Myra Melford’s Fire and Water

Hailed by The New Yorker as “a stalwart of the new-jazz movement,” the endlessly gifted pianist, composer, bandleader, and educator Myra Melford comes to TACAW with her dynamic all-star Fire and Water Quintet. The quintet brings together Melford (composer/piano), Ingrid Laubrock (tenor and soprano saxophones), Mary Halvorson (electric guitar) and Tomeka Reid (cello), and rising star Lesley Mok (drums). Their critically acclaimed debut, inspired by a set of drawings by the visual artist Cy Twombly, For the Love of Fire and Water was released in April 2022 on the RogueArt label. A second album, Hear the Light Singing, adding “insertions” to the original suite, written with each player’s unique musical personality in mind, was released in October 2023 to immense critical acclaim. In the last three years, the band has toured from Pori to San Sebastien to Austin to San Francisco and everywhere in between.

Myra Melford’s Fire and Water

Myra Melford

The Bay Area pianist Myra Melford—hard-angled counterpoint, potent grooves, free exploration, intuitive interplay, chamber-music elements and much more. Born in 1957 and raised near Chicago, Melford’s early tutelage included both classical training and the Windy City blues and boogie-woogie she absorbed through her first piano teacher, Erwin Helfer. 

She became introduced to jazz during college, in Olympia, Washington, and later studied under Art Lande and Gary Peacock in Seattle before heading east, first to Boston and then to New York. Once immersed in the city that nurtured Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and her other avant-jazz beacons, she began making her own vital contributions to the burgeoning Downtown scene. In these formative years she participated in a workshop with AACM hero Leroy Jenkins, studied piano with Jaki Byard and Don Pullen, took composition lessons from Henry Threadgill and began a decade-long tenure in ensembles led by “Conduction” innovator Butch Morris.

Since debuting on record as a bandleader in 1990, she’s accrued a discography containing more than 20 albums as a leader or co-leader and boasting collaborations with creative-music luminaries like Dave Douglas, Ben Goldberg, Chris Speed, Erik Friedlander, Cuong Vu and Marty Ehrlich. Her working groups have acted as both singular, self-contained units and larger statements of her always developing ideas about composition and improvisation. In her early trio with Lindsey Horner and Reggie Nicholson, Melford established a searching, democratic take on trio language that expanded in later groups like Equal Interest, with Jenkins and Joseph Jarman; Trio M, featuring Matt Wilson and Mark Dresser; and the freely improvising. A similarly all-embracing mission, based in writing that is at once intricate and receptive to the whims of the ensemble, has defined her quintets and sextets, including the Same River, Twice, Be Bread and now Snowy Egret.

Along the way, Melford has received some of the most prestigious honors in contemporary music, including numerous Down Beat poll placings, a 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music and, in 2013, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. That same year, she earned a Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts, during which she facilitated forward-looking programming at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. A 2000 Fulbright scholarship allowed Melford to study in North India for nine months, a journey that informed the early music of Be Bread. In 2016, Snowy Egret was named Midsize Ensemble of the Year in the Jazz Journalists Association’s annual Jazz Awards. whom the New Yorker called “a stalwart of the new-jazz movement”—has spent the last three decades making brilliant original music that is equally challenging and engaging. Over the years, and inspired by extramusical sources like literature,

history and spirituality, she’s explored an array of formats, from ruminative solo-piano recitals to

deeply interactive small groups, ambitious multidisciplinary programs and even the swinging

grandeur of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.  Her idiom-bending ingenuity—which has garnered Melford fans from the worlds of jazz, contemporary classical and the avant-garde—has been a through line in her musical life.

An experienced educator as well, Melford relocated to the Bay Area from New York in 2004 to join the music department at the University of California, Berkeley. A Professor of Composition and Improvisational Practices for the Department of Music, she continues to bring cutting-edge jazz and new music to the campus community via her teaching and as a guest curator for the Cal Performances organization.

Tomeka Reid

Described as a “New Jazz Power Source” by the New York Times, cellist and composer TOMEKA REID has emerged as one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians in Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music community over the last decade. Her distinctive melodic sensibility, always rooted in a strong sense of groove, has been featured in many distinguished ensembles over the years. Reid released her debut recording as a bandleader in 2015, with the Tomeka Reid Quartet, a vibrant showcase for the cellist’s improvisational acumen as well as her dynamic arrangements and compositional ability. The quartet’s second album, Old New, released in Oct 2019 on Cuneiform Records, has been described as “fresh and transformative—its songs striking out in bold, lyrical directions with plenty of Reid’s singularly elegant yet energetic and sharp-edged bow work.” And, most recently, in April of 2024, what has been considered Reid’s most adventurous Quartet recording to date is the highly acclaimed 3+3.

A 2022 MacArthur Fellow and Herb Alpert Artist and 2021 USA Fellow, Reid has received awards from the Foundation of the Arts (2019), 3Arts (2016) and received her doctorate in music from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017. Reid has been a key member of ensembles led by legendary reedists like Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, as well as a younger generation of visionaries including flutist Nicole Mitchell, vocalist Dee Alexander, and drummer Mike Reed.

