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Myra Melford- The Image of Your Body


B. Goren.

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The Image of Your Body will be available on September 26th.

The line up:

Myra Melford - piano, harmonium

Brandon Ross - electric guitar, banjo, voice

Cuong Vu - trumpet, electronics

Stomu Takeishi - electric and acoustic bass guitar, electronics

Elliot Humberto Kavee - drums

This is Melford's first on Cryptogramophone. Myra is one of my favorite musicians so I'm looking forward to listen to it.

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B. Goren, I have a review copy of this one. I have four Cryptogramophone albums, and they all remind me of music from the 70s, although in different ways.

About the time that the Blue Note board was shut down (Has it been three years?), the British guys over at AAJ were singing the praises of a 70s album by Neil Ardley called A Kaleidescope of Rainbows. I gathered that for some of them it was their favorite record.

The Image of Your Body reminds me of Kaleidescope. It's a good album, but my least favorite of the four Cryptogramophones. I find the songs impressionistic without a handle to grab onto. None of the songs are hummable, but they are pleasant to listen to if you are in the right mood.

I had never heard of Melford before. B. Goren, tell us what you know about her and why you like her!

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Here are the album's liner notes:

I wrote most of this music in June of 2002. It’s the first set of new music I completed since returning from India almost a year earlier (though earlier that spring I had written a few individual pieces for my quintet, the Tent, and the collective trio, Equal Interest). I was waiting to see what would emerge naturally from my experience as opposed to trying to make something happen.

One of the things I notice about this music is the layers of simultaneous activity, not unlike life in modern-day India: a continual bombardment of the senses and a mingling of the peace of the ancient with the hustle of the present. In Calcutta, in particular, the commotion can be overwhelming, yet at the same time I experienced incredible joy and a certain calmness at the heart of it all.

For this album’s music I turned once again to the Sufi mystic poet Rumi for inspiration. This time all of the music came from one poem, The Image of Your Body, which in hindsight is an apt metaphor for my own journey of the last 2 years, as indeed I’ve made it out of the city. I spent 2002-3 at an ashram in upstate New York, and now I’m in Berkeley, CA.

I first played this music on the melodica and as a result, much of it is based on melody. It’s conceived as quartet music, but what’s important here is not the instrumentation but rather individual musical personality. Brandon and Cuong each brings his own voice to the music in a way that’s beautiful and quite different from the other, and so I include performances with both of them. I also include here two older pieces, Equal Grace and Yellow Are Crowds of Flowers, II, written for my group Crush (which toured both as a trio with Stomu Takeishi and Kenny Wollesen and quartet with Cuong). I so like the way this band plays them that I felt they were worth revisiting for this recording.

This is my first project with drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee, whose sensitivity to what’s happening in the moment and whose ability to enhance it make him a true joy to play with. And Stomu’s sense of time, space and esthetics provides enduring inspiration and support. As always with music like this, which depends so much on the individual players’ contribution, my heartfelt thanks to these musicians for making it happen.

May we all, musician and listener alike, become the ones that, when we walk in, luck shifts to the one who needs it.

Myra Melford

Berkeley, California

June, 2006

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I'm enjoying this. I have become a fan of Cuong Vu and particularly enjoyed his contribution to Matthias Lupri's Transition Sonic. There are some similarities with that album, with more of an ECM vibe than the other things I have heard from Myra. I'm willing to wait for the next album, or dig up some more of Myra's back catalog in order to hear piano featured more prominently. Myra's harmonium does blend well with Vu and the rest of the group. Brandon Ross reminds me of what I like about Terje Rypdal, without seeming at all derivative. The piano that is here (about half the time) is prime.

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Here's what Doug Ramsey has to say about The Image of Your Body in his Rifftides blog today:

Cryptogramophone

In its ninth year, the little Cryptogramophone label is attracting increasing attention for recordings on the forward edge of music, with good sound and imaginative packaging. Myra Melford and Nels Cline have new CDs on the label, both likely to attract listeners who accept that jazz values can exist apart from standard song forms and harmony, and without being tied to a steady 4/4 pulse.

Myra Melford

In The Image of Your Body, Melford continues her fascination with music of India. A fearless piano improviser and a composer of meticulous precision, she introduces her new five-piece band, Be Bread. She called her last five-piece band, which had nearly the same instrumentation, The Tent. The mystique of band-naming aside, Melford's music uses the evocative capabilities of electronics and amplification to summon up the exotic atmospheres of the subcontinent and hint at the spiritual mysteries there. She employs the Indian instrument the harmonium, as she did in her previous album, The Tent, to impart a kind of folk simplicity as one layer in the complexity of "Equal Grace," "Be Bread," "If You've Not Been Fed" and the title track.

