Playing Changes

by Nate Chinen

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  Mehldau developed his voice early and saw daylight soon afterward, which meant that to many observers, he seemed to drop out of the sky fully formed. But his early experience wasn’t hermetic, or even all that exceptional; it was fairly typical of a precocious talent with access to a supportive community. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, he moved with his family to West Hartford, Connecticut, at age ten. (It was an upper-middle-class household; his father was a doctor.) Mehldau studied classical piano before a turn to jazz, becoming enamored of swinging midcentury rhythm-section paragons like Kelly and Tyner. “So jazz for me was this magical thing on all these records,” he reflected. “My aesthetic when I was younger was really governed by this classic feeling for jazz as defined on these great recordings.”1

  Mehldau received rigorous classroom training at William H. Hall High School, home to a nationally recognized jazz band. He also had hands-on experience through a weekly gig at the 880 Club, a no-frills but well regarded haunt not far from his home. The gig, which he kept through high school, brought him into regular contact with local elders, like the drummer Larry DiNatale, and fellow aspirants, like the trombonist Steve Davis. He played his share of weddings and cocktail parties in the greater Hartford area, and formed a bond with the tenor saxophonist Joel Frahm, a classmate at Hall High.

  Had Mehldau come of age just a decade earlier, his first national exposure would likely have come under the wing of a celebrated jazz mentor like Art Blakey. Because he emerged during the post–Marsalis Young Lions boom, things shook out a little differently. One heralded discovery of that era had been the alto saxophonist Christopher Hollyday, a lanky Connecticut native seven months Mehldau’s senior, who caused a stir on the strength of a vinegary bebop style derived from Charlie Parker and Jackie McLean. Hollyday was fifteen when he landed his first review in The New York Times.2 Six years later, in 1991, he asked Mehldau to join his band, an association that led to the pianist’s first studio recording date and first European tour.

  These experiences cut slightly into Mehldau’s coursework at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, where he was studying with older pianists like Junior Mance and Fred Hersch. The venerable hard-bop drummer Jimmy Cobb—one of the names Mehldau knew from albums like Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue—was also at the New School, teaching an ensemble class that effectively functioned like a weekly rehearsal band. Cobb turned one edition of this class, which included Mehldau and the guitarist Peter Bernstein, into a working group, Cobb’s Mob.3

  But Mehldau’s more pivotal sideman appointment came in 1994, with a member of his peer group: Joshua Redman, who was several albums into a contract with Warner Brothers. Redman had swept into the spotlight a few years earlier when he won the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz International Saxophone Competition, at twenty-two. He came with an alluring backstory: he was the son of a well-regarded but oft-overlooked jazz musician, the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman. (Their relationship wasn’t a model of stability; Joshua had been raised by his mother in Berkeley, California.) The younger Redman was also a recent Harvard graduate who had deferred entry to Yale Law School to pursue jazz in New York. The Monk Competition had only been around for a few years—its inaugural winner, in 1987, had been Marcus Roberts, the pianist in Wynton Marsalis’s band—but it already served as something like the NFL scouting combine for the jazz record industry. Redman’s unflappable performance, ratified by a multigenerational panel of judges, resulted in a major-label bidding war. And that Yale Law deferment quickly became an irresistible part of his narrative, repeated in dozens of articles in the mainstream press.

  The details of Redman’s backstory were exceptional, but his balance of talent and erudition made him the embodiment of a paradigm. The Young Lions boomlet to which he belonged had come of age in the thick of jazz’s neoclassical era, and could be understood as the fulfillment of a prophecy made back then by Marsalis:

  We’re entering a period now when there are young kids fourteen and fifteen years old all over the country who can really play. They’ll all be emerging four or five years from now, and they’ll insist on being heard. I don’t think people are going to try to sound like me, but you are going to see young cats getting serious about their music, and I definitely think I have something to do with that.4

  The intensity of Redman’s media spotlight meant that the release of MoodSwing—his third album, introducing a quartet with Mehldau on piano, Christian McBride on bass, and Brian Blade on drums—registered as an event. And so Mehldau, up to that point a promising name circulated among jazz insiders, found himself operating on a much larger stage.

