by Nate Chinen
Then there’s the repertoire: Songs introduces several originals with a classically steeped yet poplike melancholy, beginning with “Song-Song,” a sonorous waltz, and “Unrequited,” a bittersweet ballad with a skittering rhythmic undercarriage. There are several achingly lyrical songbook standards, like “For All We Know.” And in what would soon become a Mehldau trademark, there are intently thoughtful covers of rock tunes: “River Man,” by Nick Drake, and “Exit Music (For a Film),” by Radiohead.
“River Man” is the more conventional of the two, despite the fact that it seems to hover, ghostlike, as Mehldau translates a hypnotic acoustic guitar part to the palette of a piano trio. Drake was an English singer-songwriter of depressive temperament (he committed suicide at twenty-six), but “River Man,” released in 1969, was one of his prouder achievements: a mysterious ballad in 5/4 time, delivered with a self-assured quietude, like someone imparting a long-held secret and savoring the telling. There’s folk wisdom in the song, and Mehldau locates that quality along with its tragic stoicism.
He does much the same thing with “Exit Music (For a Film),” another dirgelike ballad sung by a mopey Brit. But the particulars of this song ensured a more intense public reception. Radiohead had created “Exit Music” for the closing credits of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, in 1996. It resurfaced the following year as a track on the band’s third studio album, OK Computer—the most acclaimed rock album of the day, a commercial and cultural as well as a critical success. Mehldau released his cover in 1998, less than a year after OK Computer arrived. He brought somber purpose to his arrangement, which teased out the song’s affinities with Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, op. 28, no. 4. Using his left hand to trace arpeggios through the Romantic chord progression, Mehldau made the piece a tour de force of simmering grace and brooding calm. It was a distillation of his personal aesthetic, rooted but new.
And for a phalanx of musicians who made up the jazz generation just behind Mehldau’s, it sounded something like a call to action. Reimagined pop tunes have always been part of the dossier for jazz—since Louis Armstrong and “(Up a) Lazy River” in 1931, let alone John Coltrane and “My Favorite Things” thirty years later—but no artist of Mehldau’s prominence had yet adapted material from the nineties alternative rock scene, not with such uncompromising élan. This wasn’t a smooth-jazz musician flipping an R&B hit for commercial airplay. Mehldau had recorded “Exit Music” because it spoke so directly to his sensibilities, in personal as well as generational terms. He was born in 1970, within a year or two of Radiohead’s front man and lyricist, Thom Yorke, and its lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood. And just as Radiohead recalibrated the sonic profile for rock, embracing classical harmony and electronic texture, Mehldau found ways of personalizing the band’s songs. He soon incorporated a dynamically astute interpretation of “Paranoid Android,” another OK Computer track, into his solo recitals. His repertoire would eventually include songs from the Radiohead albums Kid A, Amnesiac, and In Rainbows. Many other musicians followed suit, to the point where it began to feel almost like a cliché: by 2004, JazzTimes could run a trend piece titled “Radiohead: The New Standard Bearers?”12 and have it feel like settled fact.
But Mehldau’s palette was broader than that: the arranging strategies he’d developed for “Exit Music” were easily applied to other material from the alt-rock and grunge milieu—“Gen X music,” as he typified it in another liner-note essay, further explaining: “That music spoke to the way we all felt lost and untethered in the world.”13 His catalog came to include Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Oasis, and Stone Temple Pilots. And he branched out to include more of what he called “interesting pop music”—mainly 1960s and ’70s classics by the Beatles, Paul Simon, and Antônio Carlos Jobim. These were all selections made in earnest, with no trace of ironic distance. Mehldau was more inclined to embrace a mode of radical sincerity perhaps best articulated by Wallace, in an essay from 1993:
Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.