The iconoclastic trumpeter Cuong Vu is on board again. Guitarist-banjoist-vocalist Brandon Ross, bassist and electronicsician (it's a new word) Stomu Takeishi and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee are recent arrivals in Melford's world, which is wide. For all of the unfettered--not to say unhinged--expressionism in the improvisation throughout a piece called "Fear Slips Behind," Melford wraps up the track in the last twenty-six seconds with a lapidary bit of ensemble writing that might have come from Andrew Hill or Sam Rivers in the 1960s. There are too few extended passages of her piano playing, though one of them begins the long performance called "Yellow Are the Crowds of Flowers." Then the piano melds into Ross's keening guitar, and we seem headed into a stretch of ECM-ish floating. Before long, however, the band is generating gale-force mutual improvisation that lasts until Melford calms things down at the keyboard and the sun comes out just as it is setting. Did I mention that this is evocative music?

Cuong Vu's own CD, It's Mostly Residual, includes his Melford bandmate Stomu Takeishi and the always gripping guitarist Bill Frisell. It is well worth hearing.

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Review by Troy Collins:

The Image of Your Body

Pianist Myra Melford has an abiding interest in India. She cites the writings of the Sufi mystic poet Rumi, as well as her own harmonium studies there, as major influences on her writing, again borrowing from the subcontinent's traditions on this album. Many of these pieces were composed on melodica, enriching them with a strong harmonic foundation and lyric character that she transposes into a sumptuous group sound.

Melford's core trio of veteran bassist Stomu Takeishi (from two of her ensembles, Crush and The Tent) and newcomer drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee is joined on alternating tracks by trumpeter Cuong Vu or guitarist Brandon Ross for a set of compositions that are equally informed by Eastern and Western music traditions.

The rhythm section provides resourceful interplay, Takeishi's full-bodied fretless bass and Humberto Kavee's swirling trap set commingling seamlessly with the leader's own excursions. Melford's pianism engages with adroit impressionism, while her harmonium playing is raw and primal.

Cuong Vu's occasional appearances yield impressive results. He contributes ghostly declarations on “Equal Grace” and “Fear Slips Behind.” His splintery, hoarse tone separates him from any number of academically pristine technicians. “Yellow Are Crowds of Flowers, II” features him in full expressionistic bloom, stridently navigating an intensifying abstract assault.

Brandon Ross plays banjo on the ethnic explorations of the title track and “Be Bread,” adding an element of sonic authenticity to the proceedings. Plugging in, his electric guitar burns on the brief “If You've Not Been Fed,” plying long tones and sustained harmonics over a deconstructed, loping funk pulse. Ross soars on the aptly titled “To The Roof,” the album's energetic, emotional climax. Melford introduces the piece with tender, lyrical fragments before he enters, slowly building together in intensity until the piece explodes in an outpouring of electric fervor and resoundingly dramatic pianism, driven by a boisterous rubato rhythm.

Melford is resplendent at the piano. The melodious improviser's exquisite lyrical sensibility is never overshadowed by her vivacious energy. Equally capable of delicate introspection and spry commentary, both of which are featured prominently on ”Luck Shifts,” she chooses her methods wisely. “Yellow Are Crowds of Flowers, II” reveals her outré side, with a pneumatic solo full of unbridled passion and barbed commentary that's breathtaking in its intensity.

An estimable merger of electro-acoustic improvisation with Eastern song forms, The Image of Your Body demonstrates how Melford's luminous writing transcends the boundaries of genre and style.

Track listing: Equal Grace; Luck Shifts; Fear Slips Behind; To The Roof; Yellow Re Crowds of Flowers, II; The Image of Your Body; Be Bread; If You've Not Been Fed; Your Face Arrives In The Redbud Trees; Made It Out.

Personnel: Myra Melford: piano, harmonium; Brandon Ross: electric guitar, banjo, voice (2,4,6-8,10); Cuong Vu: trumpet, electronics (1,3,5,9); Stomu Takeishi: electric and acoustic bass guitar, electronics; Elliot Humberto Kavee: drums.

mmelford2006.jpg

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=22825

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