By Lazaro Vega

Lazaro Vega: I just wanted to tell you I'm on a 100,000 watt radio station programming jazz 30 hours a week, I do five hours a night, and in September I'm doing the history of jazz piano. This week is Randy Weston, Andrew Hill, Cecil Taylor and then you.

Myra Melford: Oh my gosh.

Vega: You're the final pianist in our retrospective of the history of jazz piano.

Melford: Well, I'm really honored. (Laughs).

Vega: But I think that in many ways you stand atop that tradition because you have, unlike other players of today, embraced everything that's happened. Cecil Taylor's in your vocabulary, Thelonious Monk is in your vocabulary and some of the other people I just mentioned. Maybe Andrew Hill' s ideas.

Melford: For sure.

Vega: I mean there are many players out there who have somehow managed to ignore those in-roads.

Melford: Yes. I see what you're saying. Just that have gone a more traditional route, or?

Vega: Yes, they want to play like Red Garland or Wynton Kelly. They've chosen one aspect of the tradition rather than embraced its entire evolution and development in their expression. I mean, Muhal Richard Abrams could be in the last week of programming, obviously, but I wanted to skip ahead because you're coming to Grand Rapids.

Melford: Oh, that's so nice: thank you very much.

Vega: Do you think that's a fair assessment of where you're coming from?

Melford: Well you know it's interesting. It's not so conscious. I mean I certainly listened to probably just about every jazz piano player, some to a greater extent than others. I've had my favorites that I've really studied, but it was never a conscious decision to try to draw on the full spectrum of the tradition, it was just what made it's way through and became both an inspiration and an influence. I think there's probably other people who I've been influenced by, or other types of music, that don't actually sound like they're in my music, but they have been an inspiration.

Vega: For example?

Melford: All kinds of different ethnic musics: gamelon music, various African percussion traditions, and Eastern European folk music. I guess maybe more and more the older I get the more I'm starting to hear how these things have actually subtly influenced my music.

So whether somebody else would hear that, I don't know.

Vega: But that's what a jazz musician does, right? Is taking everything they've heard and make it a part of their expression.

Melford: Yes. Right

Vega: When you come through Grand Rapids, and I know this is part of a bigger tour, I believe you're debuting a new ensemble, isn't that true? The Crush Trio (with Stomu Takeishi, fretless electric bass, and Kenny Wollesen, drums), is this a new group for you?

Melford: This is a relatively new group for me. We have actually been playing in this configuration on and off for the last two years. I think our first gig was in September of 1997.But we haven't played that much. These are, again, two musicians who are not that easy to get, to book. Especially Kenny is busy a lot. But we have done a couple of short tours in the United States and a longer tour in Europe last year. And we made a record last spring that is coming out on Arabesque in March of 2000. And then we did a few dates in New York and also in France last spring.

So this will be our first time playing since, I think, May.

Vega: Now we're dealing with, in some ways, a long established tradition in music: the piano trio. I'm wondering what are some of the ways you approach this to not repeat what's happened, or to intentionally repeat what's happened in that tradition?

Melford: Well, again (laughs) I have to say (laughs) I think it's more an error of omission, or something. I got asked that question a lot when I had a trio before. I don't know if you heard any of my trio music with Lindsey Horner and Reggie Nicholson.

Vega: I heard your trio on "The October Revolution" (Evidence).

Melford: That was actually with Tom Rainey on drums, but I've worked with Lindsey for years and I worked with Reggie for years, also, and we made three records as a trio. We worked together from about 1990 to maybe the spring of 1997 and then Crush came together in the fall of 1997. (The trio has) been a constant part of my musical life. But it kind of, the last couple of years or sort of towards the end of the original trio, my first trio.and the first year or so of Crush I was focusing more on the quintet music (for the ensemble The Same River, Twice).

