Myra Melford (born January 5, 1957) is an American avant-garde jazz pianist and composer. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Melford was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as an "explosive player, a virtuoso who shocks and soothes, and who can make the piano stand up and do things it doesn't seem to have been designed for." Early life and education Melford was born in Evanston, Illinois and was raised in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. At 3, she started playing the piano on her own, climbing onto the piano bench and improvising. She began taking lessons when she was in kindergarten. She developed a strong relationship with her teacher, Erwin Helfer, a classically trained boogie-woogie player. Helfer introduced her to classical composers such as Bach before moving on to contemporary composers, such as Bartók, and later taught her to play the blues. Melford attended blues festivals, and because of her relationship with Helfer, she was often invited backstage, where she encountered many of Chicago's most acclaimed performers. Independently, Melford also began to explore improvisation. Pushed towards performing classical repertoire, Melford attended a Northwestern University extension program in junior high school. She described her experience as a classical piano student as "not right," and while she continued to play informally, she stopped her formal studies in high school. Melford enrolled at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she intended to study environmental science. Although she was not then listening to jazz, and had not grown up listening to it, she knew that it involved improvisation, and when she saw an advertisement for jazz piano lessons in a local restaurant, she began studying again. She recalled that, during the next few years, "There were two records... which were on constant repeat: Cecil Taylor's Air Above Mountains and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come." Shortly thereafter, she switched her major to music, and in 1980 attended Cornish College of the Arts and studied with Art Lande and Gary Peacock. While living in Olympia, Melford met prominent avant-garde musicians including Oliver Lake, Anthony Braxton, Marty Ehrlich and Leroy Jenkins, whose performance with Amina Claudine Myers and Pheeroan akLaff inspired an "ecstatic feeling" which intensified her commitment to improvisation. Career Melford moved to New York City in 1984, where she studied composition with saxophonist Henry Threadgill, whom she would later cite as a major influence on her perception of organic composition.