Christian McBride and Brad Mehldau at The Clarice

Christian McBride and Brad Mehldau
The Clarice
College Park, MD
October 2, 2025

Christian McBride and Brad Mehldau made it to the top of their game together, each helping the other rise from promising talent in early '90s New York City to modern king of the bass and piano, respectively. Now, they can afford to take an occasional look back, reuniting with former colleagues and digging up old tunes.

This retrospective mindset has given fans new and old plenty to enjoy. On RoundAgain (Nonesuch, 2020) and Long Gone (Nonesuch, 2022), McBride and Mehldau joined saxophonist Joshua Redman and drummer Brian Blade to replicate the ensemble from Redman's 1994 MoodSwing (Warner). And Mehldau, McBride, and Blade reconvened with guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Gregory Hutchinson for Signs Live! (Smoke Sessions, 2017), which brought back the band from Bernstein's 1995 Signs of Life (Criss Cross). McBride and Mehldau no longer have anything to prove; today, they can just enjoy the company of old friends, this time in the form of a month-long duo tour.

They kicked off the first stop on the tour at The Clarice at the University of Maryland, with a relaxed take on Jerome Kern and George Gershwin's "Nobody Else But Me." It offered a reminder of how much potential still remains in a straightforward reading of a page from the Great American Songbook—melody, solos, trading eights and fours, melody, and close. McBride and Mehldau have a thousand tricks up their sleeves, but they also know that when you are this good, you do not need tricks to pull off a satisfying performance.

They ventured into somewhat stranger territory with Wayne Shorter's fast-faced "Angola," which seems to be a Mehldau favorite.—this critic also saw him perform it at the Village Vanguard two years ago. It afforded an opportunity for some classic Mehldau-isms, such as reversing his hands' roles and soloing with the left hand while comping with the right, and rapidly repeating a single note until releasing the tension with a virtuosic flourish. During another round of trading fours, McBride moved seamlessly from walking a swift bass line under Mehldau's playing, to making his own brief but effective statement, to retreating again into the background.

After that one-tune high, the rest of the night would be a relaxed, but rewarding, chat between friends, with the occasional echo of something in their pasts. Old friends do not mind pauses in the conversation, and in a moody rendition of Jimmy Van Heusen's "Here's That Rainy Day," played as a waltz, Mehldau often injected a measure or two of silence into his playing, and McBride opted for a few moments of quiet before even beginning his own solo.

Then came Thelonious Monk's "Work," a tune so stamped with the pianist's style that players risk coming off as bad Monk impersonators. But Mehldau was unmistakably himself, while McBride showed off his love of a good groove, with a funkiness Mehldau rarely brings to the music. Something about Monk must make Mehldau think of Charlie Brown; getting a laugh from the audience, Mehldau threw in a quote from Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy," which he also did in his solo version of Monk's tune "Monk's Dream" on Live in Tokyo (Nonesuch, 2004).

McBride kept up the rhythmic drive through another Shorter tune, the modal "Mahjong." In a show of respect for his partner, he pointed to Mehldau after the latter's solo to make sure the audience showed its appreciation before he began his own solo. Then, in the way that friends can veer off onto a shared topic of interest before returning to their main subject, McBride and Mehldau spontaneously switched to the standard "Old Devil Moon" before coming back to the original tune.

Longtime colleagues also know when to step back and give each other the spotlight, so McBride and Mehldau each took one full tune solo. With "In the Kitchen," a brief blues from his album Suite: April 2020 (Nonesuch, 2020), Mehldau offered the audience a chance to marvel at his contrapuntal magic, putting his left and right hands in conversation with each other and letting the emphasis move at a moment's notice from one end of the keyboard to the next. This ambidexterity has been one of Mehldau's signature features for his whole career, and even a short performance like this one reminded the audience why. McBride then displayed his own virtuosity in a harmonically wandering exploration that ended, to everyone's surprise (including maybe his own), in "Fly Me to the Moon."

The set closed with a plaintive Mehldau ballad, "Love Is Fragile." The tune, which hasn't been put to record yet, briefly calls to mind "And I Love Her"—which may not be a coincidence, as Mehldau has covered that Beatles song twice over the years. The finale provided the most ruminative moment of the evening: an extended solo piano coda that recalled the destabilized harmonies of Maurice Ravel's classical etudes more than anything in the standard jazz idiom. Then McBride got one last chance to shine in an encore that swapped genres completely with a grooving but brooding version of Stevie Wonder's "Golden Lady."

From the night's start to finish, McBride's and Mehldau's faces nicely matched their playing. McBride had a permanent grin that attested to the sheer fun of laying down a funky line, while Mehldau was stuck with a fixed grimace, eyes closed as he set forth his cerebral reflections. But even he managed to smile as they took the final bow.

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