upcoming

Myra Melford

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The Redwood Jazz Alliance’s spring 2010 season begins on Friday, January 29 with keyboardist and composer Myra Melford and her electro-acoustic group Be Bread, in concert at HSU’s Fulkerson Recital Hall.

Fearlessly adventurous in her composing and playing, Melford (who electrified a Center Arts audience when she played with Humboldt native Jenny Scheinman in December) decided on a musical career relatively late.  Having studied classical piano into her teens, she had no real exposure to jazz till her student days at Evergreen College, where she heard a concert by Chicago’s experimental Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).  The AACM’s fierce brand of improvisation rekindled Melford’s early love of the piano, and over the next decade, after a move to New York, she developed a signature style that turned her into one of the pivotal figures of jazz and modern creative music in the 90s.

At the keyboard, Melford recasts the blues and boogie-woogie of her native Chicago, folds in elements of the music of Eastern Europe and India, and blends them with the rangy, percussive approach she cultivated in studies with piano master Don Pullen and saxophonist and composer Henry Threadgill. Her personal musical vocabulary is further enriched by a lush lyricism and organized by an architectural sense of composition derived from her classical training.

In 2000, Melford traveled as a Fulbright scholar to Calcutta, where she studied the harmonium, a small hand-pump organ used in Indian and Pakistani classical and devotional music, adapting it as a solo instrument.  Be Bread, which the New York Times calls a “powerfully elastic ensemble,” was assembled to showcase the music that emerged from that Indian sojourn.  It’s a variable-sized ensemble built around a core unit of trumpeter Cuong Vu, guitarist Brandon Ross, and bassist Stomu Takeishi, and—in the larger version that will appear in Arcata—clarinetist Ben Goldberg (who has previously played at the RJA with Plays Monk and Go Home) and superstar drummer Matt Wilson.

The group’s repertoire includes compositions from its 2006 debut The Image of Your Body (Cryptogramophone), but this concert will focus heavily on new works commissioned by Chamber Music America’s New Works Presentation program and featured on a new album released January 19th, The Whole Tree Gone (Firehouse 12). 

Spring 2010 also brings to the RJA the piano and tenor sax duo of Frank Kimbrough and Noah Preminger, and highly regarded young drummer Antonio Sanchez with his quartet Migration.  More information about the entire Redwood Jazz Alliance season can be found at www.redwoodjazzalliance.org

Myra Melford’s Be Bread will appear at Fulkerson Recital Hall at 8:00 p.m. on Friday, January 29.  As with all Redwood Jazz Alliance events, Melford and members of the group will also present a free public workshop the morning after the concert.  Both events are funded in part through Meet The Composer’s MetLife Creative Connections program.

Tickets ($15 General Admission, $10 Students and Seniors) and more information are available online at www.redwoodjazzalliance.org.  Tickets are also available at People’s Records, Missing Link Records and The Works.

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