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BRAD MEHLDAU
RELAXED INTENSITY

With the concert business hurting on just about every level — one local booker recently told me he hasn’t seen it this bad since 1992, just before Bill Clinton was elected president — it was gratifying to see a solo jazz pianist fill a club on a Wednesday night, and going up against a West Coast Red Sox playoff game at that. The performer was 34-year-old Brad Mehldau, who’s best known for fronting one of the finest piano trios in memory but these days is playing some dates in support of Solo Piano: Live in Tokyo (Nonesuch).

In the second of two sold-out sets at Scullers last week, Mehldau played a familiar — for him — set: "Monk’s Mood," Cole Porter’s "From This Moment On," Simon & Garfunkel’s "The Only Living Boy in New York," the original "29 Palms," the Gershwins’ "Someone To Watch over Me," Radiohead’s "Paranoid Android," Nick Drake’s "River Man," and Lennon & McCartney’s "Mother Nature’s Son." That mix — mostly certifiable American Songbook classics and oddball contemporary covers — explains his across-the-board appeal to graying jazzniks, the adult-alternative crowd, and Berklee types who grew up with some of the newer material.

The other appeal is Mehldau’s unabashed romanticism. Like the great piano-balladeers of any genre, he knows how to play those slow tempi in an unbroken legato line of melody that’s supremely effective with just about any of the above songs. He supplements his readings of the melodies with lush, often dense, reharmonizations and all manner of fancy fingerwork. Instead of running long strings of eighth notes in the right hand while the left hand "comps" in the bop keyboard style, Mehldau will hammer a repeated interval or a cramped chord in the right hand — like a pedal point — while the left runs through melodic variations into the deepest end of the bass register, sometimes climaxing with grand fortissimo rumbles. Or his hands will create complicated simultaneous independent melodies. Working his way through a tune’s harmonic progressions, Mehldau examines every possible voicing of the chords, then snaps back into the melody for satisfying transitions from verse to chorus to bridge (especially on Gershwin and Porter), like a perfectly executed double play. Folk material like Drake’s and Simon’s, meanwhile, comes across in his chordings like ancient hymns.

The one thing you hardly ever hear from Mehldau is straightforward swing or blues. But when he’s lost in one of his deep explorations of "Paranoid Android," playing up the contrast between Thom Yorke’s plaintive vocal line and that driving bass vamp, you tend to forget about other kinds of jazz piano.

BY JON GARELICK

Issue Date: October 15 - 21, 2004
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