Life Carries Me This Way

Jazz, by nature, is interactive. It can be more than a little daunting for players to perform and record solo—they can only look in the mirror and go deeper for inspiration. Pianist Myra Melford answers that challenge on *Life Carries Me This Way*, her solo debut. She actually cheats a little bit, finding inspiration from several paintings by the now-passed visual artist Don Reich, who\'d picked out several works for her. Inspired by a Cubist-style painting of the same name (each piece is named after the painting that inspired it), “Park Mechanics” is an angular sonic landscape, while the track “Japanese Music” is more elliptical than the interlocking shapes on the canvas. Another highlight is “Piano Music,” which finds Melford often playing at a dazzling pace to capture the dense shapes and bright colors that nearly overwhelm the eye. Many avant-garde jazz pianists seem to deconstruct with a detached or clinical ear, yet there\'s a warm earthiness to these musical interpretations that makes this album quite approachable.

"Life Carries Me This Way" is pianist/composer Myra Melford's first solo piano recording. It features original compositions inspired by the artwork of her friend, the late Sacramento-based artist Don Reich (1931-2010). The project was entirely recorded, mixed, and mastered at Firehouse 12 Studios in New Haven, CT by owner and chief engineer Nick Lloyd. The CD package contains a 16-page booklet that includes full color photographs of Don Reich's artwork as well as notes by Melford and Charles Johnson. Her work has earned Melford some of the highest accolades in her field. In 2013 alone, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's Performing Artist Award and a Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts for her efforts to re-imagine the jazz program at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She was also the winner of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music. She has been honored numerous times in DownBeat's Critics Poll since 1991 and was nominated by the Jazz Journalists Association as Pianist of the Year in 2008 and 2009 and Composer of the Year in 2004.

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