44 DOWNBEAT DECEMBER 2011
Jazz Album & Pianist of the Year " Brad Mehldau 1 Pianist, 2 Hands By Geoffrey Himes " Photo By Michael Jackson Brad Mehldau’s double CD Live In Marciac (Nonesuch), the Jazz Album of the Year in the DownBeat Readers Poll, comes with a DVD, and when you click on the encore track “Martha My Dear,” the first thing you see is a close-up of Mehldau’s hands. Those hands, sticking out from sleeves of brown cotton and shiny, coppery stripes, are surprisingly small, especially when curled up like eagle talons over the keys. The right hand begins by picking out the familiar Beatles melody, but the left hand doesn’t play the expected comping chord or even a parallel harmony. Instead, Mehldau’s left hand carves out a brisk, descending melody that doesn’t echo the right hand but complements the tune perfectly. A mere eight bars later, his right hand is spinning variations on Paul McCartney’s theme, while the left jabs at a circular arpeggio of eighth notes. It sounds as if his hands belong to two different musicians engaged in a dialogue. The camera pulls back to reveal the pianist’s long arms, square jaw and brown hair, confirming the obvious: It’s all Mehldau. But the close-up emphasizes how independently his hands can operate, and that remarkable give-and-take is expressed on all of the album’s 14 tracks. “Playing different lines in each hand is something I’ve done for a long time,” Mehldau says by phone from Amsterdam. “I do it more and more because it’s so much fun. I love Brahms’ piano music where there’s all this melodic activity in the bass. And Art Tatum is huge for me, because he does things with his thumbs and little fingers to generate more melody. He’s really heavy. “Having each hand play independently stems from the desire to hear more melody in the lower register. It’s more expressive in some ways to hear the tune down there. It’s more touching because you don’t expect it. And then you realize you can still play a different melody up high. If you’re involved in the piano to any extent, this approach calls out to you. You realize you’ve got 10 fingers, and they can all add to the melody.” The conversation between Mehldau’s two hands is more obvious on a solo album like Live In Marciac than on a combo record like 2008’s Brad Mehldau Trio Live, a chamber orchestra project like 2010’s Highway Rider, or a duo session like the new Modern Music. When Mehldau ascended the immense wooden stage at the Marciac Jazz Festival in southwestern France, his trio mates Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard weren’t there to fill up the bottom with their own inventions. The whole lower range was left to Mehldau’s left hand, which he used to spawn one melodic theme after another. Mehldau, who was also voted Pianist of the Year in the Readers Poll, alternates between live recordings and studio recordings. In the studio, he points out, he has a lot more control over the performance. Recording multiple takes allows an artist to select the one with the optimal balance of precision and excitement. He cites Modern Music, engineered by Tom Lazarus, as “the best-sounding piano record I’ve ever been part of.” In a live setting, by contrast, you have far less control over the sound and you only get one take each night. The compensation is the stimulation from the audience. “Perhaps it’s ego-driven,” he jokes, “but you get this excitement and this drive to do something special for those people who are sitting out there. You can feel that they want it, and so you want to give it to them. It’s the same whether you’re playing for 80 people at a club or 8,000 people at a festival; they took time out of their lives to show up and hear what you do. I never take that for granted.” On Aug. 2, 2006, when Live In Marciac was recorded, Mehldau felt like he was having a special night, but he wasn’t 100 percent sure until he listened to the tapes. “I felt like it was a good night when I was on stage,” he recalls, “but sometimes I’m wrong. Sometimes I think it’s a good night, because I’m excited about something new I was trying to do. But when I listen later I realize it’s not something I want to listen to again and again. But this time, when I listened to the tapes, I liked it even more. It’s not an obvious cause-and-effect thing; it doesn’t have much to do with what happened earlier in the day. It goes in cycles—you’ll have several good shows, and then one will fall flat, and then every week or so, you’ll have a really great show.” Nine of the tracks on the album are outside compositions, including—in typical Mehldau fashion—standards by Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hammerstein, as well as more modern standards by Kurt Cobain and Nick Drake. Mehldau has long been a DECEMBER 2011 DOWNBEAT 45