Brad Mehldau

Brad Mehldau (b. 1971)

BRAD MEHLDAU

Jazz Piano's Future, Now
Over the course of the six years that he’s been recording with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy, pianist Brad Mehldau has perfected what may be the most compelling piano trio led by an under-40 jazz musician. The ensemble’s The Art of the Trio: Vol. 5, recorded live at the famed Village Vanguard in New York, highlights the symbiotic interplay that characterizes the band, as well as the leader’s finely nuanced playing. The highly-touted pianist, who can also be heard to great effect on Charles Lloyd's Hyperion With Higgins, spoke with Barnes&Noble.com's Ted Panken.

Barnes & Noble.com: You're very precise with words, and from having read a number of your liner notes, you appear not to use them lightly. Why have you named five of your CDs "The Art of the Trio"? Can you deconstruct the phrase a little?

Brad Mehldau: [laughs] Yes. Matt Pierson, who signed me to Warner Brothers, came up with that name years ago. I was just starting to get that trio sort of as a regular entity, and we had some idea that there might be a future, hopefully with those particular guys, and that I'd like to record a series of records with them. So he wanted to think of one title that would work for a series, and he came up with that one. I think it works pretty well. It's pretty literal. We're trying to make Art and we're a trio. I always feel awkward. I never know what to say, because I didn't think of it.

B&N.com: Miles Davis said Frank Sinatra and Orson Welles taught him about rhetoric and phrasing syntax. I'm wondering if there's a similar experience for you.

BM: I think there's something sort of magical about being an instrumentalist, which is that you're never achieving what a vocalist could, but in the act of trying to be like the human voice, consciously or not, the very failure is really what makes lyricism happen. With someone like Miles, it's not that he sounds like Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday. He sounds like a trumpet that's so lyrical that you can almost hear a voice trying to speak within there, but of course it's not a voice. It's just missing, because of course it's a trumpet and it's not going to denote actual words. That's where I think lyricism is. It's like a striving for a voicelike quality. I think you can do that on a piano, too. Oftentimes piano players are thinking like horn players, but you can also be informed by vocalists. So for me, certainly someone like Billie Holiday or Dinah Washington, or the way Louis Armstrong sang, are vocalists whom I think of. But then, in turn, it goes both ways. You also have vocalists who are sounding like instruments. So it kind of goes both ways, I guess.

B&N.com: You've been a trio as such for about seven or eight years and recorded as such for six. To what extent is your tonal personality guided or shaped by the people with whom you're playing? For instance, if Jorge Rossy is playing drums or if Billy Higgins -- whom you encountered several times towards the end of his life -- is the drummer, how does that impact you as a player?

BM: Someone like Billy -- or I just played recently with Dianne Reeves and had the same experience, or for instance, I got to play with [saxophonist] Junior Cook right before he died -- when you get a musician who has such a strong identity, it becomes more that you're sort of disappearing into their identity. "Identity" may not be the right word. With Billy and with Diane and with Junior Cook, it was just the actual strength of their rhythmic feeling that informed every phrase that they played. It really was being more pulled into that. It was either be pulled into it and don't fight it, or it just maybe wouldn't work. It's natural that you get pulled into that because it feels so good aesthetically. It just feels right physically.I guess playing with Larry and Jorge, it's not so much being pulled. It's a push-and-pull thing that we're all doing together. I guess I'm leading it, in a sense, just as far as I'm dictating what we're going to play, but beyond that, it's pretty even between the three of us -- the feel of it, the rhythmic feel. I think that's so important. When you're trying to talk about jazz combos, with groups, so much of it is always hinging on the feelings that people get together, which I guess is magical at a certain point, or hard to dictate at least.

B&N.com: What five or six CDs are most prominent in your current rotation? I know you're a bit of an omnivore.

BM: Yes! [laughs] Actually, my drummer, Jorge Rossy, is studying piano (and he's getting pretty good actually; it's starting to get scary), and he discovered {|Nat "King" Cole|}, whom I had never really checked out.He gave me a great triple-CD set that's a collection of the Nat "King" Cole Trio -- an overview. Two CDs are the trio with him singing and the other just instrumental. There's all these great songs that I know. But when I hear him sing "Sweet Lorraine" or "Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You," and some of the others, it makes me again start thinking about playing those songs.

B&N.com: Any classical?

BM: A lot of classical stuff. I've been working on this Hindemith piece called "Ludas Tonalis," which is a crazy group of preludes and fugues and cycles around the circle of fifths. There's a great piano player called Edward Aldwell playing it. There's also three Fauré Nocturnes on that same CD, which are beautiful. So I've been checking out a lot of Fauré. Also Janácek. A great composer. I've just discovered his piano music. It's a Deutsche Grammophon recording, and it translates in English as "On the Overgrown Path." It's a group of about 14 or 15 small piano pieces. I don't know if they're thematically tied or just by a feeling. Beautiful piano music. It's sort of between some of the Romanticism of maybe Schumann, and some of the kind of textures that he gets on piano, but already with a foot into some really different harmonic things, because I think it was written in the early 20th century.

B&N.com: Anything in the pop field that has your ear these days?

BM: The new Radiohead record, Amnesiac. There's three or four songs on there that are really beautiful.

B&N.com: --Ted Panken