From Bach to the Beatles. Two days with Brad Mehldau, solo and quartet unique concerts at our US/EU Jazz Blues Festival: Videos, Photos

Rippling arpeggios, clear melodies and an incisive touch are pianist staples that establish rhythm, harmonic movement and mood.

Brad Mehldau did not bore the Confederation Park crowd with details on Tuesday night, but he and his bandmates had started this week with some frustrating and stressful circumstances in advance of their our US/EU Jazz Blues Festival concerts in Amsterdam, Netherlands and Warsaw, Poland.

A dense and dazzling recital of Bach’s classics and the compositions and improvisations inspired by them makes this a powerful, thought-provoking gig.

Brad Mehldau made full use of them in this solo recital, first as building blocks of his singular style, then as snippets to be developed simultaneously. But it isn’t just note choices that make the American jazz pianist and composer stand out. He adds stark single notes as a third train of thought and lets them wander to mark the pulse and add emotional shade.

Mehldau established his core approach from the outset. An optimistic line came with sonorous flows in the piano’s middle range, while subtle chromatic shifts added a suggestion of doubt.

As the great jazz drummer Art Blakey, among others, said: “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” When the Mehldau trio hit the stage, a little later than billed and perhaps a little more dishevelled than they would have liked, they played like an ensemble in a league of its own, reaffirming a group sound that the three musicians, all in their 50s, began forging almost two decades ago.

The short first piece, a waltz, was the first of 14 Reveries for Piano, a new commission that made up the first set. Mehldau conceived the work as a reflection on interior consciousness, and developed each “reverie” into an exploration of subtle changes in mood. Lead lines were clearly stated, but were more concerned with emotional clarity than lyrical flow.

The result was a series of detailed variations that eschewed fast tempos and emotional extremes. The second piece was pensive and the lead line was clear; the third rose to a gentle peak of shaded discords; the fourth rumbled in the middle while the melody moved from left to right.

Later, there was a Baroque-like investigation of harmonic orthodoxy, a syncopated gallop that was inquisitive one moment and strident the next, initially triumphant ripples developing a sense of unease. There was lots of detail and lots to take in, but little familiar to act as a peg.

The second half began with selections from Mehldau’s Suite April 2020: 14 Reveries, written at the start of the pandemic while his family were stranded in Amsterdam. Here, the pieces were an all-too-effective reminder of a typical lockdown day. “Waking Up” was followed by “Stepping Outside” and “Keep Your Distance”.

When they began playing together, Mehldau, Grenadier and Ballard had already proven themselves as leading jazz musicians of their generations on their instruments. When they played last night, the music felt like it was less about proving their brilliance and more about getting down, at last, to playing, because it made them and those who heard them feel glad to be alive.

The first’s hymnal cadences gathered strength, the second moved cautiously, the third had left- and right-hand motifs that failed to meet. Mehldau ended the suite as the day moves slowly to mid-afternoon, the movement’s title, “Waiting”, captured by the music’s sense of resignation and a steadily slowing tempo.

The evening took a more upbeat turn with a cover of Radiohead’s “Optimistic”. The Beatles’ “If I Needed Someone” came next, segueing into Neil Young’s “Don’t Let it Bring You Down”. The music gained syncopated lines and rhythmic thrust, bluesy hints and melodies that gripped. And still the pianist extemporised his three trains of thought, packed in a welter of detail and delivered interpretations unlike those of anybody else.

Over the two decades since his star ascended, Brad Mehldau has been cutting a path – often introspective, virtuosic and indifferent to populist antics – that could have led him to jazz’s crowded unsung-genius shelf.

But as conversations between jazz, classical music and pop have grown ever more fluent, Mehldau’s eclecticism has turned him into a major star. He rammed the reasons home in an unaccompanied performance split between respectfully straight recitals of several JS Bach classics, and densely dazzling compositions and improvisations inspired by them.

Mehldau opened with the G minor Fugue No 16 expressed through more dynamic swerves and percussive chord work than a Bach purist might favour, but as the gig progressed, the pianist cherished the original subjects of these pieces with a growing clarity.

