Myra Melford (piano)/Marty Ehrlich (saxophone): A collaborative duo that released its first recording, Yet Can Spring (Arabesque), in 2001, and a follow-up, Spark! (Palmetto), in 2007, Melford and Ehrlich share a love of improvisation within an intimate setting in which ideas and feelings are exchanged freely and musical boundaries ignored.

[http://www.martyehrlich.com/|Marty Ehrlich] began his musical career in St. Louis, Mo. while in high school, performing and recording with the Human Arts Ensemble. He graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music with honors in 1977, where his teachers included George Russell, Jaki Byard, Joseph Allard, and Gunther Schuller. Since that time, he has made 25 recordings of his compositions for ensembles ranging in size from duo to jazz orchestra. These groups include his Emergency Peace Ensemble, Traveler’s Tales Group, Rites Quartet, and the Marty Ehrlich Sextet. He has recorded a CD length work for 26 musicians entitled “The Long View”, and has two acclaimed recordings in Tzadik’s Radical Jewish Culture series. As a multi-instrumentalist, passionate about improvisation and interpretation, he has performed with a who’s who of contemporary composers including Muhal Richard Abrams, Ray Anderson, Anthony Braxton, John Carter, Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Davis, Mark Dresser, Don Grolnick, Chico Hamilton, Julius Hemphill, Andrew Hill, Wayne Horvitz, Robin Holcomb, Leroy Jenkins, Myra Melford, James Newton, Bobby Previte, Leo Smith, and John Zorn. He appears on over 100 recordings with these and other composers.

A fearless musical adventurer – in both her composing and playing – [http://www.myramelford.com/|Myra Melford] has followed a fascinating path since determining to forge a career in music in 1983. Having studied classical piano into her early teens, she had no real exposure to jazz until college. Improvisation rekindled her early love of the piano, and she plunged in to develop a signature style. At the keyboard, Melford recasts the blues and boogie-woogie of her native Chicago, folds in elements of the music of Eastern Europe and India, and blends them with the rangy, percussive avant-garde approach 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.