Life Carries Me This Way, Myra Melford's first solo piano album, was memorable for a number of reasons on its release last year and not just for its unique place in the California-based player's discography.

A gently layered and very varied avant work inspired by the warm and sensual abstract art, jagged landscapes and architecturally inspired work of California painter Don Reich, the serenity of the warm colours of ‘Red Beach’ spilling out in musical form like a hot wave here, the wildnesses later in the more cartoon-like geometry of ‘Piano Music’, a rebellion of sorts.

Melford who also premiered ‘Language of Dreams' in 2013 combining music for Melford’s quintet Snowy Egret with narration, dance, and video, let Reich’s drawings and paintings ‘speak’ to her in her Berkeley studio over many months, and then the tunes were mostly composed during a residency in Lisbon the summer before last.

Melford returns to the UK next month for two dates, one at London's Vortex on the sixteenth joined by Chris Batchelor and Mark Sanders; and the second three days later at Sussex university with electronicist Evelyn Ficarra and video artist Ian Winters.

Myra Melford, above