"It's so gratifying. For me, it completely eclipses the first two albums
that I've made for Warner Bros. As a trio, we'd been playing steadily for
almost a year, and all we had to do was just go in and keep on playing what
we'd been playing and catch it at a real developed state."
That's pianist Brad Mehldau, talking about his new CD, The Art Of The Trio,
Vol. 2: Live At The Village Vanguard. He has several tough acts to follow,
the first of them being his own. Last year's release, The Art of The Trio,
Vol. 1, for instance, contains both a version of Oscar Levant's "Blame It
On My Youth," which was nominated for a Grammy as Best Jazz Instrumental
Solo, and an exquisite version of Lennon and McCartney's "Blackbird." But
most dramatically, peering over his shoulder at the Village Vanguard are
the many legendary figures who have worked and recorded there. Sonny
Rollins, Joe Henderson and, of course, John Coltrane recorded legendary
sessions at this most revered basement locale. And it's impossible to
think of the Vanguard without stirring up thoughts of Bill Evans, whose
trio recordings there stand as some of the most important recordings in the
history of jazz.
Fortunately, although Mehldau has a comprehensive understanding of both
jazz and classical music, he doesn't let the past deter or daunt him. As he
says in his liner notes, "There's nothing wrong with a backward glance, but
don't make it your animus."
For his further exploration of the trio format, Mehldau has chosen six
standards as his vehicles. Although his prior recordings have featured
many of his own compositions, in putting this project together, the trio's
approach to the standard jazz repertoire seemed most ripe to be documented.
As Mehldau explains, "My experience has always been that you have these
songs, you play them for about a year, and they develop into something
really different. So this was nice, because we'd been playing all of these
standards for a long time."
This is his third recording of John Coltrane's "Countdown," the only piece
on the record he has recorded before. "They [the different versions] are
harmonic and melodic vehicles that gauge how the trio interacts," he says.
"They're like time capsules for where we're at in the development of the
trio." Other explorations involve a daring rendition of "Young And
Foolish" at a remarkably relaxed tempo, and an abstract "The Way You Look
Tonight."
Heard here is Mehldau's trio-featuring bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer
Jorge Rossy, who can also be heard on both his first Warner Bros. release,
Introducing Brad Mehldau, and his second, The Art Of The Trio, Vol. 1. They
have played together off and on for the past five years, most intensively
over the past year.
Note that the recordings are called "The Art Of The Trio," as opposed to
"The Art Of Jazz Piano" or "The Art Of Improvisation." This implies an
interactive trio concept, rather than piano-with-accompaniment, the kind
exemplified by Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett.
"I'm very wary of modeling myself after anyone," he says. "It frustrates me
that the critics inevitably compare me to Evans and Jarrett. I guess there
are obvious similarities, but to me they're sort of surface or
coincidental, because I never really have them in mind when I sit down to
play. In fact, I haven't listened to Keith Jarrett any more than Wynton
Kelly or McCoy Tyner-or any number of piano trios. With the trio, we deal
with the music itself, rather than any frame of reference."
If one were trying to frame the twenty-seven-year-old Mehldau's reference
points, one would begin in Jacksonville, Florida, where he was born. His
family moved around a lot during his early years-to New York, New Hampshire
and Georgia-until he was ten, when his father, a doctor, set up a practice
in Hartford, Connecticut.
"I always knew that music was going to be what I wanted to do in one form
or another," says Mehldau. "It moved me more than anything else, and it
was something that came naturally to me."
In high school, he began listening to Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and other
kinds of what would now be called art rock or jazz-rock fusion-then Weather
Report, electric Miles Davis, the Mahavishnu Orchestra. "Weather Report
would lead to Miles Davis, which would lead to earlier Miles Davis, then
John Coltrane-and I eventually worked my way back and got the bebop bug."
Mehldau played with some of the students of the great bebop altoist Jackie
McLean, a professor at Hartt School of Music in Hartford, and worked with
Jimmy Cobb, who replaced Philly Joe Jones in the Miles Davis bands of the
'50s. He also studied with pianist Fred Hersch at the prestigious New
School For Social Research in Manhattan: "Fred is classically trained. We
worked on playing orchestrally and a lot of other things that you can glean
from classical piano literature."
Mehldau, of course, is classically trained himself. You can hear it in his
touch. You can hear it in his fondness for taking a small melodic phrase
and inventing infinite variations, his sense of form, his sense of how to
end a piece.
His classical background applies to literature, too. Mehldau could be the
most idiosyncratic annotator of his own work since the late Glenn Gould.
His essay entitled Irony? [included in the CD package] seems indebted to
his beloved Robert Schumann. As fine and volatile a critic as he was a
composer, Schumann often framed his arguments as battles between two sides
of his own personality, which he name Florestan and Eusebius.
"I love German poetry and literature," Mehldau says. "Early Göthe works
like Young Werther, [which he referenced in his own composition by the same
name on his Warner debut], that whole sensibility appeals to me. I guess I
would describe it with the German word verklemmt-heavy, heavy emotion,
almost oppressive, not being able to express it all, having it all inside
you, stuffing you up. The other side-the Wagnerian, Byronic, in-your-face
romanticism-that doesn't appeal to me. Mahler's slow movements-the Fifth
and Sixth symphonies and the Ninth-those I would take to a desert island."
There are undeniably those who will say the same thing about The Art Of The
Trio, Volume 2: Live At The Village Vanguard.
He will return to the Village Vanguard in New York to celebrate the release
of this recording. Those who recall his crystalline version of "Blackbird"
on The Art of the Trio Vol. 1, will be pleased to know that he is
considering an entire solo disc of Lennon and McCartney songs; he say they
"often remind me of a Schubert lieder."
In the meantime, we can continue to watch his astonishing growth. Like the
composer of "Countdown," he is changing so quickly one can hardly keep up
with him. But there is little doubt that whatever musical direction Brad
Mehldau may take, we're in for an exciting and musically enriching ride.
When Robert Schumann first heard the music of the young Chopin, he famously
wrote, "Hats off, gentlemen. A genius!" It's no doubt a bit too soon to
toss around that seriously undervalued word, but it might be appropriate to
invoke something the great Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov once said of
his own work:
"Desperate Russian critics, trying hard to find an influence and to
pigeonhole my own novels, have once or twice linked me up with Gogol, but
when they looked again, I had untied the knots and the box was empty."