Mehldau’s trio with Grenadier and Rossy lasted a single decade, developing a dialect that hasn’t been precisely replicated since—not even by Mehldau and Grenadier, in the new trio they formed with an earthier, more emphatically percussive drummer, Jeff Ballard. The original trio’s swan song played out over a pair of albums, recorded during the same two-day session but released in staggered fashion: Anything Goes (2004), a spruce menu of standards and covers, and House on Hill (2006), a sophisticated program of originals. Both albums capture the band at its most coolly refined, with Mehldau often spreading the melody evenly across hands and registers, while Grenadier forms a shifting pivot and Rossy levitates the beat. One original, “Happy Tune,” in a bouncy 7/8 meter, even suggests a distant echo of “It Might As Well Be Spring.” But by this point, spring has sprung: House on Hill is a posthumous statement as far as the trio is concerned. Its first track is a flowing, valedictory piece titled “August Ending,” rife with chromatic dissonance but no more turbulent than a strong gust through a canopy of trees.
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There’s a garbled but intriguing video clip on the Internet titled “The Jon Brion Show—Feat. Elliott Smith/Brad Mehldau (’00).”14 Apparently transferred from VHS tape, it’s the raw footage of an ersatz variety show hosted by Jon Brion—the indie producer, multi-instrumentalist, and all-purpose pop savant, as well as a composer of film scores for Paul Thomas Anderson and others. The taping came about after VH1 passed on the pilot for a real Jon Brion Show, mixing musical segments with sketch comedy in a post-slacker vein. For reasons of solidarity or sympathy, P. T. Anderson arranged for Brion to have another crack at it, renting an Ocean Way Recording studio in Hollywood and rolling tape with no mandate beyond creative freedom. The footage, uploaded to Anderson’s YouTube channel in 2013, suggests a shambling clubhouse vibe: a storehouse of instruments, cheap Christmas lights, faded Persian rugs.
Brion’s first guest on this deconstruction of a talk show is his friend Elliott Smith, a singer-songwriter with a vulnerable air and an adoring following. They’re playing songs from an album they worked on together, Smith’s XO. For two of those songs—“Independence Day” and “Bottle Up and Explode!”—they welcome someone Brion identifies as “one of my favorite persons to make mistakes with, Brad Mehldau.” The atmosphere is awkwardly tentative but the musicianship is on point, as Mehldau takes his place at the piano and Brion plays a pump organ and a glockenspiel. After the second tune, Mehldau shakes Smith’s hand and makes a hasty getaway, rushing to catch a plane.
Mehldau briefly relocated from New York to Los Angeles in the mid-nineties, in search of a less hectic lifestyle and a healthy distance from the scene. Shortly after settling in there, he paid his first visit to Brion’s weekly singer-songwriter residency at a club called Largo. The residency had earned a glowing underground reputation for its musicality and manic spontaneity. On any given night, Brion might be joined onstage by the singer-songwriters Fiona Apple or Aimee Mann, whose albums he had produced. He might start a set with a songbook standard, alone with parlor instruments and a looping pedal, and end it several hours later in a sweaty hard-rock duo with a drummer. Mehldau was instantly hooked, attending the residency as a fan for months before he began sitting in. The admiration turned out to be mutual: Brion had become a Mehldau admirer after hearing his cover of “Blackbird,” the Beatles tune, on The Art of the Trio Volume One.
“Meeting Brad was thrilling for me, because I didn’t like any new jazz musicians I was hearing,” he later said. “I didn’t believe in them.
I was extremely disturbed that this music built on spontaneity should be so frighteningly unoriginal, that it had turned into people who had learned to play a series of notes over chord changes. And in Brad I saw the person I was waiting for.”15
The first tangible by-product of their rapport was Mehldau’s album Largo, in 2002. It featured his piano at the center of a stylized blur of chamber jazz and indie pop, with the airless punch of a commercial rock record from the seventies. Along with Mehldau’s working trio, Brion had enlisted heavy lifters from his side of the fence, like the first-call studio drummers Jim Keltner and Matt Chamberlain. Some tracks featured French horns and trombone; the opening and closing tracks draped Mehldau’s graceful melodies in a filmy curtain of oboes, flutes, clarinets, and bassoons.
