One of the dubious advantages of traveling for work is that you sometimes spend your weekends in strange cities. This weekend’s city is Montreal, and, since I’m covering a conference, I wasn’t sure what I would do here in the evenings. In a rare move, I decided to turn to the Internet for guidance.
Serendipitously, my trip lands me smack in the middle of the Montreal Jazz Festival (June 26 - July 6 this year). I sifted through the usual unidentifiable chaff of the summer festival circuit on the festival’s web site before discovering three shows by the virtuoso pianist, Brad Mehldau. The first two were solidly booked, but I excitedly bought myself a ticket for the big Saturday night show, Hank Jones and Brad Mehldau — the show’s tag line, “Four hands and 176 keys” is intended to create enthusiasm for the two pianists, and is evidence that the festival staff’s creativity was pretty well tapped by creating the lineup.
Hank Jones is a jazz piano staple — a soloist, band leader and frequent accompanist of many other jazz greats, his playing is deliberate and very accessible. He probably has one of the most diverse lists of piano recordings, too, as he was the pianist for CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show, and was, with Charlie Parker, a pioneer of early bebop recordings. He’s 89 years old.
Brad Mehldau is 37, and a world apart. I like to say, partly in jest, that he made a name for himself by covering Radiohead’s Ok Computer, but a more accurate portrait of his work is on his album, Places, and on his Art of the Trio Volumes. He’s a very active player, leaning over the keys like Schroeder in the ‘Peanuts’ cartoons, then leaning back and stopping dramatically for half a beat, leaving a melody unfinished, only to plunge back in with a bunch of misplaced flats.
I’m a big Brad Mehldau fan — I’ve even seen him play with his trio at the Village Vanguard, and solo on the roof of the Kennedy Center in Washington. I own several of his albums, and while I’ve been struggling to define his style for years, I haven’t yet landed on a description which makes his music sound even barely tolerable.
It’s not just me — it’s fairly easy to find examples of other people’s difficulty in describing him, too. Wikipedia, for example, interrupts a definition of his style to note, “Mehldau has also expressed an interest in and knowledge of philosophy, in particular of music and art.” In the music business, philosophy does not exactly guarantee roaring, high-energy crowds, and it doesn’t get your face on t-shirts. The same article goes on to say that, “Another of Mehldau’s signature techniques is to create an ostinato in his right hand whilst developing a motivic idea in his left hand.” I suppose that’s fine, if you know what ostinatos are. My musical training falls well short of that.
In every review of his I’ve ever read, the author falls all over him or herself to mention his classical training; Mehldau’s [style of music] is deeply informed by his classical training, they all say. And that’s fine, too, though I submit that you don’t notice it when he’s playing jazz.
Instead, as I can attest from last night’s show, there’s something very different going on when he’s playing standards. Charlie Parker’s “Anthropology” was the best Jones-Mehldau performance of the evening. It came late in the set, and you got the impression from the way the two traded short solos that they were developing a kind of point-counterpoint dynamic which had been faltering earlier in the show.
Whereas Hank Jones played his way deftly and impeccably through the set, Mehldau was, as always, more of a challenge. With Jones, the excitement builds from his impeccable timing and light touch; he handles these pieces as though he’s had them for 80 years. Mehldau’s timing is a little different. He skips some of the more obvious notes in an almost childish way, and the result is occasionally a 7/4 lead over 4/4 accompaniment. Then he’ll send the melody spinning by playing too flat or sharp for a couple of bars, and just when it all seems totally irretrievable, he’ll pull it all together brilliantly in a bar or two and leave everyone stunned.
Frequently, at jazz shows, one member of the band will solo, then there will be a couple of bars of chord progression, then another will, and so on. If you look around the audience in the ebb after Brad Mehldau solos, you’ll see the expressions of people thinking hard, trying to determine not whether he ended up in the right key, after all, but how in the hell he pulled it together so brilliantly from that.
