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Posts from the ‘Autobiography’ Category

Sep 17

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Autumn books 3: Brad Mehldau

The first time I saw the pianist Brad Mehldau in person, playing with a pick-up rhythm section at the Pizza Express in the early 1990s, I was astonished by the intellectual and technical power of his playing, and by its emotional impact. The version of “Moon River” he played that night lives with me still. He was in his early twenties, still with boyish looks, and he sounded like the next thing in jazz piano. A couple of dozen years later I booked him and the tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, his contemporary, colleague and friend, to play at JazzFest Berlin, where they gave a duo performance sensational in its virtuosity, interplay and, again, emotional depth. I had no real idea of the back-story to these two performances.

Back in the ’90s, Mehldau was in the grip of heroin addiction. By the end of the decade he had freed himself from that prison without bars and found a new life. Sharing a stage with Redman in 2016, he was reunited with a contemporary who had finally lost patience with him 10 years earlier, kicking him out of his quartet just when they were achieving recognition. That rejection was one of the factors that eventually forced the pianist to take the action that saved him.

On the subject of addiction and the jazz life, the first volume of Mehldau’s autobiography, titled Formation: Building a Personal Canon, is as harrowing as anything I’ve read in a genre that includes Hampton Hawes’ Raise Up Off Me, Art Pepper’s Straight Life and Peter King’s Flying High. Here’s how he introduces it: “There are detailed descriptions of drug and alcohol abuse in this book. I want to stress that, although I describe the pleasure of using them, I hope I will have shown that they were a mistaken path, one that injured me and almost took my life. They are part of my story. I do not know why I survived when close friends of mine did not. Perhaps because of that, I feel an obligation to tell that story honestly.”

The book is dedicated to three of those young friends who did not survive, and whose stories — using only their first names — are interwoven into the tale of his own childhood, upbringing, schooling and early experiences in the jazz world.

It’s a serious book, sometimes obsessive in pursuit of its themes, in which Goethe, Rilke and Kierkegaard are often quoted as the author describes his search for meaning and beauty. He is sufficiently comfortable with such concepts as gnosis and teleology to deploy them without explanation. Dream sequences are occasionally reconstructed to illustrate his youthful anxieties, particularly those concerning his sexual identity. A publisher wanting a more commercial book would have winnowed many of these passages, removing repetition, but one imagines the accumulated weight of testimony is what Mehldau wanted, perhaps as an additional form of therapy — or as part of that obligation “to tell that story honestly”. For a sympathetic reader, it works.

There’s music, of course. No shortage of it, starting with a description of his youthful tastes, which incorporated an unaffected love of several kinds of pop music — particularly British prog-rock, on which he is clearly an expert — alongside his developing interest in jazz. There’s an abundance of how it felt while he was discovering his musical character, absorbing his influences while at school and college and eventually learning directly from the elders. The rewards of first-hand exposure to pianists of an earlier generation, such as Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris and Cedar Walton, makes good reading, as does his veneration of another one in particular.

“There was a whole swath of us piano players who were trying to play like Wynton Kelly,” he says. “Sometimes, someone would simply play a whole stretch of one of his solos, transcribed from a beloved record. Normally, that kind of thing would be frowned on, because it went against the principle of improvisation, but here the fellow piano-players who knew the solo as well would nod in approval. I did this with several choruses of (his) solo on ‘No Blues’ from Smokin’ at the Half Note. I still quote from that solo regularly. It’s a bedrock of joyous swing, melody and badassed fire all at once.”

Drummers have always been important to him. Listening to Elvin Jones and Ed Blackwell, playing with Billy Higgins and Jimmy Cobb, he’s alert to the attitude and the nuances of their playing, to the way it sits within the beat. “Blackwell’s drumming changed everything for me,” he notes. “He showed how you could play in a formally unhinged context, yet create your own shifting grid, one with simplicity and integrity which nevertheless moved easily within the free current of the music.” He makes the point that while listening to such great jazz musicians on record is one thing, hearing them in person is quite another.

