Album Notes

Statement This is music about the spaces between us. It's about the space where musicians meet, and a perfect moment in which all possibilities are suspended. It's also about the spaces between musical genres, where music really lives. With the exception of the final track, all of the music on this recording was freely improvised. We spoke little about what we would play, waiting instead to realize the moments to begin and to end. These moments, and the spaces between them, are the key to the importance this music holds for us. We recorded this album in a recital hall in the Canadian Rockies, under the watch of a pair of imposing mountains. We named many of the tracks after places in Alberta, Canada where I spent much of my life before decamping to wilder parts still, and after places in the Himalayas where both Myra and I have travelled. Naming music after geography is a trace of my abiding fascination with maps, diagrams, schemas and other marks on paper, and the way that they reveal as much as they conceal. It's also a way of representing the spaces each of us carries within us, and the different shapes they assume through time and travel. For both of us, free improvisation is a process of discovery, and a practice of being open to all of the glorious, brutal, absurd and lovely things that life reveals. In documenting such moments on this record, and in creating them anew in performance, we invite people to share these spaces with us. - Tanya Kalmanovitch Myra Melford Bio: From her first album in 1991, it was clear that this pianist and composer would stay around," the New York Times said of Myra Melford. Melford has not only stuck around, but she has flourished. She has appeared on more than 20 recordings, including nine as a leader, performed in more than 30 countries, won major awards for composition and piano performance, and worked with some of the world's most innovative musicians. Melford's staying power is the product of ceaseless musical travels; she's always going somewhere. As Francis Davis noted, "Myra Melford is the genuine article, the most gifted pianist/composer to emerge from jazz since Anthony Davis." At the keyboard, Melford recasts the blues and boogie-woogie of her Chicago hometown, folds in elements of the music of Eastern Europe and India, and blends them with the rangy, percussive avant-garde stylings 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. Melford's remarkable breadth is ordered by a thoughtful, expressive sensibility, evocatively described by Coda Magazine: "Myra Melford is at once a dancer, a romantic and a savage sucker puncher at the bench . . . beating all hell out of the piano and making it beautiful." In the early '90s Melford toured and recorded extensively with her acclaimed trio featuring Lindsey Horner on bass and Reggie Nicholson on drums. Their 1993 recording Alive in the House of Saints was reissued by hat Art in 2001. In the late '90s, she led a quintet, The Same River, Twice, which featured trumpeters Dave Douglas or Cuong Vu, reedist Chris Speed, cellist Erik Friedlander, and drummer Michael Sarin. They recorded two albums, their self-titled debut on Gramavision (1996) and Above Blue (Arabesque, 1999). Melford's ongoing search for new sounds and new directions in her music led her to the harmonium, a small hand-pump organ traditionally used in Indian and Pakistani classical and devotional music. Melford was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study North Indian music on the instrument with Sohanlal Sharma in Calcutta, where she was in residency from September 2000 through May 2001. The fruits of her studies are heard in some of her compositions for her groups The Tent and Be Bread. In addition to leading her own ensembles for more