Myra Melford

For the Love of Fire and Water

Rogueart

Pianist and composer Myra Melford assembles a super group of improvising players for what she has dubbed the Fire and Water Quintet and an album of a similar name, For the Love of Fire and Water.  She says this is the first installment of a multi-part project inspired by modern artist Cy Twombly, another who lives on the edges of conventional forms. In digging into Twombly’s process, often considered subversive and scribbly but worthy of exposition at museums such as the MoMA in NYC, Melford relates this, “I read that when Twombly was a young artist, one of the things he did to train himself was to turn out all the lights at night and draw in the dark. He was interested in what it felt like to make the line more than what it looked like, and that seemed like an apt metaphor for how I play the piano. For me, it’s all about the gesture and the energy. Of course, there’s a sound to it, but It’s almost as if the sound is the information I get after the impulse to make a gesture.”

 Since all here is unconventional, the review began a bit differently but now we are back on course, not forgetting to cite these players: Mary Halvorson on guitar, Ingrid Laubrock on soprano and tenor saxophone, Tomeka Reid on cello, and Susie Ibarra on drums and percussion. This group – each an accomplished composer and bandleader in her own right — first convened as part of Melford’s June 2019 residency at The Stone, the famed NYC avant-garde venue. The response to the debut, a one off, minimally rehearsed performance of a potpourri of ideas and text directions, was so enthusiastic that Melford decided to bring these four women to the studio, eventually recording this in just a day and a half. Commenting on the nature of an all-female group, Melford offers, “Coming up as a woman in this music, it felt important to show that I could play with anybody and not put myself in a box. But as I’ve gotten older, it’s felt more important to support both my female-identifying students and peers. So, I thought, if I can put a great band together that happens to be all women, why not?”

Melford has been down this road before, in terms of inspiration from Twombly as well as South African artist and animator William Kendridge with her acclaimed group Snowy Egret and their 2018 The Other Side of Air.  The compositions on this album though, loosely respond to Gaeta Set (for the Love of Fire & Water), an oil-on-paper series that Twombly completed in 1981. Melford acquired Twombly’s series in digital form from the Brandhorst Museum in Munich, where they are permanently housed.

The ten movements accompany ten of Twombly’s drawings The listening is not always comfortable. Let’s take “I.” Melford goes from rapid fluid runs to crashing, loud, dissonant chords in an instant, setting the course for Reid, who also fleetly navigates the delicate to the abrasive. Halvorson fills in the spaces with often choppy but cleverly inventive lines, while Ibarra seems rather occupied in her space that doesn’t always coincide with the others. Laubrock plays skittering, tight, piercing and harshly toned phrases. Somehow though, Melford’s vibrancy brings it back together, almost like a herding sheepdog gathering the wandering sheep.  Laubrock’s squeals and squalls set a frenetic pace and tone for “II” while “III” has playful interplay among all with the leader tinkering with abandon. “IV” features an elegiac unison melody that Melford compares to a foggy day and Ibarra playing detuned Filipino gongs.  According to Melford, the goal was for everybody to color the notes, the timbre and the attack differently each time they played it.

“VII” opens in scattered fragments but morphs into syncopation. Melford says that in “VIII” the solos were supposed to be recorded over an asymmetrical, hand-clapped beat, each distinctive with each improviser’s voice.  “IX” begins with feisty conversations between Laubrock’s soprano, Halvorson’s guitar, and Melford’s melodica before it changes halfway through to a march-like tempo that builds into a frenzied, intense burst of joyous noise. This sets up a rather surprising, peaceful concluding piece that Melford describes as a chorale, ending with the pianist and Halvorson carefully fading out while playing sweet abstractions, like a sun slipping behind a horizon.

The album is a set of contrasts – space and cacophony, dark tones and light tones, crescendos and fades, frenetic and ethereal, romantic and abrasive, grounded and free. These polarities intersect as if to reflect the force and unpredictability of nature whether it’s related to Melford’s pilgrimage with the Huichol Indians of Mexico who hold their own sacred beliefs or her visit to Gaeta, the small coastal town in Italy where Twombly developed his oil-on-paper series. There she was impactfully struck by the different patterns of the sun hitting the water. While Melford has plans to project the drawings on a screen while delivering these ten movements live, there is little substitute for her own personal impressions that go even deeper.

The ever-explorative Melford feels that she is still learning; that there’s so much more to explore in putting Twombly’s art to her inventive music.  Her music typifies the way journalist Phil Freeman describes most of today’s avant-gardists – ugly beauty. Dive in, you don’t have to understand it to appreciate it.

• Jim Hynes

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