Myra Melford is a polystylist, who draws on and creates multiple playing styles. In Alive In The House Of Saints these include stomping classic jazz piano with a funky attack of Horace Silver, gospel plangency, Keith Jarrett's country and blues lyricism, and Don Pullen-style free jazz episodes. Though from quite early in her career, Alive In The House Of Saints, Parts 1 and 2 is one of her finest recordings - high on the musical power spectrum, and one of the most exciting albums of piano jazz. The members of the trio respond organically to one another - their creative empathy is clear throughout. Reggie Nicholson is a great, rather neglected drummer who, on this session, is on dazzling form. The result is a consummate live performance, full of feeling, in which no one is wrong-footed. Melford is alive to everything she hears, responding in the moment to her musical partners.

Listening, eight years after it was created, to this primary chapter in the recorded legacy of Myra Melford's first trio evokes a rush of feelings. There are warm memories of in-person encounters with Melford, Lindsey Horner and Reggie Nicholson; and satisfaction regarding how the ideas Melford articulated here as both pianist and composer have metamorphosed into the triumphs of her subsequent music. What is absent is the uncertainty one often feels when contemplating the recent past, that feeling of needing more time to take the full measure of a musical statement. Melford has made it easy for us, through the clarity of both these now-historic performances and her subsequent efforts, to hear the present works as both glorious ends in themselves and the foundations of her ongoing creations. Melford formed the trio in 1990, and immediately began the touring and recording that made her and it among the most positive signs of musical health in the early 1990s. What set the trio immediately apart was its ability to merge a strong blues feeling with notions of rhythmic and structural complexity associated with the exploratory end of the jazz-trio spectrum. The music conveyed a strength and unguarded emotionalism that burst forth in dynamic arcs, with a sense of shape and completeness that made the trio’s collective creations anything but random. Even as the band broke new ground, it was clearly a product of the jazz tradition. However odd the meter or angular the thematic material, the music always had a propulsion that all sides of current debates on jazz aesthetics could identify and celebrate as swing.