Myra Melford has led plenty of bands worth naming, from Trio M to Snowy Egret and the Tiger Trio, but the Fire and Water Quintet is the one that reads like a manifesto. Piano, guitar, saxophone, cello, drums: Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock, Tomeka Reid and, since 2022, Lesley Mok, every one of them a composer and bandleader who could fill an evening alone. Melford's job is less to lead them than to hand them something worth arguing over.
Hear the Light Singing, released by RogueArt in November 2023, is the group's second suite and the first since Lesley Mok replaced Susie Ibarra at the drums. The music grew out of Melford's long fascination with Cy Twombly, whose scrawled canvases look improvised even when they were not, and the five pieces are titled simply Insertion One through Five, as if they were marks added to an existing surface. That surface is For the Love of Fire and Water, the ten-movement suite the quintet cut at Firehouse 12 in New Haven in July 2021 and released the following spring. The new pieces were recorded in the same room a year and a half later, in a single day in November 2022, with Nick Lloyd again at the desk.
The change of drummer matters more than a credit swap suggests. Mok came out of the Bay Area and Berklee, moved to New York in 2017 and found a footing in the city's noise and improv rooms before commissions from Roulette and a piece taken up by the JACK Quartet followed. They play the kit less as a clock than as a drawing instrument, and across the eighteen-minute Insertion Three A + B, the record's centre of gravity, the drums spend long stretches on grain and gesture rather than pulse. It says something that Melford, who studied with Henry Threadgill, Jaki Byard and Don Pullen and has taught improvisation at UC Berkeley since 2004, went looking for that in a player who finished at Berklee the year she turned sixty.
What binds the five is Melford's refusal to write parts that behave. Halvorson's pitch-bent guitar and Reid's cello share a register and keep trading roles; Laubrock's tenor and soprano drift between lead voice and section player. The writing leans on gesture and cue rather than theme and solo, a tendency Melford has since pushed toward explicitly cellular composition on the quintet's third album, Sure Grand Out, recorded at Sear Sound in Manhattan in September 2025 and released this month.
RogueArt is a fitting home. The label works out of an office on rue Victor Massé in Paris and issues records the way an art press issues prints, with Max Schoendorff's sleeve designs and commissioned essays in the notes, here from Natalie Weiner, who also wrote for the first suite. It has become Melford's European base: Katarahi, her piano duo with Satoko Fujii recorded live at Jazzfestival Leibnitz in September 2024, came out on the same imprint this May. Hear the Light Singing is where a project became a band.
