January 30, 2015
Join ARC for a lively evening of food, cocktails, and a special piano performance and salon conversation with UC Berkeley faculty member, composer, and Guggenheim Fellow, Myra Melford.
Start off the evening with a delicious buffet along with a signature cocktail prepared Shanna Farrell, head researcher for the “West Coast Cocktails: An Oral History” project at UC Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office, before Melford performs music from her recent solo recording Life Carries Me This Way, work inspired by original artwork of the late Sacramento-based artist Don Reich.
After the performance, UC Berkeley Assistant Professor of Music T. Carlis Roberts and Melford will talk about the work, Melford’s role as a curator of New Frequencies Fest/Jazz@YBCA, and the course they co-taught on “Improvising Community” which explored community engagement through musical improvisation.
This event is being held at the private residence of Harry Bernstein and Caren Meghreblian in Berkeley. Address details will be sent after guest registration.
Myra Melford is a pianist, composer and Guggenheim fellow who draws inspiration from a vast spectrum of cultural and spiritual traditions and artistic disciplines. In 2013, she released her first solo recording, Life Carries Me This Way and premiered Language of Dreams, her most ambitious project to date, combining narration, dance, and video with music for her quintet, Snowy Egret, which has a new release coming out in March 2015 (Enja/Yellowbird). Melford also performs in the collective Trio M with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson, and the duo, Dialogue, with clarinetist Ben Goldberg. In 2013, Melford was named a Guggenheim Fellow and received both the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and a Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She won the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music and has been honored numerous times in DownBeat’s Critics Poll.
T. Carlis Roberts is scholar and artist based in Oakland. He is Assistant Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches courses on popular music and politics. His forthcoming book, Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Performance of Unity, examines Afro Asian musical collaborations as a window onto inter-minority politics in the post-multicultural era. Other publications include Yellow Power, Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho and a special issue of Journal of Popular Music Studies on Michael Jackson. He frequently speaks on music, identity, and cultural politics in a variety of venues in the U.S. and abroad. T. Carlis is an active musician and has worked nationally and internationally as a composer, sound designer, and performer in theater, dance, and film.