In 2013, she launched the first Chicago Jazz String Summit, a semi-annual three-day international festival of cutting edge string players held in Chicago. From 2019 to 2021, Tomeka Reid received a teaching appointment at Mills College as the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition.

Mary Halvorson

Guitarist, composer and MacArthur fellow MaryHalvorson has been described as “a singular talent” (Lloyd Sachs, JazzTimes), ”NYC’s least-predictable improviser” (Howard Mandel, City Arts), “one of the most original jazz guitarists of our time” (Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily), and “one of today’s most formidable bandleaders” (Francis Davis, Village Voice). In recent Downbeat Critics Polls she has been celebrated as guitarist, rising star jazz artist, and rising star composer of the year. Halvorson’s most recent release, Cloudward (Nonesuch Records, 2024), features her Amaryllis sextet, with Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Jacob Garchik (trombone), Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums), along with special guest Laurie Anderson (violin) on one track. In a 9/10 review by PopMatters’ Chris Ingalls, the album was described as “a shimmering, deeply satisfying example of a jazz sextet firing on all cylinders. Prepare to be astonished.” Halvorson is also part of several collaborative projects, most notably the longstanding trio Thumbscrew, with Michael Formanek on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. Over the past two decades she has worked with such diverse musicians as Tim Berne, Anthony Braxton, Taylor Ho Bynum, John Dieterich, Trevor Dunn, Bill Frisell, Ingrid Laubrock, Myra Melford, Jason Moran, Joe Morris, Tom Rainey, Jessica Pavone, Tomeka Reid, Marc Ribot, Ches Smith and John Zorn.

Lesley Mok

Lesley Mok is a New York City-based percussionist and interdisciplinary artist who works in sound, installation, film, and theater. Interested in the ways social conditions shape our beings, Lesley’s work focuses on overacting humanness to explore ideas about alienness and privilege. Their work draws from queer and feminist art practices, Chinese philosophy, and Afro-Cuban musical traditions. 

Their ongoing explorations with composition and improvisation are most notably documented in their debut album The Living Collection (American Dreams Records, 2023) that features a ten-piece improvising chamber ensemble. The album was named International Debut Album of the Year at the 2024 Deutscher Jazz Preis. Other recent works include stilled leaf-chatter (2022), bird in its chest (2022), pooling light (2021), but I forced to mind my vision of a sky (2020), and (2020).

Lesley is a recipient of the 2022 Resident Artist at Roulette Intermedium, 2021 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award, Hermitage Fellow, 2021 Van Lier Artist at the Asian American Arts Alliance, and a member of the inaugural cohort of Mutual Mentorship for Musicians. Their work has been commissioned and performed by International Contemporary Ensemble, Metropolis Ensemble, and JACK Quartet. 

As a percussionist, Lesley has performed alongside Tomeka Reid, William Parker, Ingrid Laubrock, Halvorson, Kenny Barron, John Patitucci, Cory Smythe, Jen Shyu, Kalia Vandever, Fay Victor, Adam O’Farrill, and others.

Ingrid Laubrock

Ingrid Laubrock is an experimental saxophonist and composer, interested in  exploring the borders between musical realms and creating multi-layered, dense and  often evocative sound worlds. A prolific composer, Laubrock was named a “true 

visionary” by pianist and The Kennedy Center’s artistic director Jason Moran, and a “fully committed saxophonist and visionary” by The New Yorker. Her composition Vogelfrei was nominated “one of the best 25 Classical tracks of 2018” by The New York Times. 

Laubrock has performed with Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jason Moran, Kris Davis, Nels Cline, Tyshawn Sorey, Mary Halvorson, Myra Melford, Zeena Parkins, Tom Rainey, Tim Berne, Dave Douglas, Wet Ink and many others. Laubrock has composed for ensembles ranging from solo to chamber orchestra. 

Awards include Fellowship in Jazz Composition by the Arts Foundation, BBC Jazz Prize for Innovation, SWR German Radio Jazz Prize and German Record Critics Quarterly Award. She won Rising Star Soprano Saxophonist in the Down Beat Annual Critics Poll in 2015 and best Tenor Saxophonist in 2018. 

Ingrid has received composing commissions by The Fromm Music Foundation, BBC Glasgow Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Yarn/Wire, Grossman Ensemble, The Shifting Foundation, The Robert D. Bielecki Foundation,  The Jerwood Foundation, American Composers Orchestra, Tricentric Foundation, SWR New Jazz Meeting, Jazzahead, Wet Ink Ensemble, The Jazz Gallery Commissioning Series, NY State Council of the Arts, Wet Ink, John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning Series and the EOS Orchestra. 

She is an 2022/23 Artist-in-residence of The Wet Ink Ensemble. She is a recipient of the 2019 Herb Alpert Ragdale Prize in Music Composition, the 

2022 Herb Alpert Ucross Prize in Music Composition and the 2021 Berklee Institute of Gender Justice Women Composers Collection Grant. 

She is part-time faculty at Columbia University and The New School. She holds an MFA in Music Composition from Vermont College of Fine Arts.