Myra Melford, Zeena Parkins, Miya Masaoka – MZM (Infrequent Seams)
<a href=“http://infrequentseams.bandcamp.com/album/mzm”>MZM by Miya Masaoka, Zeena Parkins, Myra Melford</a>
Context matters: The difference between coming to MZM expecting music for piano, harp and koto and coming to it expecting music by Myra Melford, Zeena Parkins and Miya Masaoka may be the difference between loving and hating the album. Of course, Melford, Parkins and Masaoka are three major names on the creative music scene, and it’s not clear who would find themselves sampling out-there bassist/composer James Ilgenfritz’s Infrequent Seams label so innocently. But imagining the hypothetical experience of hearing it “out of context” may begin to capture how surprising, strange and slippery — even to ready ears — MZM is.