Review: Fire and Water Quintet, led by pianist Myra Melford, does ‘supergroup’ right (2024)

If we are to trot out the “supergroup” trope — more marketing schlock than anything — may all supergroups be like Fire and Water.

In 2019, pianist Myra Melford, who was raised in Evanston and studied with members of the South Side-born Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), gathered other like-minded mavericks for a 2019 gig at the New York venue The Stone. Joining her were guitarist Mary Halvorson, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, cellist Tomeka Reid and then-drummer Susie Ibarra. (Percussionist Lesley Mok has since inherited Ibarra’s spot in the band.) All five are ferocious bandleaders in their own right; all work at experimental and free jazz’s highest level, and prolifically. Halvorson, Laubrock and Mok have all released albums within the last year; Reid’s “3+3” comes out this Friday with her quartet, which includes Halvorson.

Since its genesis, the quintet has toured “For the Love of Fire and Water,” Melford’s suite referencing Cy Twombly’s 10-painting “Gaeta Set” (1981). Last fall, the band followed it up with “Hear the Light Singing,” an album of five “insertions” that can be kneaded into the original suite, as they were on Friday at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts.

Fire and Water isn’t a jangling charm bracelet of virtuosos, nor does Melford make her colleagues efface themselves for her compositions. Quite the opposite: in performance, they become wide-open canvases for everyone’s creative considerations. On Friday, no backing was perfunctory, no supporting voice beige.

The Fire and Water musicians sounded, undeniably, like themselves. Together, they sound like little else on today’s jazz scene.

Melford led off the evening with a tumbling, atonal solo that plumbed nearly the piano’s entire range — left and right hands scurried to the ends of the keyboard, then snapped back to center like a rubber band. The rest of the band gradually joined in, wheeling generously around the axle of a short, spiky theme.

That first movement, from “For the Love of Fire and Water,” established a pattern repeated in others: free improvisation eventually clotted into the tunes’ heads, sometimes only after several minutes. At set’s very end, Melford asserted a hurtling, ahead-of-the-bar groove in “Insertion Five’s” very last seconds. Just as listeners begin to appreciate its punchy asymmetry, whoosh — the rug is pulled out and the tune is over. It’s a breathtaking moment.

Melford applies that same balance of liberty and structural rigor in her treatment of the band. Her compositions frequently divide the quintet into sub-units of three and two, one with the melody and the other accompanying.

Listen closely, though, and you’ll find these tiny combos are just as much in dialogue with themselves as with the rest of the quintet. In “For the Love of Fire and Water’s” second movement, Laubrock and Halvorson played the tune’s angular melody in unison while Melford, Reid and Mok parked on rhythm behind them. No sooner had Halvorson splintered off into a complex countermelody when the two units flip-flopped entirely. The Melford-Reid-Mok trio took over, in one of the evening’s most gorgeous detours — tinkling and delicate, like a ballet of ice sculptures.

The quintet followed that with still more complex handoffs in “Fire and Water’s” fourth movement (here paired with “Insertions 3A and B,” from “Hear the Light Singing”). A crawling piano-sax theme leads off, but focus soon shifts to the locked-in teamwork of Reid, Halvorson and Mok, Reid deputized as a leader within that division. The quintet took note of each other’s phrasing but never parroted lines. Everything was fresh yet rhythmically unassailable, thanks to Melford’s effective, unostentatious direction — head-tick cues, lips mouthing the melodies to help keep time and occasionally rising from the piano bench to clear sightlines.

This wasn’t a whistle-clean show. Laubrock jumped her first entrance of the evening, in the movement which leads off “For the Love of Fire & Water” — impossible to hide, when that movement layers in members of the band sequentially. The Logan Center Performance Hall courts sound snafus aplenty, and it did again on Friday; Melford had to ask, then practically beg, for adjustments at least twice.

What was immaculate: the quintet’s ingenuity and airtight ensemble work, so layered and inspiring one left Logan Center feeling like they’d learned how to be a better musician in 90 tight minutes. For that alone, this was one of the best local jazz billings of the year.

Blaze on, Fire and Water. Chicago hopes you course our way again soon.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.