Myra Melford Trio

Alive in the House of Saints (hatOLOGY)

Myra Melford Extended Ensemble

Even the Sounds Shine (hatOLOGY)

VERY few avant-gardists have achieved such a union of sheer musical audacity and unfettered swing as the luminous pianist Myra Melford.

She was born in Glencoe, Illinois, in 1957 and grew up in Chicago.

Fascinated by boogie woogie as a young woman, but also living, listening and playing in the Windy City, it was the genre-breaking sounds of the musicians who comprised the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, like pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and violinist Leroy Jenkins, who provoked her adventurous spirit, as well as studies with powerfully innovative pianists like Art Lande and Ron Blake.

During the ’80s she began to play with bands led by fellow musical discoverers like Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris and Joseph Jarman and by the ’90s she was recording in Europe with the pathfinding hatOLOGY label.

In February 1993 she cut the trio double album Alive in the House Of Saints in Frankfurt, with the earthy bassist Lindsey Horner and drummer Reggie Nicholson, who had been a key element of the trio of blues-backed pianist and organist Amina Claudine Myers.

They had been together since 1990 and knew each others’ musical capacities and instincts intimately, as demonstrated continuously during this absorbing two-hour session.

The opener Evening Might Still has Melford’s pellucid chimes ringing out alongside Nicholson’s rocking drums.She ventures down new roads and her notes gather momentum as she peers both sides while Horner’s relentless bass beats sustenance for her journey, then twangs out for its own pinging solo.Now and Now 1 begins speculatively with Nicholson’s quiet sounds and Melford searching for a theme before pace quickens, suspense heightens and the threesome’s sonic fire begins to burn through this German night before Nicholson douses it suddenly as it threatens a blaze.

Between Now and Then has the trio gradually ruminating both together and as soloists and its pauses and changes of pace, including a long, long ominous roll from Nicholson then the huge vitality of Melford’s freeway through an apparent world of mesmerising thoughts.

The two parts of Frank Lloyd Wright Goes West to Rest is anything but slumberous and Melford’s own musical “organic architecture” pounds Cecil Taylor-like along her keys, lending shape and space to the brilliant timbral constructions of her two bandmates, while Breaking Light has Horner’s pulse opening the promise of dawn and Melford’s lucid strides.

Some Kind of Blues begins with Horner and Nicholson in superb unison before Melford’s palpitating notes create a blues sound of aching and throbbing modernity, preluding the strident and anything-but-placid message of the furious That the Peace.

The session ends with the rumbustious Live Jump. Melford begins with an astonishing solo passage heralded by drum-like strikes of her keys, and as her compadres enter. “Alive” is the word as the harmonies and unity fill the ears with compelling ensemble soundscapes.

In May 1994 the trio reconvened in Wuppertal with two other free spirits, Dave Douglas of Montclair, New Jersey, and Marty Ehrlich of St Louis, on trumpet and altosaxophone respectively.

“By adding horns,” Melford wrote, “I was looking to expand the sonic and structural possibilities” — an architect of free improvisation was speaking — and a poet of sound too in the album’s title: “Even the Sounds Shine,” taken from a poem by Fernando Pessoa.

And shine they do from the howling ensemble opening of the title tune to Douglas’s pointillistic stop-time whimpering and declamatory solo and Melford’s percussive forays up and down her keys.

La Mezquita Suite, named after the Cordoba mosque and the “joy and affinity” Melford felt in her first involvement with Flamenco music, is partially a result of her mission to build a structure of sounds to express the concord and beauty of the mosque’s stone columns and architectural glory.

The album’s other tracks reprise the tunes of the first album, augmented by the free-blowing horn voices.But Melford is the music’s draftswoman and true maker of these buildings of such sonic beauty.