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Posts tagged ‘Brad Mehldau’

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)

Aug 15

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Lee Konitz: the improviser at 85

Lee Konitz 1No musician interrogates a song more thoroughly than the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz: separating its components, wiping off the accumulated dirt and scraping away the rust, holding the bits up to the light, examining them from all angles, and then reassembling them in a more interesting form. He was doing it in 1947, when he made his first recordings with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, aged 20. He is still doing today, halfway through his ninth decade.

He’s featured on a new CD, Costumes Are Mandatory, released on the HighNote label and recorded in August 2012 with a quartet under the leadership of the pianist Ethan Iverson, noted for his work with the trio The Bad Plus. The bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Jorge Rossy complete the group. Together with two other albums released in the past couple of years, Live at Birdland (ECM), recorded in December 2009 with Brad Mehldau, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, and Enfants Terribles (Half Note), made in June 2011 with Bill Frisell, Gary Peacock and Joey Baron, it provides a view of a great artist in his final years, his work subject to the changes imposed by time and the ageing process.

The late work of a long-lived great artist is always interesting and can provide a fascinating distillation of his or her career-long preoccupations. Sometimes the reduced powers are physical, sometimes they are mental. The painter Willem De Kooning was suffering from a form of Alzheimer’s disease when, in his eighties, he produced a series of strange, pale, almost luminous canvases that seemed like the ghosts of his former work. Fortunately, any reduction in Konitz’s powers is purely physical; the articulation might not be as swift, but the intellect is as sharp as ever.

No longer the fleet-footed musical athlete of his youth, when he and his fellow saxophonist Warne Marsh leapt with such alacrity over the high hurdles set for them by their mentor, the pianist Lennie Tristano, now Konitz deploys his reduced powers to different ends. The last of his strength is being spent on searching his material — almost always drawn from the standard American songbook — for new connections, new angles, new avenues of approach.

My best memory of Konitz is also one of my best memories of music, full stop. It comes from about 30 years ago, and a night at a short-lived jazz club called the Canteen on Great Queen Street in Covent Garden, occupying premises that had formerly been Blitz, the headquarters of the New Romantic movement, would later become a discotheque and now house a lap-dancing club. The Canteen, although ultimately unsuccessful in its attempt to rival Ronnie Scott’s, was for a while a very good place to hear such people as Esther Phillips, Chet Baker and Lee Konitz.

On the night in question Konitz was accompanied by an excellent British rhythm section: the pianist (and composer) Bob Cornford, the young bassist Paul Morgan and the experienced drummer Trevor Tompkins. What I remember most vividly is that one complete set was taken up by a treatment of “On Green Dolphin Street”, the Hollywood film theme composed by Bronislau Kaper in 1947 and rescued just under a decade later by Ahmad Jamal, who was responsible for its subsequent popularity among jazz musicians. Konitz started out by improvising unfamiliar and seemingly arbitrary phrases, inviting the other three musicians to go along with him as he gradually allowed these shreds of melody to take new forms, uncovered the connective tissue between them. This mesmerising process reached its apogee when, after much feinting and seeming disgression, Kaper’s theme gradually began to emerge and was stated for the first time as the piece ended. It was like watching a film of an explosion being run backwards in super slow motion.

Lee Konitz 3He does something similar, at a more compressed and less exalted level, on the version of “What’s New” included in Costumes Are Mandatory, allowing Iverson to lead the way, before entering with a phrase from the theme which is quickly deformed into a series of glancing allusions to the original tune, inventing their own sense as they go along. This is something that used to be called “thematic improvisation”, and it is almost a lost art. His distinctive tone — which once proposed an alternative to the all-pervasive influence of Charlie Parker — may be more fibrous and less robust than in his youth or his prime, and the comparison with Live at Birdland and Enfants Terribles indicates that time is having an inevitable effect, but it remains the perfect vehicle for his thoughts.

Konitz, of course, was a member of Miles Davis’s famous 1948 nonet, the Birth of the Cool band, and another personal memory of his playing comes from 1991, when he appeared at London’s South Bank with a band billed as Re-Birth of the Cool, an attempt by another original member, Gerry Mulligan, to recreate those celebrated sessions. Lew Soloff played Davis’s parts, and the other original present was Bill Barber, the tuba-player. For me, the outstanding impression was left by the way Konitz approached the project: he was the only one not interested in honouring the past by recreating it note-for-note but was intent on playing as though more than 40 years had passed and the world had moved on.

Working as a soloist for hire suits him because it presents him with a constant variety of challenges. That is how he has operated throughout his career, which has never been short of recorded documentation, from those early sides with Thornhill, Davis, Tristano and Stan Kenton through his own albums on Atlantic and Verve, his fascinating and fearless encounters with Martial Solal, Elvin Jones, Albert Mangelsdorff, Kenny Wheeler and countless others, to this most recent crop of albums. As a body of work, it offers not just a vast quantity of great music but a salutary lesson in the value of living in the present.

* The photograph of Konitz at the top is a detail from the cover of the 1955 Atlantic album Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh, taken by William Claxton. The lower photograph is a detail from the cover of Costumes Are Mandatory, taken by John Rogers. For those who want to know more, I thoroughly recommend Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art by Andy Hamilton, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2007.