A MUSIC MEETING OF THE FIRST KIND

“Myra is the genuine article, the most gifted pianist/composer to emerge from jazz since Anthony Davis.”

Francis Davis, Philadelphia Inquirer

 «…un pianiste et compositeur de grande envergure dans son Montréal natal, François Bourassa privilégie un jeu avant-gardiste fluide, souvent teinté de lyrisme»

Nate Chinen, The New York Times

The musicians

In a career that spans some 30 years, Myra Melford is recognized today as one of the most highly acclaimed jazz pianists on the contemporary music scene. With an assertive and diverse style that ranges widely, from her early affinity for the blues to the percussive dynamics and intricate complexities of her musical mentors from the late 20th century New York scene, pianist Don Pullen and composer/musician Henry Threadgill, she has crafted and expanded over the years her ever evolving improvisational and composing skills in parallel with her personal quest with deeply connected cultural and spiritual traditions. With her lyrical and avant-garde musical sensibility, Melford has performed and continues to collaborate with an impressive range of inventive improvising voices on the contemporary jazz scene while creating major works, constructing inspirational cross-disciplinary projects, releasing acclaimed recordings and earning major awards and honours in the process.

Montreal native François Bourassa has in his 30 year career come to be recognized internationally as a singular composer, pianist and band leader representative of the highly active Canadian contemporary jazz scene. His openness to exploring new territory, to take up new challenges with his close accomplices and other musicians has been a hallmark in his constant evolution over the years. Influenced and drawn in his early period to the music of such jazz icons as John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter and Bill Evans, Bourassa’s lyrical and more introspective approach opened up with his exposure and involvement with a coterie of improvising performers in the last decade. Concurrently, his compositions reflected a solidifying sound marking a maturing process that expanded into new territory, writing and arranging for strings, the vibraphone and marimba.

Together, with performances in solo and duo sets, this is a pianistic music meeting of the first kind, a space for the artists and audience to engage in a shared complicity, from the initimate and personal in the solo format to a range of possibilities left to the imagination, virtuosity and daring in duo, as much one of exchanges as one of discovery.

Buy your tickets here or purchase all 3 concerts with a discount at the Suoni Per Il Popolo box office: 514 284-0122