Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet: For the Love of Fire and Water
RogueArt

Press releases are notorious for exaggerating the value of an artist or project, but the one for the latest release from the ever-adventurous pianist Myra Melford is correct on at least one count: For the Love of Fire and Water is indeed “a gathering of some of the most compelling improvisers working today.” The personnel she recruited for the project—Mary Halvorson on guitar, Ingrid Laubrock on soprano and tenor saxophone, Tomeka Reid on cello, and Susie Ibarra on drums and percussion—are four of contemporary music's most exciting and influential players, with each also making significant contributions as a bandleader in her own right.

The seed for the album was planted in mid-2019 when the outfit's debut performance during a Melford residency at NYC's The Stone was enthusiastically received. Consistent with the spirit of the album, the live set was built from an array of ideas, directions, and improvisation. That the ten tracks on For the Love of Fire and Water are title-less might suggest improvs; in fact, the pieces are marked by individuating structures and concepts and could just as easily have been given conventional titles. There's improv for sure, but there's also notated composition. Most of all, however, the recording documents the distillation of each player's personal aesthetic into an ever-elastic whole.

It's worth noting the influence of artist Cy Twombly (1928–2011) on the project. Testifying to his importance, the band name and album title come from his drawing collection, Gaeta Set (for the love of Fire & Water), but his significance for the pianist goes well beyond naming. An anecdote Melford shares is particularly revealing with respect to her approach. She recalls that he trained himself as a young artist to draw in the dark because 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.” Sound is what's heard, but it originates out of gesture and energy. Certainly it's possible to draw parallels between Twombly's abstract lines and scribbles and the playing of the quintet, but the latter stands on its own. Common to both, of course, are exploration and play and the embrace of spontaneous creation.

The album fittingly begins with Melford alone, her intertwining lines unpredictable and explorative, before the others enter one at a time, Reid engaging with the pianist first, Ibarra second and then Laubrock and finally Halvorson. That generally improv-driven salvo segues without pause into a comparatively more structured tune, this one grounded in a lurching figure by the leader and intricate cross-patterning by her collaborators. The contrast between those tracks carries over into others. During the dirge-like fourth, Ibarra's Filipino gongs softly accent the ponderous ruminations of the others. The fifth, on the other hand, largely centres on front-line interaction between a dynamic, registers-spanning Laubrock on tenor and a wholly responsive Melford. The freeform fury the five sometime get up to is well-documented in the seventh while at the same time working into its performance a spidery, march-like section whose character recalls Halvorson's composing style. Track eight opens with what could pass for a modern-day riff on Steve Reich's Clapping Music, the difference here being that other instruments appear against the asymmetrical, hand-clapped beat. A quasi-classical tone surfaces in the closing piece, a stately “chorale” featuring delicately rendered contributions from all five.

May 2022