Myra Melford/Ben Goldberg Dialogue with guest, Mark Dresser – La Jolla

Mark DresserOnTour

The series opens on Thursday, February 4, with Dialogue, an intimate duo project featuring pianist Myra Melford and clarinetist Ben Goldberg. Both artists last played at the Athenaeum in summer 2013 as part of dynamic drummer Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom band. Melford is well-known to Athenaeum audiences for her role in the collective Trio M, and Goldberg has appeared on the series with the genre-crossing Tin Hat Quartet. These two Bay Area-based artists have been performing duets since 2008 and each concert is a chapter in an evolving musical conversation – two musicians speaking the same language with slightly different points of view, and, like any good conversation, finding something new.

Over the course of two decades, Myra Melford has carved out a distinctive niche among the creative music’s most respected pianist/composers. Her signature sound skillfully combines early influences such as classical music and the traditional blues piano styles of her native Chicago with her later immersion in the music of Eastern Europe and India.  Goldberg, whom John Zorn has called “one of the greatest clarinetists I have ever heard,” is one of the Bay Area’s leading jazz artists and was named #1 Rising Star Clarinetist in both the 2011 and 2013 DownBeat Critics’ Poll.Jazz at the Athenaeum