Epiphanies, by their nature, tend to just arrive–you can’t usually schedule them. An exception takes place this weekend, when the Unity Temple in Oak Park hosts a concert by the invigorating jazz pianist Myra Melford, who credits the temple’s designer, Frank Lloyd Wright, as a major influence on her work.
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Yes, yes–Wright drew buildings, Melford makes music. But Melford, who left Chicago in the 1980s for New York, punched through that barrier long ago, using not only Wright’s architecture but also his writings as inspiration. (One of her first major compositions is called “Frank Lloyd Wright Goes West to Rest,” a title taken from a newspaper article about the transferal of Wright’s remains from Wisconsin to Arizona.) As Melford explained in a recent lecture on the parallels between architecture and music, she tries to create an “aural space” with her widely praised compositions and her invitingly rigorous improvising–“a space that is not only satisfying on a structural level, but that also allows the individual listener or player to have one’s own experience within it…I think great music, great architecture, or any great art gives us that.”
Wright spoke of the “potential poetry” in architecture, which could be realized in the creation of a building “free in form…that expresses [the] inner harmonies perfectly, outwardly, whatever shape they take.” Melford found in that statement a valid metaphor for her own free-form explorations of sound and texture and her efforts to craft “an invisible seam between what was notated and improvised”; these considerations have evolved into hallmarks of her work. Largely due to the cantilevered construction of her compositions, Melford’s several albums are among the most organized and exciting new-music recordings of the decade. (They feature bassist Lindsey Horner and drummer Reggie Nicholson, a former Chicagoan, both of whom will appear with Melford in Oak Park.) She has continued to explore not only Wright’s work but architecture in general: her album Even the Sounds Shine includes a piece inspired by wandering into a Spanish mosque that her guidebook likened to “a meditation in stone.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo of Myra Melford by Lauren Deutsch.
