BAG, August 2026)
• Fire and Water Quintet « Sure Grand Out » (RogueArt, September 2026
  
  
• Find out more here: https://myramelford.bandcamp.com/
• Myra Melford on RogueArt: https://roguart.com/artist/myra-melford/160 
• Revisit an interview with Myra Melford on the Free Jazz Blog in 2022. 

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