Myra Melford / Allison Miller / Lux Quartet - Tomorrowland

2024

Celebrating the life-giving power of light, the Lux Quartet is an exploratory new quartet co-led by two of the most celebrated and visionary artists in modern improvised music: pianist Myra Melford and drummer Allison Miller. Drawing on a shared passion for the preservation of nature and a boundary-stretching approach to music, the two innovative composers and bandleaders are joined by saxophonist Dayna Stephens and bassist Scott Colley, together crafting a sonic environment that glows with it's own intense yet nurturing radiance.

Melford and Miller have long embraced the natural world in their individual work. Melford often combines her passion for the outdoors with poetic and philosophical imagery in bands like Snowy Egret, Fire and Water or The Same River, Twice. Miller's captivating work Rivers in Our Veins is a multi-media journey into the cultural and ecological life of rivers. The two have worked together for several years in the drummer's ensemble Boom Tic Boom, a recent touring version of which also featured Stephens and Colley.

Both musicians are renowned for incisive playing across the entirety of the jazz spectrum. The saxophonist has worked with Kenny Barron, Ambrose Akinmusire, Julian Lage and Gerald Clayton, among others; while Colley is a deeply respected bassist who has enjoyed extensive collaborations with Joshua Redman, John Scofield, Herbie Hancock and Chris Potter to name a few. The quartet developed such profound chemistry that it evolved into it's own singular entity. The name Lux Quartet was inspired by the role of light in the panoply of life on Earth, from the vitality of the sun's ray to the bioluminescence of creatures in the deepest oceans - a suggestive indication of the heights and depths that the band endeavors to explore.