So I think in a sense I was ready to take a break from the trio as my main vehicle for writing and playing when I ended the first trio and was working so much with Same River. And then I started feeling like after Same River, which has been a great opportunity for me to stretch out in my writing, I felt like I needed a place where I could play more again, where it was really more about playing. A playing situation for me and not just fitting into an ensemble and making sure that every instrument is featured and so on.

Which has always been my philosophy. From the beginning of having a trio I think these guys did spend a lot of time accompanying me. But I also had a lot of solo space for them, and a lot of group improvisation. I tried to write pieces that featured in each instrument it's own sort of ability to play a theme or to play a melody, even if it was on drums. I guess that harkens back to the Bill Evans Trio where he really freed up the bass player and the drummer to act as a sort of separate melodic or solo voice in the ensemble. So I've been doing that for a long time.

I certainly love listening to, say many of the Monk trio sessions. I mean, I love that format, the piano trio, because you get to hear so much piano, and yet there's this great underlying bed in support for the piano to take off.

Sometimes solo piano can be a bit of a big job. Because even though it seems like, well it's easy for piano to play solo as opposed to just a single-line instrument, you have a lot of stuff to think about and take care of all at the same time. When there's a bass player and drummer it somehow feels like it lightens the load. It's a great context to play in.

Vega: Would you get a little more specific in musical terms about what you mean by 'they lighten the load?'

Melford: If I'm playing solo piano, whether I'm playing every single function, I'm thinking about whether it's covered or whether it needs to be covered. And that (means) some kind of bottom to the harmony, if there is harmony, or something being played in the range of the bass, whether it's in the piano or on the bass, on a separate instrument.

When I think of music I always want to cover all the bases, and now I'm talking in terms of like baseball bases, in one way or another. I don't have to cover everything in every piece, as I said, but I think about what is the function of the low register of the music? What's being played in there, if anything? What is providing rhythmic impetus, and is it being stated overtly or is it an underlying feel that is being played off of or only hinted at?

When I play solo piano these are things that I either play or consciously avoid, because that's part of what statement I'm making in the particular piece. When I'm playing with bass and drums, I don't have to think about that at all, other than the fact that I'm arranging the music and I'm asking them to play a certain way. But I don't have to play that, say in my left hand or between my two hands and then also solo on top of it if I want to solo in sort of a right handed way.

One of the things that I've done is developed a way of improvising that's a very two-handed approach and very textural. So I can use that either in a solo context or over a rhythm section or in combination with other instruments.

So I found ways to really make a lot of sound on the piano, and cover the full range and so on. But when there are other people playing with me, and especially a bass player and a drummer, it's a time when I can go back to a more traditional role as a 'jazz pianist' and assign the bass function to the bass player. Even though they have more freedom than this. I don'' want them to only play a traditional role. But there is that aspect that they can cover, and the drummer can play the time, or he can play color. Then I can interact with those things and just play a part of them. So it allows me to play less, and it also allows me to play with greater freedom because I have less responsibility, in a sense.

Vega: That's really fascinating. I had a chance to see The Same River, Twice band when you appeared at the Chicago Jazz Festival. I was in the audience for that and noted you certainly do get a lot of sound out of the piano! (Laughs). That was a good performance. Were you happy with that one?

Melford: Yeah. That was fun. It's not easy to play in a situation like that. It's hard to hear the sound on stage isn't good and so on. And you don't really know whom you're playing for; the audience is a little bit far away and so on. Considering all that, and the fact that my music is necessarily immediately accessible to people that haven't listened to the tradition that I come from, I felt like it was a very successful concert. And we had fun making music despite the sound problems, so.

Vega: Currently there's two recording by The Same River, Twice, that are available, right, one on Gramavision and one, "Above Blue" on Arabesque? Are those your most recent output?

Melford: Yeah they are in terms of recording history. I did make a record with Han Bennink in 1994 that come out in between the two quintet records.

Vega: How did you find performing with him? He seems more like a performance artist than an improviser at times.