  He happened to have the perfect temperament for Redman’s music, which prioritized an agenda of direct emotional clarity. Redman had taken it upon himself to push back against jazz’s “rotten public image,” as he put it in the album’s liner notes—an overintellectualized, preciously ennobled, eat-your-vegetables idea of great American music. Left unspoken was the extent to which that image went hand in hand with the Marsalis agenda. The prototypical Young Lion album was pyrotechnically intense, an ostentatious gut punch. MoodSwing was medium cool, laid back, an arm draped over a shoulder. “There is much elegance and virility going on here,” observed Greg Tate in his review for Vibe, “the kind of suave that creeps up on you rather than checking itself in the mirror every two minutes.”5

  And it didn’t escape notice that Mehldau’s unhurried erudition, as an accompanist and a soloist, was at the heart of the album’s stylish nonchalance. This was as true on a bossa nova like “Alone in the Morning” as on a churchified swinger like “Rejoice.” But the emblematic track on MoodSwing, certainly for Mehldau, was “Chill,” which exudes the noir composure of a smoke-filled Herman Leonard photograph. The song’s simple form involves a languid vamp in E-flat minor, with a salutary flip into the major key during an eight-bar bridge. Mehldau plays the first solo, continuing the vamp with his left hand, and leaving deliberative pockets of space between each obliquely bluesy phrase in his right. There’s a bit of Wynton Kelly in his articulation, and in the way he hangs behind the beat. But the entire solo is touched by an insinuative ease that feels distinctive even now, and felt like a quiet manifesto at the time. Among the listeners who took notice was the guitarist Pat Metheny, who had appeared as an approving elder on Redman’s previous album. Metheny first heard “Chill” on the radio while he was driving, and was so immediately struck by the piano solo that he pulled the car over to give it his full concentration.

  “Brad’s appearance on the scene was really significant to me,” Metheny said a dozen years later, as he was preparing to embark on a concert tour with Mehldau’s trio, “because I just recognized immediately so many of the ideals that I aspire to myself, rendered in a way that was unbelievably refreshing.”6 Among those ideals: strategic patience, a careful use of space, and a composerly command of harmonic resolution.

  Most of these attributes are evident to some degree on Introducing Brad Mehldau—notably in a languorous stroll through “My Romance” and in the honey-drip saunter of “Prelude to a Kiss.” The album includes a version of Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On” that ratchets into breakneck double time, against which Mehldau improvises like a bird in flight. His solo wheels above the fray in one moment and lunges back in the next, culminating in a chorus or so of two-handed octave work à la the bebop wonder Phineas Newborn Jr. But Mehldau isn’t reaching back with “From This Moment On.” In his overall comportment, he reorients the song from a dreamy romantic pledge into a vow of artistic intent—staking a claim, here and now, that things are going to be different.

  Mehldau was just beginning a decade-long run with Grenadier on bass and Rossy on drums, but he had earned early acclaim for his hookup with McBride and Blade in the Redman quartet. So his producer, Matt Pierson, split the album into two sides, with one half featuring Redman’s sinewy rhythm section and the other eff
ectively rolling out the new Brad Mehldau Trio. In that sense the album offers a glimpse of the pianist at a transitional moment, winding down one journey and embarking on another.

