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ON TIME
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The Brad Mehldau Trio’s second set a week ago last Wednesday night at Scullers (the first of three nights at the club) didn’t offer any surprises in terms of song selection. Cole Porter’s "You Do Something to Me," the Gershwins’ "Someone To Watch over Me," the Cuban composer Osvaldo Farrés’s bolero "Tres palabras," Thelonious Monk’s "Skippy," Mehldau’s own "Boomer," and two Paul Simon pieces, "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover" and "Still Crazy After All These Years," are all familiar from the trio’s previous appearances in Boston. But this almost 90-minute set was full of invention and emotional breadth. The Mehldau trio — with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy — is justly famous for its rhythmic elasticity. "You Do Something to Me" laid out the band’s basic modus operandi. They implied the 4/4 rhythm rather than articulating it outright, Grenadier playing very freely under Mehldau’s cycling of the tune’s melody and harmonic progression, Rossy offering gentle propulsion with his cymbals. Occasionally Grenadier offered a series of quarter notes at the beginning of a new chorus, followed by a pair of half notes in the next measure, like bobbing channel markers in the music’s ebb and flow. What was remarkable here, and even in the more abstract "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover" was that no matter how far afield the rhythms wandered, the band came together in cadences throughout the piece, maintaining form in the midst of complete freedom and relaxation. "Tres palabras" was a perfect complement. Grenadier and Rossy relished the slow dance’s precise syncopations while Mehldau indulged his lyric touch, answering the right-hand melodic figures with left-hand responses and chordal harmonic signposts, drifting for a moment into an adjacent harmony. On the funky, medium-uptempo "Skippy," Grenadier finally got to dig into a hard walking four while Rossy drove the multi-section piece forward with subtle subdivisions of the beat played in turn on everything in his kit; it culminated in a delicious solo. "Boomer" was based on a maddening (in a good way), modulating left-hand piano ostinato and typical Mehldau complex metrics (after the set he revealed that he and Grenadier were playing seven against Rossy’s four). The overall effect was vaguely trip-hoppish. Mehldau played a couple of cadenzas — on "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover" and "Someone To Watch over Me" — that showed off all his strengths: complete independence in his left and right hands, broad harmonic reach, dynamic drama. On "Someone To Watch over Me," the tension of his legato line was heightened by his use of rests, and he’d follow a slowly climbing figure with a descending run, like a ball rolling down hill.
BY JON GARELICK
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