Myra Melford: Fire & Water Quintet

Hailed by The New Yorker as “a stalwart of the new-jazz movement,” the endlessly gifted pianist, composer, bandleader, and educator Myra Melford returns to Outpost with her dynamic all-star Fire and Water Quintet featuring Ingrid Laubrock on tenor and soprano saxophones, Mary Halvorson on electric guitar, Tomeka Reid on cello, and rising star, Lesley Mok, on drums. Each of these artists has an impressive catalog as a bandleader and collaborator, and Melford had worked with all of them previously, but never together. The result is a gathering of some of the most compelling improvisers working today. Their critically acclaimed debut, For the Love of Fire and Water, inspired by a set of drawings by Cy Twombly – whose art has been a touchstone for Melford for years –  was released in April 2022 on the RogueArt label and served as the “first installment” of a multi-part project. Melford notes, “I read that when Twombly was a young artist, one of the things he did to train himself was to turn out all the lights at night and draw in the dark. He was interested in what it felt like to make the line more than what it looked like, and that seemed like an apt metaphor for how I play the piano. For me, it’s all about the gesture and the energy. Of course, there’s a sound to it, but it’s almost as if the sound is the information I get after the impulse to make a gesture.” The Quintet’s second album, Hear the Light Singing, which adds “insertions” to the original suite and was written with each player’s unique musical personality in mind, was released in October 2023 to widespread critical acclaim. In the last three years, the band has toured from Pori to San Sebastien to Austin to San Francisco and everywhere in between. A native of Chicago, Myra Melford was an influential presence in New York for several years before relocating to the Bay Area in 2004 to join the music department at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Professor of Composition and Improvisational Practices. She has spent the last three decades making brilliant original music, taking inspiration from legendary pianist Cecil Taylor, the blues and boogie-woogie of her native Chicago, the poetry of Rumi, yoga and more. Her teachers and mentors include Butch Morris, Henry Threadgill, Don Pullen and other icons of jazz postmodernism, and she has received some of the most prestigious honors available to an improvising musician including a Fulbright Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award.