  Even at the time, it was obvious which of the two groups pointed the way forward for him. Rossy, who hailed from Barcelona and had found his way to New York via the Berklee College of Music in Boston, was a drummer with an unusually delicate attack: agile and propulsive but also placid and sparse. Grenadier had a deep, luxurious sound on the bass, and a warmly authoritative way with harmony as well as rhythm. Their rapport with Mehldau had originally coalesced in group settings with other articulate peers, like the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner. They were all recent conservatory graduates honing their craft at Smalls, a comfortably low-stakes basement club in Greenwich Village. One of their defining early statements was Yam Yam, Turner’s debut album, released in 1995. It featured a balletic quintet with Mehldau, Rosenwinkel, Grenadier, and Rossy, exuding a youthful style but an already well-developed chemistry.

  Among the shared values in this peer group was a fondness for streamlined complexities delivered with a relaxed lightness of touch. They were inspired not only by the warrior kings of jazz history but also by some of its more outré and standoffish types, like the modernist cult composer and pianist Lennie Tristano. Within a prevailing musical culture that had recently tacked so heavily toward a combative and masculinist ideal, there was something subversive about this bookish field of interest. Mehldau, whose style was often likened to Tristano’s, didn’t identify as an acolyte of the Tristano school, but that was a label you easily could pin on some of his closest collaborators, notably Rossy.

  And lateral influence, among musicians roughly the same age, was a matter of profound importance for Mehldau. “Actually I think that’s the strongest form of influence,” he said a decade into his solo career, at a time when the jazz culture’s fixation on patrilineage was still earning him reflexive comparisons to his elders. “And one thing that does puzzle me a little bit is that there’s very little discourse about how players of the younger generation, let’s say forty and under, are influenced by their peers. They have to be tied to something that’s already been in the vocabulary for so long, and it’s reified and it’s well-known.”7

  No artist likes to be reflexively compared to his precursors, but for Mehldau it seems to have been infuriating. As he once complained, notoriously, in print: “The constant comparison of this trio with the Bill Evans trio by critics has been a thorn in my side.” He was referring to a common bit of reductionism at the time, which saw in Mehldau another sensitive white pianist with slouchy posture and a tendency to appear lost in reverie. Some jazz critics also couldn’t help seeing another victim of substance abuse—a step too far for Mehldau, though he did speak openly at times about his battle with heroin addiction. (Evans, who had begun using heroin in the late 1950s and later gravitated to cocaine, died an ugly death in 1980, at fifty-one.) But what seemed to irritate Mehldau most was that the invocation of Evans forestalled any recognition of his trio’s musical independence, to say nothing of its formal innovations. Analogies to Keith Jarrett would have been more insightful, but still a problem; Mehldau wanted to shrug off the smothering weight of precedent, and engage with the music on his own terms.

  He was already concerned with some of these issues when he made his debut album, and the best evidence resides in his original compositions. Introducing contains four of them, including “Say Goodbye,” a soulful reverie, and “London Blues,” a sly take on the twelve-bar blues form, studded with major-seventh chords that seem to hint at an alternate key. Even more intriguing is a song called “Young Werther,” which unfolds in a floating eighth-note pulse, neither swinging nor exactly straight, and has a melody openly indebted to Brahms. (It shares the same wistful intervallic motif as the first movement of the Capriccio in F-sharp Minor, op. 76.)

  Mehldau was hardly coy about his classical interests, nor did he recoil from high literary allusion. The track’s title evokes Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a foundational text for the German Romantic movement—and a portrait of the artistic temperament in voluptuous torment. As if to wave a banner of recognition, Mehldau had named his music-publishing company Werther Music. And as if to be absolutely clear about his frame of mind, he and Pierson sequenced the album’s track list so that the first original in the lineup was an ethereal waltz with another loaded title, “Angst.”

