The debut album of an outstanding and forward-thinking new quartet led by two of the United States’ most creative women musicians – the venturesome pianist Myra Melford and the versatile drummer Allison Miller – Tomorrowland also features the front-rank saxophonist Dayna Stephens and the first-call double bassist Scott Colley. All four are acclaimed players, composers and bandleaders in their own right; Lux Quartet is a kind of modern jazz supergroup, the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young of improvised music.
Like many an all-star ensemble, the quartet has some history. Melford and Miller have been playing together off and on for 20 years, most prominently in Miller’s agile collective Boom Tic Boom; Stephens appeared on Science Fair, the fine 2018 album by Miller and the pianist Carmen Staaf. Colley may be the newcomer, yet he brings vast experience to the unit as an ever artful and empathetic collaborator.
The eight original compositions by all four band members, some of which have been recorded before, range from the relatively straight-ahead postbop of Miller’s Congratulations and Condolences to the darting and sinewy Andrew Hill-like lines of Melford’s Intricate Drift and the solemn, elegiac tones of Colley’s title track.
All the tunes have an inherent sense of strength and freedom, form and abstraction; they are like structures without walls. Each player seems to move in and out of the compositions organically, so that over the course of the album you get to hear individual members solo, in duo with all three others, in trio and together as a quartet of equals. The music is responsive, democratic and generous: these are conversations full of striking statements, fascinating details and intriguing asides.
Melford once said that “what’s being made by improvisers, what’s being said, depends as much upon the listener as the players”, and such are the sky-high levels of intuition, interaction and invention on Tomorrowland that it seems almost inadequate to listen to the album just once. Try five times. One for each player. And then marvel at how Lux Quartet brings it all brilliantly and seamlessly together.