He dives into deeper currents, too, employing his appreciation of aesthetic theory drawn from the likes of Theodor Adorno and the literary critic Harold Bloom (compiler of The Western Canon). “Where to find oneself as an over-thinking, aspiring jazz musician? Music, in its steady abtractness, would not supply a road map. Literature has been the closest analogue thus far. At its best, it used language to break out of language, into something more like music.”

Characteristically, he uses the example of James Joyce and Thomas Mann to discuss the dichotomy between music of the flesh and music of the spirit, embodied in the contrast between Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, both of which he quite properly venerates, just as he does Joyce’s Ulysses and Mann’s Dr Faustus.

“Of course, Miles wasn’t only carnal any more than Coltrane was only spiritual.” he writes. “Yet each led to one pole in my experience of listening to them. I began to have an aspiration for my own output: to close the gap between the divine and flesh, to reconcile sexual and spiritual ecstasy in the musical expression.” He finds an answer in Ulysses.

In jazz-historical terms, he’s fascinating on how it felt to come up in the late ’80s and early ’90s, working alongside the Marsalis-led revival that was supposed to use tradition to blow away the allegedly stale irrelevances of the avant-garde and fusion music.

“‘Postmodernism’ was an explanation for anything and everything,” he remembers, “but it was a term that seemed to eat itself, as it tried to account for the breakdown of linear history in linear, historical terms. In a way, it had no utility, by its own definition. Perhaps that lack of utility was embedded in its meaning, though, and the idea was to start from a place of no meaning. The old set of integral tools did not work. They no longer constructed anything whole. The ’90s were all about coming to terms with that. In that process of reckoning, there was ultimately a strong creative input from all quarters. But it took a minute.” And there was certainly a resentment, directed at the Marsalis brothers, to be worked through.

The narrative ends with Mehldau on the brink of rescue from the fate that had long been beckoning. You know it’s coming, of course, but on the way to his redemption he spares us nothing of the squalor into which his life descended in just about all its aspects — including, for a while, even the music. It’s a gruelling narrative, and a brave one.

* Brad Mehldau’s Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part One is published by Equinox (www.equinoxpub.com)

Apr 20

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Woman at her typewriter

Mom was my greatest champion right from the very beginning. Except for drugs, I shared every event with her. Boyfriends, famous friends, triumph, and regret. My mother subscribed to Rolling Stone for an entire decade, complaining that I was not on the cover again. Watching me fade from the limelight seemed harder on her than it was for me. She didn’t understand that careers must be pliable. If an act insists on not changing and making the music audience come to them, they can end up an oldies act. I always wanted my music to be a place un-aging. The real danger of early success is that our parents, our children, our friends also reap what we sow. I had watched the trajectory of every member of my family change as they chased the fairy light of my success.

I weathered the storms of humility, the people who did not offer backstage passes anymore, or the people who did not even know my name anymore, and I kept on working. Mom told me I should just quit. Finally, I asked:

“And do what, Mom? This… this is what I am.”

Here is the tone and texture of Last Chance Texaco, Rickie Lee Jones’s new memoir. Subtitled “Chronicles of a Troubadour”, it’s one of the most remarkable I’ve read from a musician, a first-person commentary on the life and early career of this extraordinary artist, full of romance and adventure, misadventure and indiscipline, anecdote and reflection — just the stuff we want from those free spirits who live the life so that we don’t have to, inviting us to stand and watch in fascination, half admiring and half appalled.

If you want to know what prompted Steve Gadd to devise that drop-dead-laconic snare-drum lick on “Chuck E’s in Love”, or precisely how her first producers, Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman, teased and moulded the songs that made up Pirates into a classic album, this is not the book that you might have hoped for. Most of the albums after those first two don’t even get a mention. She does tell you how some of the songs came into being (“Last Chance Texaco” itself resulted from a first meeting with Tom Waits, dancing together under a streetlight on Doheny Drive, before she drove away in her yellow Chevy Vega). But there’s rather more to her autobiography than a recital of facts.

