DREAM ANALYSIS WITH BRAD MEHLDAU
BRAD MEHLDAU DREAMED A STRANGE DREAM ABOUT THE LATE ACTOR PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN.
Dreams often prove elusive, but Mehldau’s possessed a clarity to accompany its surrealism: Hoffman stood in a room with Mehldau, and the actor read the American Constitution. Perhaps because Mehldau is a pianist and composer, the dream was accompanied by a melody.
“I woke up and wrote the tune, as has happened on a few occasions — I dream something musically and then try to grab it right away,” Mehldau says. “Not even a week later, he died. I was saddened like many people — I was a big fan. I was also spooked because I had just dreamed about him. It seemed like a message from the future, a portent.”
That’s the story as to how Mehldau came to title his forthcoming album “Seymour Reads the Constitution!”
“I decided to title the song for what it was, taking only his middle name because it had a flow to it,” Mehldau says. “I suppose there’s an elegiac component to it, retrospectively, inadvertently.”
That album — recorded with Mehldau’s trio, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard — is still a month from release. More recently, the pianist made “After Bach,” a recording comprising four preludes and a fugue from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, each
with a corresponding new original piece written by Mehldau.
These two very different recordings follow a collaboration last year with Chris Thile, a mandolin virtuoso with similarly wide-ranging musical interests.
Following Mehldau over nearly three decades has been like chasing an elusive sea creature, an adventure with wondrous twists and turns. When Mehldau began recording in the early-’90s, assessment of his work was often reductive: He was a white pianist leading a trio, so clearly he was the next Bill Evans. His performances and recordings didn’t support that comparison, though. They completely missed a delicately balanced sense of playfulness and melancholy that filled all corners of his music: his playing, compositions and interpretations of others’ music.
Mehldau dug repeatedly into the works of Broadway legend Richard Rodgers, which wasn’t a dramatic departure for a jazz player, but also songs by the Beatles, Radiohead and Nick Drake.
Years later, he admits he still has a particular affinity for rock guitarists.
“I’m often taking guitar strumming and placing it, in a different context, slightly mashed up, on the piano,” he says. “Joni Mitchell, Allman Brothers, Hendrix, Radiohead, David Gilmour from Pink Floyd, Alex Lifeson from Rush — it’s all in there.”
Mehldau’s interest in the piano’s sound reminded me less of ’60s jazz pianists and more of Glenn Gould stalking Bach’s work. So decades later, “After Bach” felt less like a detour and more like an old dream turned into reality. Even with material nearly 300 years old, Mehldau finds ways to slip expectations and marry old and new.
Though “After Bach” was just released, Mehldau visits Houston this week with his trio. For those shows, Mehldau says the trio tours with a group of about 10 songs “that are ‘current’ — they have not been recorded yet, and we are playing them live often, almost every night, in a tour.”
They’ll also mix in a few from their deeper repertoire and the occasional left-field surprise, a song “we all know but have never played before. So I try to keep a mix between new, comfortable and spontaneous. In this way, we hopefully don’t get locked into an approach that’s too fixed but also are able to develop material over the course of time and let it grow and bloom.”
The pieces on “Seymour!” are the result of such growth. The mix is intriguing, as always.
Mehldau reaches way back for Frederick Loewe’s 1940s standard “Almost Like Being in Love.”
He also snares “Friends,” a lesser-circulated tune by the Beach Boys, whose composer Brian Wilson deftly made songs of alienation and isolation sound radiant.
The album’s tone twists with great subtlety between feelings of optimism and sadness. I asked if Mehldau felt sour times introduce some form of optimism.
“Never, in the sense that you might be suggesting — that current events, political and what have you, determine optimism or lack of it in artistic expression,” he says. “It is the argument (German philosopher Theodor) Adorno put forward when he said that no one could write beautiful poetry after the Holocaust. It is a very good argument. But I’ve never seen it play out in praxis. Optimism in all its forms — naive, bullish, foolish, inappropriate, radiant — always resurfaces. Which probably means: At this point in the game, it’s not all so doom and gloom as we might have it. That’s what I tell myself. I could certainly imagine situations where ‘Great Day’ would not be the track to play, but at this moment, we’re not there yet.”
So the trio works through “Great Day” — a Paul McCartney song from 20 years ago — and also pours some of the natural beauty from “Beatrice,” a piece the late jazz great Sam Rivers wrote for his wife.
Mehldau says the latter “occupies an unapologetically optimistic space that we can get into as a trio but one that we hadn’t really documented so much yet. I liked it ending the record because in the context of my output thus far, it’s counter-intuitive. I’m often angsty, and all that angst gets old after a while.”