Myra Melford was born on January 5, 1957. She is an American jazz pianist and composer known for her innovative style. In 2013, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an honor given to individuals who show exceptional talent. The San Francisco Chronicle described her as an exciting player who surprises and calms audiences. They noted that she can make the piano perform in ways that seem unexpected.

Early life and education

Melford was born in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. At age 3, she began playing the piano on her own, climbing onto the bench and making up music. She started formal lessons when she was in kindergarten. She had a good relationship with her teacher, Erwin Helfer, who was trained in classical music and played boogie-woogie. Helfer taught her music by composers like Bach, then introduced her to works by Bartók, and later taught her how to play the blues. Melford attended blues festivals and, because of her connection with Helfer, was often invited backstage, where she met many famous Chicago musicians. On her own, she also began experimenting with making up music as she played.

Her family encouraged her to perform classical music, so she joined a program at Northwestern University during junior high school. She said her experience as a classical piano student felt "not right," and although she continued to play informally, she stopped formal lessons in high school.

Melford went to Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she planned to study environmental science. At that time, she was not listening to jazz and had not grown up with it, but she knew jazz involved improvisation. After seeing an ad for jazz piano lessons in a local restaurant, she started studying again. She remembered that during the next few years, she listened to two records repeatedly: Cecil Taylor’s Air Above Mountains and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. Soon after, she changed her major to music and in 1980 attended Cornish College of the Arts, where she studied with Art Lande and Gary Peacock.

Melford described the feeling she has when she follows her natural instincts while playing music as a kind of "meta-flow." This is a state where she does not need to think about what to play, but instead knows instinctively what note, movement, shape, or rhythm will come next. It feels as though the music happens without her effort, and it is a physical reaction to the sounds she hears.

While living in Olympia, Melford met important avant-garde musicians, including Oliver Lake, Anthony Braxton, Marty Ehrlich, and Leroy Jenkins. A performance by these musicians with Amina Claudine Myers and Pheeroan akLaff gave her an "ecstatic feeling" that strengthened her dedication to improvisation.

Career

In 1984, Melford moved to New York City, where she studied composition with saxophonist Henry Threadgill, who later influenced her understanding of organic composition. She also studied privately with pianists Jaki Byard and Don Pullen, learning from their percussive playing styles.

After arriving in New York, Melford performed in the bands of Threadgill, Leroy Jenkins, and Butch Morris, among others. In the late 1980s, she played and recorded with flutist Marion Brandis and formed a trio with bassist Lindsey Horner and drummer Reggie Nicholson. Her career grew in the early 1990s when she joined the first Knitting Factory tour of Europe and recorded three albums with Horner and Nicholson: Jump (1990), Now & Now (1991), and Alive in the House of Saints, a live album from 1993.

In the late 1990s, Melford began working with larger groups and added trumpeter Dave Douglas and reed player Marty Ehrlich to her trio to form the Myra Melford Extended Ensemble. She also created a second five-piece group, the Same River, Twice, which included Douglas, cellist Erik Friedlander, reed player Chris Speed, and drummer Michael Sarin. Their first album, released in 1996 on Gramavision, was titled Same River, Twice. A second album, Above Blue, came out in 1999 on Arabesque. Melford also performed on the 1996 album Eleven Ghosts with Dutch drummer Han Bennink and on the 1999 album Equal Interest, which featured her playing harmonium and piano with Leroy Jenkins and Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. By the end of the decade, Melford was widely recognized as a key figure in the downtown jazz scene, with the Seattle Times describing her in 1999 as a "pianist who plays with both care and power, blending composed music with free improvisation."

In 2000, Melford formed a trio called Crush, in which she played piano and harmonium with drummer Kenny Wollesen and bassist Stomu Takeishi. Arabesque released the trio’s album Dance Beyond the Color that year. In September 2000, she traveled to Calcutta as a Fulbright scholar to study harmonium with Sohanlal Sharma. She spent several months with Sharma, learning about raga and Hindustani classical music, and continued her studies with other musicians in Delhi and Rajasthan. She also studied with Sudhir Nayak in Mumbai.

After returning to the United States, Melford lived at an upstate New York ashram. She later formed an ensemble called Myra Melford’s Be Bread to perform music inspired by her studies in India. The group’s first album, The Image of Your Body (named after a poem by Rumi), was recorded in 2003 but not released until 2006. Another album, Where the Two Worlds Touch, was released in 2006 by Arabesque.

In 2004, Melford moved to Berkeley, California, to teach as a professor of contemporary improvisational music at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2006, she formed a trio called Trio M with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson. Their first album, The Big Picture, was released in 2007 on Cryptogramophone, followed by The Guest House in 2012 on Enja/Yellowbird.

Melford performs with clarinetist/composer Ben Goldberg, whom she met after moving to Berkeley, in the duo Dialogue. In 2012, she formed a new quintet, Snowy Egret, which includes bassist Takeishi, guitarist Liberty Ellman, trumpeter Ron Miles, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. In October 2012, she won the Alpert Award for her musical contributions and her ability to blend different musical traditions.

In October 2013, Melford released her first solo album, Life Carries Me This Way, inspired by the paintings of artist Don Reich. That same year, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and received awards from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for her work in reimagining the jazz program at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In November 2013, Snowy Egret performed the music for Melford’s multimedia project Language of Dreams at the center.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Melford has taught courses on contemporary jazz and improvisational music. She also lectures on innovations in jazz since the 1960s and other topics in contemporary improvised music.

Selected honors, fellowships, and awards

• Guggenheim Fellowship (2013)
• Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's Performing Artist Award (2013)
• Alpert Award in the Arts for Music (2012)
• Jazz Journalists Association Pianist of the Year (2008, 2009)
• Jazz Journalists Association Composer of the Year (2004)
• Fulbright scholar (2000)
• New York Foundation for the Arts Composition Fellowship (1998, 2002, 2008)
• Chamber Music America New Jazz Works Commissioning grant (2003)

Discography

An asterisk means the year listed is when the music was released.

With Joseph Jarman and Leroy Jenkins

• Out of the Mist (Ocean, 1997)
• Equal Interest (Omnitone, 1999)

With Allison Miller (drummer)

• Boom Tic Boom (2010)
• Boom Tic Boom Live at Willisau (2012)
• No Morphine, No Lilies (2013)
• Otis Was A Polar Bear (2016)
• Glitter Wolf (2019)

• 96 Gestures (2001)

With Henry Threadgill

• Song Out of My Trees (Black Saint, 1994)
• Makin' a Move (Columbia, 1995)