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pioneer in using rock songs in the same way
that earlier generations of jazz musicians used
swing-era songs—as fodder for improvisation.
“Playing pop tunes just seemed a no-brainer
to me,” he says. “I never thought of it as particularly
weird; I had Blue Note records where
Lee Morgan played Beatles tunes. It had something
to do with me living in L.A. from 1996 to
2001, because that’s when I started recording
with the trio and started playing those songs by
Radiohead and Nick Drake. Radiohead became
a big band for me, because I hadn’t heard any
new bands in a while, and they were really hitting
it then. OK Computer was happening, and
when I heard that, I went out and got the earlier
albums. Not only were they a great band, but
they were also here and now; they felt relevant.
“It was a renaissance for me in listening to
pop music, because I had put it aside when I
dived into jazz, just as I had put aside classical.
Classical came back to me when I was 20 in
New York. Pop came back to me when I was 24
in L.A. Pop was the first music I had an emotional
response to. When I was young, I had a
clock radio in my bedroom and I’d wake up
to the sounds of Steve Miller, the Eagles and
Steely Dan, and I loved that music.”
More recently, however, Mehldau has been
consumed by listening to Bach’s preludes and
fugues and Beethoven’s sonatas. As he gets
older—he’s now 41—he finds himself exploring
a single composer or work for months at a time.
This allows him to dive deeply into the details.
Months of listening to Richard Strauss’
Metamorphosen led to Mehldau’s first long
work, his own through-composed Highway
Rider. That, in turn, led to him occupying the
prestigious Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie
Hall for the 2010–’11 season, the first jazz artist
to do so. That doesn’t mean that he is forsaking
jazz to become a classical composer or pianist.
“Just because I listen to a lot of Bach doesn’t
mean I play a lot of Bach at my gigs,” he points
out, “but the listening comes out in unexpected
ways. I can study the Faure nocturnes for a
few months and then later on a live date, covering
a Pink Floyd tune, something will come out
in my playing, and I’ll say, ‘Ah, that’s Faure.’”
Mehldau has long been fascinated by
canonical classical composers, especially the
Germans from the 18th and early 19th centuries
and the French from early 20th century,
but he had never explored contemporary
art music in quite the same way. That changed
with his newest album, Modern Music
(Nonesuch), a duo project with fellow pianist
Kevin Hays based on arrangements by the
classical and jazz composer (and saxophonist)
Patrick Zimmerli.
Mehldau and Zimmerli actually went to
the same school at the same time—William
H. Hall High School in West Hartford, Conn.
Hays was simultaneously attending a different
Connecticut high school; he met Zimmerli at a
national music competition for students. Like
Mehldau, Hays held the piano chair in Joshua
Redman’s early ’90s bands.
Mehldau is two years younger than the
other two, and grew up admiring them. When
he and Hays committed to a two-piano recording,
Zimmerli stepped forward with the idea of
improvising within structured arrangements
of contemporary classical pieces. As the idea
evolved, the pieces by Arvo Pärt and Henryk
Gorecki dropped out, and the final lineup
included four compositions by Zimmerli
and one apiece by Mehldau, Hays, Ornette
Coleman, Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
For the album’s title-track composition,
Zimmerli asked Mehldau and Hays to play
a written part in the left hand and to improvise
with the right. This pushed the concept of
right-/left-hand independence to an extreme
that even Mehldau had never attempted. But he
was game, and after a few stumbles, Mehldau
started to get the hang of it.
“You have this burden of playing something
as it’s written and also being intuitive
enough to improvise at the same time,” he
recounts. “Each one is challenging enough by
itself, but to do both at once is a real test. The
brain feels like it’s split in half.”DB
DECEMBER 2011 DOWNBEAT 47