Myra Melford

Assistant Professor, Improvisation and Jazz

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

Office location: 208 Morrison

Email: mmelford@berkeley.edu
Office phone: 642-0284
Web site: http://www.myramelford.com

Office hours: On Leave

Personal statement

Improvising pianist and composer Myra Melford is a sonic explorer whose career has been defined by a restless curiosity and openness to collaborative creativity. A Chicago native, she graduated from Evergreen State College and pursued music studies at the Cornish Institute. After moving to the East Coast in 1982 she studied with several musical innovators, including Ran Blake, Jaki Byard, Don Pullen and Henry Threadgill. During the 1990s, she recorded seven albums as a leader and another eight as co-leader or sideperson that, together with live performances, established her as a distinctive voice with what Duke Ellington scholar Reuben Jackson called “a commitment to refreshing, often surprising uses of melody, harmony and ensemble playing.”

In 2000, Melford was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study North Indian music on the harmonium in Calcutta, reflecting her interest in expanding her sound palette beyond the piano and in incorporating non-Western elements into her compositions. Since 2001 she has completed ten recordings as a leader or co-leader and performed extensively around the world in diverse musical settings. As a composer, Melford has received numerous commissions and grants from organizations including Chamber Music America, the British Arts Council, the Hellman Family Fund, Performing Arts Japan, Meet the Composer and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

As an educator, Melford has conducted lessons and classes in performance, improvisation and composition in a number of settings including private sessions, master classes at universities and conservatories in the U.S. and abroad, and through both the Brearley School and the Lincoln Center Institute in New York City. Since joining the music faculty at UC Berkeley in 2004 she has developed and taught a series of courses in contemporary jazz and improvisation-based music for performers and composers in addition to lecturing on innovations in jazz since the 1960s and other topics in contemporary improvised music.