FOREVER IMPROVISING JAZZ
From the moment Myra Melford first set fingers on her piano’s keys, she delighted in making creative sparks fly.
As a toddler at the keyboard, she tried to imitate the music that her considerably older siblings made. “I was just making up my own songs,” she recalls. “I have this memory of how much fun it was to improvise as my first experience of playing.”
Soon after, she began piano lessons, but bristled at how regimented they were. “I was disappointed, because I was told exactly how to sit and put my hands, and I had to learn to read, which I didn’t associate with music at all, reading music, that is. And how dumb the songs were!”
After going through several teachers, Melford found one she liked — Erwin Helfer, a blues and boogie-woogie pianist in Chicago — who gave her some classical lessons, but also taught her to play the blues.
Eventually, although Melford had a strong feeling that her life’s work lay in music, she was stumped about how to make that happen. Entering high school, she soured on classical music and stopped playing piano.
It was only when Melford was in college that she had her musical eureka moments, after taking some jazz piano lessons “on a whim” and attending a concert by avant-garde violinist Leroy Jenkins.
The orthodoxies of the jazz piano lessons made her once more balk: “I realized that playing ( jazz) standards wasn’t my thing either ... I really knew at that age I had to find my own my way of playing the piano and write music that go with along that.”
But hearing Jenkins and his peers set Melford on her path. “I had no idea what they were doing. I had never heard anything like it. But this light bulb went off in my head, a little bit into the concert. And I thought, ‘You know, what? This is it. This is what I want to do.’”
Since the early 1990s, Melford, now 59, has recorded prolifically and collaborated with equally open-minded musicians such as drummer Matt Wilson, trumpeter Cuong Vu and clarinetist Marty Ehrlich. She’s won awards, including a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
As part of the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival, Melford plays the NAC Back Stage on June 23 with her latest project, a quintet that she calls Snowy Egret after from the bird that once captivated her in a powerful dream.
The band plays Melford’s original music — of course. In it, there can be hints of blues or skittery, edgy melodies, lyrical moments or passages of fierce aggression. The music can be wide open and spacious or brashly rhythmic in a way that can be both complex and earthy. The influence of different world musics can be heard.
Melford exults in her music’s eclecticism. “To me that is a definition of jazz, that it is a hybrid, welcoming kind of music that’s always evolved because it could adapt to other influences,” she says. “In the last 20 years or so there have been people who have tried to narrow it down, but that to me that doesn’t make any sense.”
Years ago, Melford sought out lessons from Don Pullen, who had held down the piano chair in legendary bassist Charles Mingus’s band. “I asked him, ‘How do you bridge the world between playing this really groovy music with chord changes, with this avant-garde language?’ and he said, ‘That’s a great question, and I’m sure you’ll find a great solution.’
“As corny as it was, that really gave me the confidence to try and make my way.”
She hopes that potential concertgoers who might be unfamiliar with her music won’t be dissuaded by the “avant-garde pianist” label that’s usually applied to her.
“My music is full of a lot of things that I think are inviting,” she says. “I think there are a lot of great grooves, actual melodies and tunes and so on.
“I can invite people, to create an aural journey or experience that might take them further out than they’ve ever been, but where they feel engaged ... even if they say they don’t like avant-garde jazz.
“At this point in my life, I don’t feel apologetic about my music, or that it’s my job to make people like it, as much as it is to be authentic and to do what I love, and hope that that enthusiasm and joy I experience in music will move them.”
There are also connections to the world outside of music for listeners to ponder. The writings of 13th-century Persian poet Rumi and Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano have prompted Melford compositions. So has Zen Buddhism. Melford says that she is trying not so much to translate works in other media into music, but to create a dialogue with them.
Snowy Egret includes some strikingly distinctive musicians in their own right — cornet player Ron Miles, guitarist Liberty Ellman, bassist Stomu Takeishi, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey.
“I am so happy and excited with this band. I feel like I’ve really gotten to another level as a bandleader and a composer with these guys.
“They are so able to play so many different kinds of music, and to groove and to play with timbre and tone colour, and (to) experiment and go back and forth between those with so much facility. And they listen so well, it’s so exciting for me to play with them.”
Melford is on faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, as an associate professor of contemporary improvised music. Meanwhile, most of her band members live in New York, and in the case of Miles, Denver, Colorado. Since 2012, the band has managed to unite and play for roughly two weeks each year, and it released its first album a few months ago. “It’s a band that for whatever reason has a rapport that we can drop right into,” Melford says.
What’s more special about Snowy Egret, Melford says, is the autonomy of her musicians and the trust she has in them, resulting in spontaneous arrangements of her material. “It’s really exciting to see how the music develops from night to night,” she says.