Listening to Arriale’s compositions, you can almost hear vocal accompaniment, and in fact she reports that she does sing as she composes. "Teachers used to tell me: 'You have to sing this line.'...It took me years to teach my fingers how to sing." Yet don’t confuse Arriale’s emphasis on melodic line with conservatism—she can deconstruct time and rhythm as creatively as any modern improviser, be it transforming Bernstein’s “America” into calypso or Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” into abstract funk. I made the mistake once of asking her if she would be playing her “own” compositions in an upcoming set. Kindly, she noted that “I like to think that anything I play is ‘my’ composition, meaning that whatever I play, I turn it into my own.” And indeed, she does.

In comparison to some of her contemporaries, Arriale’s style is pared down to the essentials. “The idea is that each note should hold its own weight and not to waste any notes…” This economy of line may make her music more accessible and more immediate, yet the music emanates a complexity created not by multiple layers of notes, but by multiple layers of emotion.