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  When David Foster Wallace, the brilliant regent of postmodern fiction, took his own life in 2008, one of the more soulful quick-fire appraisals of his art came from the critic A. O. Scott, in The New York Times. Describing Wallace’s literary voice, Scott offered a list of attributes—“hyperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware”—that would seem to apply not only to one writer in particular but also to the cohort that claimed him. It would be wildly reductive to call Wallace a Generation X artist, but that’s the category in which he’s unavoidably filed. Still, among that demimonde he was a special case, as Scott observes:

  None of his peers were preoccupied so explicitly with how it felt to arrive on the scene as a young, male American novelist dreaming of glory, late in the 20th century and haunted by a ridiculous, poignant question: what if it’s too late? What am I supposed to do now?8

  Mehldau grappled with precisely this conundrum, at least in the first decade of his solo career; replace the word “novelist” with “jazz musician” and you have an accurate depiction of his circumstances. And because he also saw himself as a writer—a public intellectual on the page as well as the piano bench—he did much of his agonizing in plain view. The album that followed his debut, in 1997, came bearing a self-important title, The Art of the Trio Volume One. That phrasing was the brand-conscious work of Pierson, and Mehldau later attempted to distance himself from it. But he was the one who, in lieu of liner notes, chose to include one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.9

  The following year, when he released Live at the Village Vanguard: The Art of the Trio Volume Two, Mehldau made up for any lost verbiage: his essay in the CD booklet amounted to a lengthy disquisition on irony, the Gen X über-subject, framed as a barroom dialectic. In a conversation between two imagined characters, proxies of his own subconscious, Mehldau lays out some of the insecurities and obsessions with which he felt so afflicted. “I can’t help being overly cognizant of the fact that harmony exhausted itself, played itself out, as it were, at the turn of this century,” he says. “Here we are on the crest of another millennium and I’m playing what? Showtunes!”10

  Elsewhere in the essay Mehldau disparages the glorification of aesthetic lineage, along with the authority of any self-appointed spokesman for a tradition. (He doesn’t need to name names; his crosshairs are obviously trained on Marsalis.) “When this kind of chauvinistic ideology and myth step into the foreground,” he asserts, “there arises a tendency toward a sort of musical fascism, steeped in the conservative, with a sensibility inclined toward the downright reactionary.”

  If it was youthful idealism that had Mehldau determined to plant his flag on the right side of history, maybe it was youthful arrogance that led him to toss around words like “fascism” when peering over at the other side. In any case, he was painfully self-aware about the meager contribution he and his generation would be able to make within the given constraints of the art form. It’s a point undercut slightly by the vitality of the music on The Art of the Trio Volume Two—especially a breathtaking version of “The Way You Look Tonight,” at once quick and light, with a harmonic mercuriality made possible by hair-trigger interplay. Ethan Iverson, a pianist in Mehldau’s circle, has described this track as “a thrilling moment for jazz,” implying that the trio’s place in history was secure.

  Years later Mehldau looked back on his frustration from a m
ore objective remove:

  What you have a lot when you talk about our generation—let’s say Joshua Redman and me, Mark Turner, Brian Blade, Larry Grenadier—is an idea that there was this orthodoxy or this way to play. A lot of that came out of this thing that Wynton Marsalis was presenting, which was really cool in a lot of ways. But the downside was, it gave us the idea that we had to play in this correct style. We’re the generation of Quentin Tarantino and Beck and this mash-up of stuff: listening to Bird and Monk and Coltrane, but also being on the road and listening to Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, or going to a Sonic Youth concert.11

  What changed from the mid-nineties on was both the impact of Mehldau’s peer circle and the permissions around the state of the art. The two things are interlinked. Songs: The Art of the Trio Volume Three, the most fully realized of Mehldau’s albums prior to the turn of the century, reveals the extent to which he and his trio stretched and personalized modern jazz conventions, dictating new terms without discarding the old. Partly it’s a matter of how fully Mehldau has broken away from the established grid of bebop pianism, which relegates a player’s left hand to chordal accompaniment while the right hand plays elaborative lines. Partly it’s the translucent quality of the playing itself, with a pristine but unfussy touch, a pronounced Brahmsian bent, and a shrewdly digressive approach to harmony. Partly it’s the trio’s on-again, off-again relationship to swing, and its ability to make those straight eighth-note cadences glide and breathe.