Myra Melford May 11, 2007

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. A formidable classical performer, Kalmanovitch is fast developing a reputation in the international jazz and creative music community as an innovator on her primary instrument, the viola. She explores the viola's dark, warm terrain, uncovering its rich, vocal qualities in the context of jazz and free improvisation.