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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