Brad Mehldau - new boxed set: 10 Years Solo Live

[Ron Thorne]

Brad Mehldau Evolves in ‘10 Years Solo Live,’ a New Boxed Set

By NATE CHINEN
OCT. 21, 2015



The pianist Brad Mehldau. Credit Michael Wilson


Somewhere around the midpoint of “10 Years Solo Live,” his elegant, imposing new boxed set, the pianist Brad Mehldau settles into a song as if it were a vintage leather club chair. The track is “Holland,” by the indie troubadour Sufjan Stevens, and its drifting waltz tempo and bittersweet air feel perfectly in tune with Mr. Mehldau’s signature style, maybe even to a fault.

After five minutes of tasteful luxuriating, the song begins to take new dimensions: a darkening tone, a growing fixation on one tendril of melody from its medieval-sounding end refrain. We’re off and away by then, following a mind awhirl in creative reverie. Mr. Mehldau — tracing connections, making digressions, but never quite forsaking the original framework — sounds both grounded and almost boundless.

That performance, in its gradual unfolding and dramatic, expressive payoff, is roughly par for the course on “10 Years Solo Live” (Nonesuch), a compendium of eight LPs that Mr. Mehldau assembled from a decade’s worth of European concert recordings. (It will be offered digitally and as a four-CD set on Nov. 13.)

The music adds up to an ambitious self-portrait, finding rich possibility in a simple formula: “Short, small songs that get stretched out into bigger vehicles with grand expressive gestures,” as Mr. Mehldau writes in a thoughtfully didactic liner-note essay.

Mr. Mehldau, 45, has entered a mature and reflective phase of his art, which isn’t to imply that maturity and reflection were ever far from its core. Since “Introducing Brad Mehldau” appeared on Warner Bros. 20 years ago, he has arguably been the most widely influential pianist in jazz: You’ll find traces of his approach among a remarkably diverse coalition of younger players, from Fabian Almazan to Glenn Zaleski. (Sometimes you’ll find more than traces.)

Mr. Mehldau’s main vehicle has been a sleek acoustic trio with Larry Grenadier on bass and Jeff Ballard (previously, Jorge Rossy) on drums. But he has also branched out with collaborators like the heavy-groove drummer Mark Guiliana, the beyond-bluegrass mandolinist Chris Thile, the pop-literate soprano Renée Fleming and the literate-pop producer Jon Brion. With Pat Metheny, a guitarist and composer of similarly far-reaching aesthetics, Mr. Mehldau formed an intergenerational alliance that yielded two albums and a major tour.

Through every chapter, solo piano remains a constant, the format in which Mr. Mehldau best excels at converging his interests in classical Romanticism, modern jazz and anguished but melodic indie rock. He’ll bring this trademark mix to a solo recital on Thursday at Zankel Hall; the program will include selections from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” as well as “Three Pieces After Bach,” a new commissioned work.

But there’s no way the concert could exceed the bar set by the new collection, which contains some of the most impressive pianism Mr. Mehldau has captured on record. Because he took seriously the project of selecting his material, choosing a different theme for each LP — “Dark/Light,” “The Concert,” “Intermezzo/Rückblick” and “E Minor/E Major” — this set also reveals something about Mr. Mehldau’s evolving process as an artist.

Anyway, it’s a deep dive. And in its baronial sprawl, “10 Years Solo Live” more closely resembles a deluxe archival package than the work of an improviser at midcareer; one of its few precursors in that regard is Keith Jarrett’s “Sun Bear Concerts,” a 10-LP collection recorded in Japan and released on ECM in 1978. And yes, let’s acknowledge that Mr. Mehldau’s new release probably won’t mollify anyone who likes to grouse about a perception of grandiose interiority in his music, let alone the cerebral quality often filed under pretentiousness.

Mr. Mehldau became a working musician at a time when jazz was engulfed by historicism, and he spent a lot of youthful energy swatting away one presumptive legacy or another. This could be one reason that his solo work deals sparingly with the jazz repertory. The “jazziest” track in the new collection is a welcome extrapolation of “This Here,” by Bobby Timmons. Two tunes by Thelonious Monk run a close second. (Mr. Mehldau will be a featured guest in a Monk-themed concert by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra on Friday and Saturday at Town Hall.)

Elsewhere, song form serves 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,” Mr. Mehldau writes, “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 does this no less probingly with John Coltrane’s “Countdown” than with Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

The inclusion of Nirvana brings up another trademark of Mr. Mehldau’s solo output. “A lot of the music in this collection is Gen-X music,” he explains, unabashed. “That music spoke to the way we all felt lost and untethered in the world.”

Whatever you think of this assessment, Mr. Mehldau evidently finds something personal and usable in these songs, by bands like Massive Attack, the Verve, Stone Temple Pilots and especially Radiohead. It’s surely no coincidence that “Holland,” that Sufjan Stevens song, evokes the whispery specter of the singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, with whom Mr. Mehldau had some meaningful interaction via Mr. Brion.

Working with music from his own era has been a good way for Mr. Mehldau to stand apart from the lineage of other solo piano improvisers, including living paragons like Mr. Jarrett and Fred Hersch. But “10 Years Solo Live” also confirms that his pristine technique and prismatic elaboration are distinctive traits unto themselves. The set’s closing track is “God Only Knows,” the Beach Boys aria, and Mr. Mehldau gives it the full rhapsodic treatment: shimmery, inquisitive and grave. From the first pale tremolo to the last seismic rumble, the performance is unmistakably Mr. Mehldau’s handiwork, and an astonishment even by his lofty standards.

[peterdubya]

I bought this set over the holidays, and it's quite impressive.
His liner notes are too!

I'm a big fan of Mehldau and he does not disappoint on this one.