For Harold Mabern’s 83rd Birthday, A Downbeat Feature From 2015 and an Uncut Blindfold Test from 2004

For Harold Mabern’s 83rd birthday, I’m augmenting a post that I put up in 2015 (it contained an uncut Blindfold Test that we did in 2004) with a “Director’s Cut” of a 2015 Downbeat feature. Here’s the intro I wrote to the post at the time:

Pianist Harold Mabern celebrates his 79th birthday today. I had a chance to hear him last night playing bassist Gregory Ryan’s weekly gig at at a midtown steakhouse (Joe Farnsworth on drums). The piano, which is decent but was shaky in the upper register, is placed between the stairway down from street level and the bar, and to call the room noisy would be an understatement. Still, Mabern played with customary focus, power, melodic invention and soulfulness — treated the gig with complete respect and commitment, revealing his encyclopedic knowledge of the American Songbook. A son of Memphis, Tennessee, who spent the second half of the ’50s in Chicago, Mabern has been a beacon and mentor for several generations of pianists, among them James Williams, Donald Brown, Mulgrew Miller and Geoff Keezer, with whom he played in a five-piano band twenty years ago. I had several opportunities to talk with HM during my WKCR years, and had an opportunity to do the DownBeat Blindfold Test with him in 2004. Here’s the uncut version.

Harold Mabern Downbeat Feature, 2015:

On March 19th, a day before he turned 79, Harold Mabern celebrated by taking a sideman gig with bassist Gregory Ryan. The venue was not a jazz club, but a cavernous mid-Manhattan branch of Hillstone, the steakhouse chain, where the “bandstand” is a narrow 15′ floor space from the piano, which sits at the base of the stairway to the street, to the drums, next to a corner door leading to a storage room. The trio faced a large oval bar, banquettes and perhaps a dozen circular tables, packed with raucous Thursday dinner hour patrons—corporate types cutting loose before the weekend, couples, well-heeled families with small children.

While waiting for tables, folks milled about the piano, among them a woman bouncing her harnessed baby to the beat of Mabern’s relentless vamp on “You Go To My Head.” Mabern smiled broadly as he reharmonized the melody, transitioned to a long chordal passage executed in parallel octaves, then, to conclude, switched to rhythmic dialogue with Joe Farnsworth. After stating the verse and melody of “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” as a surging waltz, he shifted to several choruses of block chords over a brisk swing section. An abstract rubato solo introduction morphed into “The Nearness Of You,” reharmonized with voicings evocative of Red Garland. Two little girls had sidled by the piano, transfixed by Mabern’s huge hands dancing across the keys; he smiled at them benignly while interpolating a long section from “Strangers In The Night” and a Bobby Timmons blues. After a rollicking stroll down John Coltrane’s “Straight Street,” on which he alternated fleet single-line movements with stirring passages of two-handed invention, he closed the set with his own soulfully boppish “Aon” which premiered on Mabern’s 1968 Prestige debut Rakin’ and Scrapin’.

A week or so after this grandmaster class in the art of the trio, suffused with high intellect, deep emotion and an abiding sense of musical adventure, Mabern recalled a piece of sage advice from his good friend, the long-deceased alto saxophonist Sylvester “Sonny Red” Kyner: “Mabern, a little bit of money beats no money any day; a small gig is better than no gig at all.” Mabern continued: “Nobody’s coming where I live to hear me play. The things I do for my friends, we do for each other. The gig pays $100, but on the bandstand you get a million dollars worth of experience, because you always find something you didn’t know before.”

A fortnight later, Mabern played three nights at Smoke to acknowledge a new release, Afro Blue, on SmokeSessions, the club’s imprint. Present from the recording on the opening set were Farnsworth, bassist John Webber and tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander, his bandmates of choice for several decades. Vocalist Jean Baylor filled in on short notice for Alexis Cole, one of five singers on the date, along with Kurt Elling, Norah Jones, Jane Monheit and Gregory Porter. It’s the first of Mabern’s two dozen leader dates to showcase the context in which he worked frequently during the 1960s, often at Birdland but also on the road, with Betty Carter, Johnny Hartman, Irene Reid, Gloria Lynne, Dakota Station, Ernestine Anderson, Arthur Prysock, Joe Williams and Sarah Vaughan, in between consequential sideman stints of varying lengths with the Jazztet, Roy Haynes, J.J. Johnson, Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery and Lee Morgan.