Day two in Warsaw, Poland

Brad Mehldau or Chris Potter played on second day. But bad weather on the continent meant that pianist Mehldau, billed as the headliner, had to open the London jazz festival show in place of Potter, whose band – including the superb drummer Bill Stewart – was still in transit.

And so Potter – one of the most accomplished of today’s saxophonists, was restricted to playing for little more than 45 minutes late in the evening. Coming after Mehldau’s intense monotone, this short burst of Potter’s meticulous yet ardent post-Coltraneisms provided a welcome glimpse of a quite different emotional landscape – even if his improvising runs ahead of the quality of his compositions by some distance.

Mehldau’s trio performance ostensibly followed the steady line of development that he, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy have been exploring since they got together in 1995. But this gig was a more varied and purposeful affair than the pianist’s somewhat subdued performance at the Barbican earlier this year.

The fascinating thing about Mehldau is the way he manages to stay independent of the usual practices of the jazz tradition, while astutely deploying its phrasing and some of its repertoire. His group constantly ducks in and out of the common refuges of swing, spending much of the rest of its time in a free pulse that allows the pianist almost as much latitude as if he were playing unaccompanied.

He dislikes grandstanding effects or big climaxes, and often starts in a casually preoccupied manner, as if sitting down to an unscheduled practice. He opened with two originals, a waltz and a slow-building swinger. The restless, twisting parallel world of his remarkable left-hand counter-melodies steadily grew around the music. A yearning and quietly impassioned bolero borrowed from Charlie Haden’s Nocturne album swelled into a typically irresistible Mehldau rhapsody of clustered double-time playing and clamouring voices, while Harold Arlen’s Get Happy was a staccato remake of the original.

Mehldau’s unaccompanied section on this last piece was a tour de force. On Harry Mancini’s Dreamsville he dipped into the well of his classical knowledge. And the inflamed encore answered the reservations of doubters who think Mehldau plays too much in his head. The only downside of the show was the unavoidable brevity of Potter’s contribution.

Saxophonist and composer Chris Potter finally had the stars align for a session that’s been years, if not decades in the making. It can be challenging to find a break in the schedules of such giants on their respective instruments – pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Johnathan Blake.

The eight compositions on Eagle’s Point are all Potter originals, developed with these musicians in mind, as he plays an array of saxophones to the unparalleled support from this rhythm section in an acoustic session. Potter has played with all three of these quartet members but that dates to the early nineties. Call this a long-sought-after reunion.

The album opens with Mehldau’s eerie chords and Potter’s tenor welcoming us into a world that initially seems a bit mysterious but unfolds into melodic vibrancy, reflected in Potter’s liquid rapid runs while Mehldau comps brightly and the tandem of Patitucci and Blade, longtime members of the late Wayne Shorter’s Quartet, underpin as few others can. Mehldau launches a terrific, nimble solo of his in the break and symmetrically closes, repeating the opening ethereal chords.

“Cloud Message” is bolder, with Potter’s tenor commanding attention from the get-go, building his solo aggressively as his mates propel him forward. Mehldau follows in trademark shimmering fashion, with Blade on the ride cymbal and Patitucci plucking emphatically into his declarative turn. Potter returns in a fury, and they take it out to a definitive climax.

The C major Prelude from Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2 led him toward a deep rhythmic thunder built out of the source’s serene pulse, then a turmoil of interwoven melodies and hints of blues.

Bach’s delicately turning resolutions were steered toward dissonance, threaded into jazzy lines and pulled from explicit motifs toward vivid abstractions. Book 1’s D minor Prelude No 6 was recast as if its motifs had been designed for Broadway-song harmonies, and the E major Allemande sparked a hypnotically Keith Jarrett-like contrapuntal whirl.

The Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers” led to jazz standard “Here’s That Rainy Day”, the first of four encores. “Cry Me a River” got the final ovation, though both player and audience were up for more.

On the rousing encores, Mehldau scattered the Beatles’ And I Love Her across impulsive surges in shifting keys and metres before reeling it in, and punched out the Who’s Pinball Wizard in such sympathy with the evening’s agenda that it wasn’t hard to imagine Bach applauding it. Mehldau can be dense to the point of relentlessness, but though there were moments of that, the balance of space and intensity was almost perfectly struck in this powerful and thought-provoking gig.