Brad Mehldau, lean and lanky, lopes across the stage to the grand piano. He acknowledges the audience with a brief flip of the hand and nod of the head, and drops to the piano bench. His hands fall on the keys a fraction of a second later than his backside hits the bench, and his fingers launch into a rustling chord, notes quietly oscillating and circulating a shimmering harmony. Right leg swings toward the left, pivoting his lower limbs upstage. Turning his head away from the audience and, at the same time, towards the keyboard, he draws his right ear down. Above the pulsing, shifting sixteenth-note figuration in the middle register, plaintive quarter notes and eighths plink away at the melody to an unidentifiable rock or pop song.

Brad Mehldau.

^{Courtesy photo}

Welcome to a Brad Mehldau concert.

Would you like to hear some funky blues? Hard bop? Regular bop, even? A walking bass line in the left hand with swung eighth notes in the right? Man, you came to the wrong show.

You want “Body and Soul?” “Stella by Starlight?” “Caravan?” “Green Dolphin Street?” Sorry, they’re not on the menu tonight.

What you will find on a Mehldau set list are rock songs intermingled with less obvious jazz standards, reharmonized and given contrapuntal textures which often include 3 separate lines, always played with an absolutely beautiful tone. You’ll also hear some Mehldau compositions, which can be difficult to ascertain as he so thoroughly reconfigures standards and covers in his own idiom, and chooses from so broad a range of music, that, even for a knowledgeable listener with catholic tastes, the original tune can be almost impossible to identify.

At Mehldau’s solo piano recital Wednesday evening at the Neurosciences Institute, I was able to name only 5 of the 9 compositions he performed during the 90 or so minutes that he played. “My Favorite Things” was introduced with a rocking rhythm somewhere between a waltz and a cowboy music shuffle, or like a Chopin nocturne with a mild limp, and when the melody finally emerged, it was couched in a haze of unusual harmonizations. Performed as a soft, impressionistic berceuse, it was the diametric opposite of the static modal ecstasy of the tune’s most famous incarnation as an exuberant vehicle for Coltrane and Tyner.

There was no gospel shouting in Bobby Timmons’s soul jazz waltz, “This Here” (announced by Mehldau as “Dish Here,” a reference to Cannonball Adderley’s spoken introduction to the work on The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco). Instead, it became a blurry, delicate, cool waltz, understated but bluesy.

That new jazz standard, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” began with an off-kilter left hand pattern marked by occasional blue notes; a melody emerged from the pattern as notes stuck out. Eventually the right hand came in with the Nirvana tune, reharmonized with sour minor chords resolving into clear major sonorities. Mehldau drove the piece to some weird bitonal place, and one particularly memorable section involved a single note repeated in the middle register as the left hand spun out an accompaniment and the right hand soloed.

“I’m Old-Fashioned” was turned into a slow diatonic stride work. In a rock-steady adagio time, Mehldau’s left hand alternated bass notes and thick diatonic clusters as the accompaniment to a lazy right hand solo. Of note was how Mehldau brought his left hand away from the stride bass and dropped it in the same octave as the right hand, a daring pared-down texture of two notes (one per each hand).

The work which had the strongest feeling of traditional jazz swing was a playful rendition of Harold Arlen’s “Get Happy.” Here Mehldau used swinging eighth notes to delineate an embellishment of the melody; in the last 8 bars of the tune’s first statement, Mehldau tumbled the melody into the bass register, developing it into an extended solo for left hand alone, later bringing in the right hand for an improvised counterpoint like a spastic Bach toccata.

Textures of improvised 2-part counterpoint are a Mehldau specialty, and his talent for doing so was nothing less than amazing. Completely independent lines in both hands were elaborated and elegantly played, a joyful spontaneous counterpoint.

The pianist most frequently mentioned in the same breath as Brad Mehlau is Bill Evans, but such a comparison is lazy and stupid: lazy, because Mehldau, like Evans, is white, plays quietly, likes to work in a piano trio format, and his music is informed by a classical background—all superficial similarities; stupid, because the comparisons pretty much end there.

Evans, no matter how much he stretched time or created new comping styles, was essentially a bebop pianist: left hand accompanies, right hand solos. The strongest classical influence one hears in Evans is that of Ravel or Debussy (at least the clearer moments of the latter).

Mehldau seems to be equally influenced, or even more so, by the German/Austrian piano tradition of Bach, Schumann, Brahms, all composers who created detailed contrapuntal textures of 3 or 4 parts. It’s not uncommon in a Mehldau setting to get a gentle oscillating accompaniment in the middle register of the keyboard and a different bass line in the low register to sound underneath a calm melody in the right hand.

One of Mehldau’s most impressive attributes is his ability to play straight eighth notes and quarters, and somehow make them swing. Were you to transcribe one of these passages and place the sheet music in front of a classical pianist, the result would come off as some kind of Bach with blue notes. I don’t know how Mehldau achieves that feeling of forward momentum without being ponderous or square, but somehow he does. In his treatment of such rhythms outside the usual scope of jazz, in his repurposing of classical musical textures for jazz and improvisation, and in his exploration of harmony, Mehldau has significantly expanded the jazz keyboardist’s vocabulary.

His willingness to open a musical door in the middle of a solo, step through it, and explore the new territory makes him more akin to Keith Jarrett. Indeed, if one needs to triangulate Mehldau in the history of jazz piano, I would consider him as a cool version of Jarrett’s passion and lyricism. This was most impressively evident in his penultimate selection, what sounded like a pop or rock song. The middle section included a long rumination on a rhythm of ONE TWO-and THREE FOUR-and, featuring chords in both hands which bled into new harmonies, overlapping the old. The work climaxed with a rumbling in the bass (Mehldau can create a loud tone, but he never bangs—it’s always lyrically loud) and washes of diatonic clusters pouring out of the instrument, melting away into new chords, and slowly dying away to take us back to the three-part texture of the beginning: melody simply stated in the treble, rolling accompaniment in the middle, and a separate and distinct bass line in the low.

Mehldau is a restrained, cerebral, yet generous improviser with massive technique. He’s not every jazz fan’s cup of tea because he often steps outside the previously established boundaries of the idiom, but for those willing to follow him, as was the standing-room-only audience at the Neurosciences, the reward is great. If Mehldau does have one outstanding similarity to Bill Evans, it is this: every jazz pianist of his generation has to come to terms with his style, through either acceptance, rejection, or selective adaptation. That is the mark of a true musical giant.

For a copy of the program, click here.