Myra Melford Assistant Professor

208 Morrison Hall
Phone: (510) 642-0284
Email: mmelford@berkeley.edu
Personal website: http://www.myramelford.com/

Office Hours

Myra Melford is currently Assistant Professor of Improvisation and Jazz in the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Her course, “Current Trends in Jazz and Improvisation-based Musics—A Performance Workshop,” allows students to explore the role of improvisation in contemporary jazz and creative music through performance. The course emphasizes developing the tools of an improviser and a personal language and approach to improvisation and composition, as well as an aesthetic and critical knowledge of current practices. She has taught piano, ear training, improvisation, composition, history of Western music and jazz at The Brearley School, the Lincoln Center Institute and privately. In addition she has taught master classes and workshops around the world, including Columbia, Yale, and Harvard Universities in the U.S., the Lulunkyla Conservatory in Helsinki, and the University of Padova, Italy. She earned a B.A. from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. She completed her studies with pianist Art Lande and bassist Gary Peacock at the Cornish Institute in Seattle, and with reedist-composer Henry Threadgill and pianist Don Pullen in New York City.

Areas of Interest: Improvisation in contemporary music, post-1960’s jazz studies, the music of the AACM, blues, North Indian music, Butoh, and multi-media collaborations.

According to critic Francis Davis, Myra Melford is “the genuine article, the most gifted pianist/composer to emerge from jazz since Anthony Davis.” A composer and bandleader with a “commitment to refreshing, often surprising uses of melody, harmony and ensemble playing,” according to NPR’s Reuben Jackson, Melford currently leads or co-leads four groups: the electro-acoustic quartet, Be Bread; The Tent, a flexible group of five musicians whom she employs in settings ranging from acoustic quintet to drummerless trio of trumpet, bass guitar, and piano/harmonium; a cooperative duo with reedist Marty Ehrlich; and Equal Interest, a collaborative trio with reedist Joseph Jarman and violinist Leroy Jenkins. She also performs solo concerts and has recorded and performed with composer-saxophonist Henry Threadgill, conductionist Butch Morris, and violinist Jenny Scheinman. Early in her career she led the Myra Melford Trio; the quintet The Same River, Twice; and the electro-acoustic trio/quartet Crush. Since 1991, she has appeared on more than 20 recordings, including nine as a leader. As Jazziz magazine noted, “The confidence to go so far into uncharted territory and the ability to carry listeners along—then bring them back—attest to Melford's vision.”

As a composer, Melford has received numerous commissions, including the Chamber Music America New Works Presentation Grant for new music for quintet (2003), and a British Arts Council commission (1999) for a nonet comprised of Equal Interest and 6 British musicians. She received a commission from the Steirische Kulturinitiative (2000) for the multimedia project, “My Face of us All” a work for three musicians, butoh dancer, architect and videographer. She received a Harvestworks Project Residency in 2003–4 and a University of California at Berkeley Junior Faculty Research Grant in 2004–5 to develop an interactive computer system using max/MSP for a new multi-media project, “Knock on the Sky,” as well an NPN touring/residency grant to present the work in 2006.

Other commissions include the dance-theater score “My House Was Collapsing to One Side,” premiered at Dance Theater Workshop New York City in 1996; and “D Train,” an evening-length score for the Fay Simpson Dance Theater. Melford is also the recipient of three Arts International Grants to perform at foreign festivals, three Composition Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as commissioning grants from the Mary Flager Cary Charitable Trust and Meet the Composer. Down Beat Critics’ polls have honored Melford as “talent-deserving-wider-recognition” as a pianist and composer and in 2004 the Jazz Journalists Association nominated her for “jazz composer of the year”.

She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study North Indian music on the harmonium in Calcutta, where she was in residency from September 2000 through May 2001.

Her publications include “Aural Architecture” in Arcana: Musicians on Music (Granary Books, New York, 1999); “Architextures: Musical Composition as Architecture” in Music and Architecture (Haus der Architektur, Graz, Austria, 1997); and “Living Music” in Ear & Eye Book (Schott, Edition Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, Germany 2004).

Updated 11/16/2005