The fact that we’re 260 pages into a 360-page book before we even get to signing with Warner Bros for the debut album that made her an overnight sensation at the age of 24 indicates that the emphasis of the narrative is firmly on her childhood and adolescence. This works because her early life was so peripatetic and picaresque, travelling with her perennially malfunctioning family through Oklahoma, Arizona, California and Washington State, sometimes enrolling at three new schools a year, running away and coming back and running away again and eventually staying away but without being able to sever the bonds to her father, the child of a vaudeville performer, and his wife, who had been brought up in an orphanage. They were a couple who “had learnt as kids to avoid government, big institutions and authority” and who “used cash to avoid declaring income and… avoided obligations beyond next month’s rent.” We know where that less than stable background got her, but the journey to her destination makes for compelling and sometimes distressing reading.

She’s good on how music took a hold of her, most significantly through the Beatles (“I fantasised all the ways I could meet Beatle Paul… In melodramatic scenarios I abandoned my hopes and dreams for the sake of Paul who would eventually come find me as I lay dying and realise how much he loved me”) and, later, through seeing Laura Nyro on TV: “(She) seemed to send a message to me that day that said, ‘Come you young girls who are not like the others because you love Broadway as much as rock ‘n’ roll.'” Other influences: an English teacher who got her writing poetry in one of her several high schools, and picking up a book at her sister’s house — Dick Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me — that “told me I was not the first to go for this bohemian life of hitchhiking, pranksters, pot smokers, rebellion and free love.”

There are vivid descriptions of her early experiences as a performer, including her first gig with her first band, playing to an audience of deaf people, her first professional engagement as, briefly, the only white member of Little Caesar and the Romans, famous for their doo-wop hit, “Those Oldies But Goodies (Remind Me of You)”, and the fraught appearance on Saturday Night Live that made a hit of “Chuck E” and a star of Rickie Lee in 1979.

Her lovers — from the famous, including Waits, Lowell George and her heroin buddy Dr John, who shot up with her after being assured that she’d tried it once before, to the lesser known — are given due and intimate consideration. As with her treatment of family members, she’s both generous and unsparing. “We stayed in character throughout our entire romance,” she writes of Waits, “and our characters were sometimes cruel and selfish.” She is wry and realistic about his disciples: “Was I going to be another ghost, sitting around in Tom Waits’s peripheral vision, hoping he looked directly at me?” It led her to a conclusion about the problematic relationship between performer and listener: “I don’t want to have sex with someone who has mistaken me for my song.”

The book sent me back to the albums — the first two, of course, then the great covers collections of Pop Pop, Girl at Her Volcano and It’s Like This, and Traffic from Paradise and a later favourite, The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard — and to the memories of one of the finest concerts I’ve ever attended, at the Dominion Theatre in London in 1992, and one of the most hair-raising, at the Jazz Café in 2007. Most of all, without being unnecessarily literal-minded, it gave me a much clearer idea of the life went into the making of songs like “Coolsville”, “Traces of the Western Slopes”, “The Horses”, “Stewart’s Coat” and “The Evening of My Best Day”: one in which, as she says, “most of the dangerous choices I made were in fact lesser evils.”

By the time she came to read On the Road, it was a disappointment. She’d already lived the story herself. On the journey from the three-year-old lapping up applause for her performance as a snowflake in a children’s ballet to a recovered addict with a Grammy on her mantelpiece, via deportation from Canada as a teenaged hippie officially described as being “in danger of leading a lewd and lascivious life”, she’d learnt that “fame brings no solace, no love, and no warmth” and that money can cut you off. “You may say, ‘So what?’ and ‘I’ll take it if you don’t want it,'” she writes. “I do want it, fame and money and all that goes with it. It’s just that they weren’t what I thought they would be.”

* Rickie Lee Jones’s Last Chance Texaco is published by Grove Press. The photograph is from the album It’s Like This, released in 2000, and was taken by Lee Cantelon.