By all accounts, the Largo sessions unfolded with a sort of junk-shop whimsy much like what’s depicted on P. T. Anderson’s fake Jon Brion Show. Mehldau would come into the studio and discover that Brion had prepared the piano with some new sonic treatment: putty for dampening the strings, or a guitar pickup fed through a Leslie amplifier and wah-wah distortion. Some tunes were conjured on the spot, jammed into being; others were fleshed out from a preparatory sketch. There were covers of “Paranoid Android” and “Dear Prudence.” The entire album reflected a desire to reinvent the possibilities for jazz musicians in a studio setting, and to access the drive and attitude of rock without resorting to any known species of fusion.
Mehldau had already won over an aspiring jazz generation with his choice of material; Largo found him tinkering with his methodology. The album entered the world as a curio, but soon had extraordinary resonance with the wave of musicians coming up after Mehldau. Some, like the pianist Frank LoCrasto, adopted the album’s lo-fi pop grandeur as a signature. The keyboardist Marco Benevento earnestly re-created its sound, going so far as to hire Chamberlain as his drummer. “I’ve seen people form bands based around individual tracks on that record,” Brion said, a bit sardonically, about its reach.
The well-trammeled post-Largo landscape partly explains why Brion and Mehldau were both averse to a straightforward sequel when they reunited, at Ocean Way studios, in 2009. Another reason was the enlarging of Mehldau’s vision as a composer. He had grown more invested in classical new music: in 2005 he premiered a Carnegie Hall commission, Love Sublime, for piano and voice (specifically, the soprano Renée Fleming). And shortly before the release of his new project with Brion, he was named to Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair, a position previously held by the classical composers Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Thomas Adès, Elliott Carter, and Louis Andriessen.
Highway Rider, the album Mehldau made with Brion, reflected this new level of compositional ambition with an original score for a chamber orchestra. Mehldau’s main template was Metamorphosen, a late work by Richard Strauss for twenty-three strings, with the unusual feature of a unique and independent part for each player. Borrowing that instrumentation and strategy, Mehldau added three French horns, a bassoon, and a contrabassoon, for heft. And against this dark Romantic swoon, he brought in Redman on tenor saxophone, as a gallant and spontaneous lead voice.
Redman also surfaces on a number of tracks with no complement of strings, including a sprightly tune called “Capriccio,” featuring just piano, soprano saxophone, handclaps, and light percussion. It leads into the track that most recalls Largo, a ballad with a loping groove, a laid-back piano solo, and the mournful wheeze of a pump organ. Mehldau titled it “Sky Turning Grey (For Elliott Smith).”
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The second Brad Mehldau Trio—formed in 2005, with Grenadier as the holdover and Ballard as the newcomer—revitalized the rhythmic traction in his music, and strengthened his anchoring tether to the postbop tradition. Mehldau had known Ballard since his conservatory years, and what drew them back together was something almost wistful. It hadn’t escaped Mehldau’s notice that Ballard, Grenadier, and Turner—three of his longest musical acquaintances—were making separate strides as a cooperative trio, Fly. He enlisted them all for a one-off quartet gig at the Village Vanguard, and then poached Ballard (with the blessing of all involved). The new Mehldau trio made its debut with a strong studio album, Day Is Done (2005), followed by a stronger double album, Brad Mehldau Trio Live (2008). At a certain point, with hardly anyone seeming to notice, it outlasted the tenure of the original trio.
What registered clearly was the omnivorous enthusiasm of the group, and the way in which a wildly divergent repertoire could be bound by the force of its cohesion. A 2012 album called Where Do You Start, after the ballad by Johnny Mandel, also featured material by Nick Drake and Elvis Costello, the indie-folk artist Sufjan Stevens, the alternative-rock band Alice in Chains, the Brazilian musicians Chico Buarque and Toninho Horta, and the modern jazz lodestars Sonny Rollins and Clifford Brown.
Meanwhile there were productive dalliances outside any trio framework. Mehldau recorded and toured with the new-groove drummer Mark Guiliana and the beyond-bluegrass mandolinist Chris Thile; with Metheny and another stylistically frisky jazz guitarist, John Scofield; with the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. A 2010 album titled Modern Music featured him and a contemporary, Kevin Hays, on two pianos at a crossroads of jazz and new music. He reunited with Redman for a series of duo tours that yielded a live album, Nearness, in 2016; among the reasons to hear it is a version of the Charlie Parker flag-waver “Ornithology,” featuring some of the most luxuriant peekaboo bebop phrasing of Mehldau’s career.
