Burning Dervish

Excerpt from Myra Melford's official biography:

"...At the keyboard, Melford recasts the blues and boogie-woogie of her native Chicago, folds in elements of the music of Eastern Europe and India, and blends them with the rangy, percussive avant-garde approach she cultivated in studies with Don Pullen and Henry Threadgill. This personal musical vocabulary is further enriched by a lush lyricism and organized by an architectural sense of composition that she derived from classical training..."

And about her group Be Bread:

"...Myra Melford created the group to play music based on her harmonium studies in India, and the band’s book includes both pieces composed on the melodica – that use a wide range of timbres available through acoustic instruments like banjo and harmonium as well as electronically manipulated sound – and more recent compositions that that form the acoustic suite for sextet, The Whole Tree Gone, a work commissioned by Chamber Music America’s New Works Presentation..."

In spirit, if not exact style, I hear Sonny Sharrock, Santana, Shakti, Alice Coltrane, McCoy Tyner...a great contemporary take on spiritual jazz...

1. equal grace 8:29
2. luck shifts 9:18
3. fear slips behind 5:09
4. to the roof 11:37
5. yellow are crowds of flowers,ii 5:55
6. the image of your body 7:11
7. be bread 4:46
8. if you've not been fed 3:27
9. you face arrives in the redbud trees 9:27
10. made it out 0:46

Cuong Vu - (trumpet)
Ben Goldberg - (clarinet)
Brandon Ross - (guitar)
Stomu Takeishi - (electric bass)
Matt Wilson - (drums)
Myra Melford - (piano, harmonium)

Download: Myra Melford's Be Bread - The Image of Your Body