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| 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.
%20-%20credit%20Vera%20Marmelo.JPG) |
| 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.
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| 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].
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| 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:
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