The idea gestated when Mabern mentioned his experiences with “the singing thing” during an interview for the liner notes of Right On Time, a live trio engagement with Webber and Farnsworth that launched SmokeSessions. “We asked Harold if he’d made a record with singers,” Paul Stache, the club’s proprietor and label head, said. “He said, ‘No, but I always wanted to.’” Stache already had a notion to recruit Gregory Porter for a future project after Porter sang Johnny Hartman and other Coltrane repertoire with Mabern’s group during an end-of-2011 week at Smoke. He also knew that during a three-year period when Porter sang at Smoke every Thursday, Mabern, when in town, attended almost every single performance. When Stache later reminded Mabern of the singers idea, he replied, “If you get Gregory, I’m in; I wrote a song that’s perfect for him.’” Stache put together a six-singer wish-list. “Five of them confirmed,” Stache said. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, yeah, for Harold…’”

“Gregory reminded me of Joe Williams, who I played with for three years,” Mabern said. “Joe could sing anything—what Pavarotti sang, or ‘Over The Rainbow’ or ‘Go Down, Moses’—and Gregory is ubiquitous in his language and selection of songs. I went even when it was Chicago-cold and snowing.” As Mabern does not drive, this meant catching a bus from Spring Creek Towers, a cooperative apartment complex of 15,000 residents in the East New York district of Brooklyn, to catch the 3-train for a one-hour ride to Smoke’s 106th Street and Broadway location. He moved there from Crown Heights, from which, midway through a 12-day transit strike at the beginning of 1966, he hiked 10½ miles through the snow to the Empire Hotel by Lincoln Center to catch a ride to a Blue Mitchell session for Blue Note at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey. When the session was over, Mabern trekked back. “I did it six times that week,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to miss that record date. They said, ‘If you can get here…’ I made it.”

“Harold stayed two or three sets every week,” Porter confirmed over the phone. “I was very encouraged by that. He saw everything. One night he said, ‘Lou Rawls was like you.’ That’s cool coming from a master of the music. I don’t take it lightly. It means more to me than anything.”

Once all the singers signed on, Mabern conferred with each on repertoire, then worked out treatments during two days of recording. Both Porter and Elling confirm Mabern’s relaxed, collaborative attitude. “Unlike many sessions you enter as a hired gun, so to speak, Harold asked what he could do to shape the music around me—what tempo, what key,” said Porter, who sang Oscar Brown’s lyric of “Afro-Blue” and Mabern’s “The Man From Hyde Park.” The latter title references Herbie Hancock, four years Mabern’s junior, reflecting a friendship that developed during Mabern’s 1954-1959 residence in Chicago. “Before I went into the booth, I asked Harold to sing it to me at the piano—to give me the melody, the phrasing,” Porter said. “He sounded so beautiful and tender. It’s a letter to Herbie, and it was cool that he allowed me to sing this personal message.”

“It was super loose in the studio,” said Elling, who sings the blues ballad “Portrait Of Jennie,” scats on “Billie’s Bounce,” and draws on his church background in delivering the 1978 C&W hit “You Needed Me.” “Harold emailed me to ask for the key; when I arrived, I said, ‘OK, let’s just do this.’ Harold and the guys set up the arrangements on the spot, and we ran it down once. Harold, Webber and Farnsworth are top of the food chain; they have the real history in their sound.”