Through every chapter, solo piano was the format in which Mehldau made the most dramatic growth in public. His first solo album, Elegiac Cycle, from 1999, was an exercise in style, a grief-stricken, album-length suite that he later described as a purging. Mehldau gradually moved toward a more song-oriented solo-recital ideal, following the example of his former teacher Fred Hersch. But there was also the looming shadow of Jarrett, whose solo recitals have often delivered a grand rhapsodic sweep to go with their high emotional drama. This is one obvious reference point on a 2004 album called Live in Tokyo, which includes a version of “From This Moment On,” the Cole Porter tune from Introducing Brad Mehldau. Here it unfolds in somber grandeur, an ornate cathedral built using the thematic materials of the song.
Mehldau’s solo output found a suitably expansive frame in 10 Years Solo Live, a 2015 boxed set initially pressed on eight LPs, and subsequently issued on four CDs. Assembled from a decade’s worth of European concert recordings, it assumes a baronial sprawl more in line with a deluxe archival package than the work of an improviser at mid-career; one of its few precursors in that regard was Jarrett’s Sun Bear Concerts, a ten-LP collection recorded in Japan and released on ECM in 1978.
Comparisons aside, 10 Years Solo Live presented Mehldau at a new stage of maturity and self-reflection, extracting rich possibility from a deceptively simple formula: “Short, small songs that get stretched out into bigger vehicles with grand expressive gestures,” as he writes in another extensive liner-note essay.
Throughout the set, Mehldau engages song form as a springboard rather than a road map. “I am no longer relying on the structure of the song for my improvisation, in the classic jazz manner of theme and variations,” he explains, “but instead am using pieces of the melody as motific jumping-off points, and then allowing the harmony to follow in a freer manner.” He did this no less probingly with Coltrane’s “Countdown” than with Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” And there may be no better example of his prismatic elaboration as a solo pianist than the final track in the collection: “God Only Knows,” the Beach Boys aria, extrapolated in a way that’s shimmery, inquisitive, and grave. Over the course of a suspenseful sixteen minutes, Mehldau preserves the intervallic heart of the melody while shifting textures and tonal centers almost constantly. His spiritual frame of reference for the song includes not only Brian Wilson, its star-crossed composer, but also Wagner—in p
articular, the climactic finale of Tristan und Isolde, known as the “Liebestod” (Love-Death). From the first pale tremolo to the last seismic rumble, the performance is unmistakably Mehldau’s handiwork, and a stunner.
Less jaw-dropping, but perhaps more telling, is one of the shortest tracks on the set: a brisk reading of “John Boy,” the opening theme from Highway Rider. A song at once sun-dappled and touched by a lingering sadness, it’s a tribute to several figures in Mehldau’s personal pantheon: Jon Brion, for one, and John-Boy Walton, the writerly young character from The Waltons, a seventies television drama burned into Mehldau’s pop-culture subconscious. “Last but not least,” he notes, “ ‘John Boy’ is Johannes Brahms, the composer I have always felt so close to in my heart.” (On the track list, it sits beside Brahms’s Intermezzo in B-flat Major, op. 76, no. 4.)
“One reason that Brahms is such a model for me is the way he straddles two epochs,” Mehldau once explained, in the essay accompanying House on Hill. The reasons why that straddling would appeal to him aren’t laid out, exactly, but they don’t need to be: they run throughout his music, which perpetually strives to balance the weight of jazz history against the possibilities of its exigent present.
Brad Mehldau, Highway Rider (Nonesuch)
Brad Mehldau, Introducing Brad Mehldau (Warner Bros.)
Brad Mehldau, Songs: The Art of the Trio Volume Three (Warner Bros.)
Joshua Redman, MoodSwing (Warner Bros.)
Mark Turner, Yam Yam (Criss Cross Jazz)