Melanie Dyer
Leonia, NJ
Music
Melanie Dyer is a jazz/creative improvising violist and composer living in New York City. She studied viola performance/symphonic repertoire with William Lincer (Principal NYPhil), Lee Yeingst (Principal/Colorado Symphony Orchestra), John Jake Kella (Met Opera/NY) and Naomi Fellows (CSO) and at the University of Denver’s LaMont School of Music. She has performed and recorded with many notable musicians in Europe, South Africa and the USA, including Sun Ra Arkestra under Marshall Allen, Henry Grimes, William Parker, Howard Johnson, Tomeka Reid, Joe Morris, Matana Roberts, James Brandon Lewis, Heroes Are Gang Leaders, Andrew Lamb, Gwen Laster’s New Muse 4tet, and award-winning poets Randall Horton, Anne Waldman and Tyehimbe Jess.
She is the recipient of awards including New York Council on the Arts Support for Artists (2024), Herb Alpert Foundation Ragdale Prize (2023,) Jazz Road/South Arts (2022), Chamber Music America (2022 & 2019), New Music USA (2017 & 2019), Bonfils-Stanton Foundation (2019), Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2022). She has been a featured artist at Donaueschingen Musiktage (2022), Festival Sons d’Hiver (2022, 2019), City of Asylum Jazz Poetry Festival (2023), Vision Festival (2017 - 2022), Edgefest 2022), Lincoln Center Outdoors (2021), Detroit Jazz Festival and various venues in the U.S.
Dyer founded WeFreeStrings, an improvising string/rhythm collective in 2011. From 2004 – 2013, under her Bb Universe banner and in collaboration with the Scientific Soul Sessions collective, she co-produced a series of underground salon events in her Harlem home. Bb Universe hosted music performances, rehearsals, community dialogues, recordings, lectures, one-act plays and films by artists/activists including Toaksin Ghosthorse, a performance of Robbie McCauley’s “Sally’s Rape”, and an open dialogue with Israeli refusniks; Her events brought cultural luminaries, artists, grassroots activists, working and under-employed people together.
Her discography includes WeFreeStrings: Love In The Form Of Sacred Outrage (ESP-disk, 2022) and Fulfillment (Indepstrings, 2018); Living Sky: Sun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen (2022); LeAutoRoiOgraphy: Heroes Are Gang Leaders (2022); The Music of William Parker: Migration of Silence Into & Out of the Tone World (2021), Blue Lotus: New Muse 4tet (2021), No Joke: Nicholson/Parker (ESP-disk, 2021) David Haney’s Birth of a City (2019), Come Sunday (T. Cumberbatch, 2015); Dogon A.D. Revisited, Salim Washington (2018); Live at St Nick’s Pub, Salim Washington/Donald Smith Ensemble (2007); Harlem Homecoming, Salim Washington & The Harlem Arts Ensemble(2005), and others.