Melford: Well, I think he's both: he's an improvising performance artist. But he certainly comes out of that Dada and Fluxes school that's a lot about theater as well as music. It was great to work with him. It was challenging for sure. I played with him long enough to come up with some strategies that seemed to work. I had a really good time playing with him and I think the record reflects that. The challenge in the beginning was finding some variety for me in how to approach playing with him, because he's a powerhouse. It's impossible for me to just play loud and hard for 45 minutes or an hour, even though (laughing) I can play pretty loud and hard.

Vega: I've had it explained to me that you reach a certain point in American improvisation in the late 1950's through Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman where anything is possible. And when you get to this level where anything is possible in Germany you had Schoenberg come in and re-establish order with the 12-tone system, but in America that really didn't happen. It seems to be the challenge of the improvisor today to find a structure to hold the improvisation given the parameter that anything is possible. Can you comment on that?

Melford: Well, I agree with you. I don't quite see the history of jazz in relation to European music the way you do, but I do agree in the sense that Schoenberg was saying to his contemporaries there's got to be some order and we have to depart from the system as we know it.

I think that is probably, whether it's acknowledged or not, that's one of the main problems if you will of my generation of composers and musicians. Everybody is solving the problem in his or her own way. But it's too take all of the influences of our predecessors and the point where we've reached at the end of the 20th Century that anything is possible, anything goes. No one can define what is jazz or what is music anymore with the limits we came in to this century with, even half way through this century with.

I feel like I represent, even though I'm doing my own music, I represent my generation and my sort of school of music that I'm involved in by finding my own way of organizing all the elements and all the resources and influences available.

I think you're right, part of that is saying, 'O.k., yes -- free jazz and totally free improvisation is great, and then what? And now what do we want to do with that? How do we use that vocabulary, that texture and that energy?'

There's plenty of people who are still out there going for it very hardcore, but that doesn't appeal to me. I've had to find other ways of incorporating it into my compositions as part the improvisation, or as a specific texture a composition calls for. Something like that.

Vega: I think at one point in this there was a definite stream of music from Albert Ayler and John Coltrane's approach, that really kinetic, blow your brains out for hours intense energy music that 'Trane was typical of after ' 65 and Ayler got to by '63. And then there's your teacher, Joseph Jarman, and the people in the A.A.C.M. who sort of reacted against that and said we can put space back into the music again and use silence as part of the line but still use some of the signal energies they were talking about. Then after the A.A.C.M. that's when things get more nebulous.

Melford: Well it's hard to have perspective on it when you're right in the middle of it. It's true. I see it more like; there are people who have just ignored, as you said, this whole development of the music, the post-Coltrane development of the music.

Vega: It seems like that whole thing went over to Europe.

Melford: A lot of it did. And it was embraced in a very big way. There's a huge tradition of free improvisation and all kinds of experiments with improvisation in European music from country to country. And it will differ from culture to culture, but it was embraced in a very big way.

But over here is was ignored or overlooked by a lot of people. You can't judge people for their taste. And it's hard to say what the future of the music is.

To me the important thing is that, you know music, and jazz in particular is a fabulous vehicle for personal expression. As a jazz musician or improvising musician one has so many choices about how to interpret and where to go in the middle of a piece and to play it different from night to night which the classical world doesn't have on the same level.

What inspires and drives me is looking to develop my own voice to the greatest extent that I can. Trying to play somebody else's music, or interpret a style or even develop a style from a particular style of twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, is not where I'm coming from at all. I gave up playing classical music in high school, because that was never my thing to play somebody else's music. When I started studying jazz I quickly found out that playing bebop or trying to master a particular style like that, or stride, was not my style. I really have to just make my own music and play what's inside me.

So I understand it's interesting to look at the history and look at where the music is going, but it's those people who have looked inside and done their own thing who have really stood out to me as the most inspiring musicians. Whether it's Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Coltrane, Henry Threadgill, Muhal, Andrew Hill, Monk or so many people.

Vega: I mean that's Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, too.

Melford: Exactly. And Charlie Parker. And Bud Powell. You know.

Vega: Yeah.

Melford: For sure.