By Yosji Kato
[reprint courtesy of Downbeat]
After wrapping up her day as a professor of improvisation and jazz at the University of California-Berkeley, pianist/harmonium player Myra Melford spoke in her faculty office last December before an improvised performance with multireedist Frank Gratkowski, electronics master David Wessel and violinist Nils Butlmann, Melford is always eager to collaborate as much as lead, demonsrtated by last year's Spark! (Palmetto), a partnership between herself and Marty Ehrlich.
California seems like an ideal setting for you. How has it been?
MM: The students are bright, enthusiastic and creative, so it's been a lot of fun. I started offering an introduction to improvisation class last year because the students needed more opportunities to get introduced to all the possible ways that you could approach improvising. I get a lot of classical players who are quite good but have never improvised. Some of them have gone on to pursue other kinds of improvisation. I've also had the good fortune to work with quite a few of the graduate composers here who are fantastic, and I've performed some of the pieces they've been writing for me.
How was your experience in 2000, when you studied harmonium in Calcutta on a Fulbright scholarship?
There were so many advantages to it, like just to be on the Indian music scene during the the concert season, where many of the concerts take place at night and sometimes all night. There were five or six nights in a row whwre I would get there at seven or eight in the evening and walk home at five or six in the morning, when the sun was coming up. Then there's the aspect about being in that culture, listening to that music with people who have grown up with that music. I made some great friends among Indians who loved jazz and Indian classical music. We had some great discussions about similarities in the culture and the differences. They gave me insights into the music that I might not have gotten, had I not had that time to hang out and talk.
Has it been difficult incorporating a non-traditional Western instruments such as the harmonium into your music?
I've tried to look for some other examples of people who have used it. Alice Coltrane has been a huge inspiration. There was Henry Threadgill's band, the version of "Make A Move" with Tony Cedras playing harmonium and accordion. That was probably the most immediate influence. BBut other than them, that's partly why I went to India, to study the instrument in a place where there was a historical context. I never went with the intention of being able to perform classical Indian music, but just to absorb as much as I could and bring it back to my own house.
As is the case tonight, you're known for playing in many different musical settings. Would you have it any other way?
There are times I think, "My life would be simpler, and maybe I'd go deeper in one particular thing, if I just had one main project." But there was something about my generation in New York, coming up at a time when Dave Douglas or John Zorn was doing lots of different things, and this idea was in the air. So we do have a lot of different things that we're interested in and a lot of different directions to explore. Some of my peers have written different books of music for every project.I feel like that, to a certain extent. It's interesting to have some overlap if I play a given composition with one group and then another. There's something about the different personalities and different instrumentation that can bring a whole new light to a piece.