Mabern initially intended “You Needed Me” as a vehicle for Norah Jones, who he describes as “a modern-day Billie Holiday, without trying to be, the way she phrases and lays back.” Her counter-suggestion was “Don’t Misunderstand,” a ballad by Gordon Parks that O.C. Smith stamped as his own on the soundtrack for Shaft, and the Johnny Mercer song, “Fools Rush In,” a 1940 hit for Frank Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey. “I’d played ‘Don’t Misunderstand’ once in the last twenty years,” Mabern said. “I said I’d think about it. Then Norah suggested we do it piano and voice. It was bold of her, but I thought we pulled it off. Key of A-flat. We couldn’t do ‘Fools Rush In’ like Sinatra, who is one of my top three vocalists along with Joe Williams and Nat Cole, so I told Farnsworth to lay down the Poinciana beat.”

He quoted Sinatra, “if you can’t sing in tune, you can’t sing,” in explaining his picks for Jane Monheit. “I’ve always liked the pureness and intonation of her voice, that she knows how to treat a ballad and something up-tempo,” Mabern said. “I figured ‘My One and Only Love’ would match her; later, she told me it was her wedding song. ‘I’ll Take Romance’ hasn’t been done much, and Eydie Gorme had a big hit with it.

For Alexis Cole, Mabern selected his stoic, bittersweet “Such Is Life.” “I learned to write lyrics from being around Bill Lee,” he said, referring to the distinguished bassist-composer to whom he dedicated Afro Blue, along with pianists Billy Wallace and Chris Anderson, also deep influences from Chicago years. Lee befriended Mabern soon after he arrived in town from Memphis, as testified by a Mabern waltz called “Brother Spike,” written to mark the birth of Lee’s son, the film director, and recorded on the eponymous 1959 VeeJay album MJT+3, by the in-vogue Chicago-based combo that exposed Mabern to the national jazz audience.s,

Like Muhal Richard Abrams, his predecessor in the first edition of MJT+3, Mabern is a self-taught pianist. Standing by an old upright at a party a few months before his fifteenth birthday, he watched a girl play a song on only black keys—the title, he learned later, was “I Stuck My Dollar In The Mud”—and then “sat down and played the same song; I just picked it up.” Soon thereafter, he learned “The Honeydripper” and “Perdido,” and started “doodling around.” Within six months, he was gigging with George Coleman and his brother, alto saxophonist Lucian Adams. Mabern’s father, who worked in lumber yard, “raked and scraped up” $60 to buy a piano, on which he applied lessons learned from close observation of pianists Charles Thomas, “who played like Bud Powell,” and told him, “If you think I can play, you’ve got to meet Phineas Newborn.” Newborn, a Tatumesque virtuoso, was then giving lessons in the back room of a local record store and playing in his father’s band at Mitchell’s Hotel, where the likes of B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, Johnny Ace, Coleman, Frank Strozier, Booker Little, Charles Lloyd and Mabern cut their teeth. He watched where Newborn placed his fingers, and emulated.

“He’d play like a big band; I watched him orchestrate,” Mabern said of his autodidactic learning process. “I had a small band with Charles called the Rhythm Bombers, and I’d pick and choose notes very carefully there. With George Coleman and his brother, I made a dollar a night, which was a lot of money. That was the standard, although B.B. King might have made $2-$2.50. You had to track down Sunbeam (Andrew Mitchell), the club-owner, to get that, because he had the money in the cigar box with his 22-caliber pistol.” In keeping with his glass-half-full philosophy, Mabern states, “They treated us good there, like family members. Sunbeam’s wife, Miss Ernestine, made the best chili you could find anywhere.”

Mabern declined a scholarship to Tennessee State University to join Strozier at the American Conservatory of Music, and moved north in August 1954. “The money got tight, but my sister said I should stay and see what I could do,” Mabern says, “It was the best thing that happened to me. I say I got mine from the university of the streets.” He joined trombonist Morris Ellis’ big band, where “I got my reading together,” had private lessons at the conservatory for six months, and embarked on five years of “playing and practicing 12 hours a day.”

“I met Bill Lee at the YMCA at 49th and Michigan,” Mabern reminisced. “From Bill I learned how to orchestrate, how to rearrange standard songs. I heard him play the most beautiful choruses on piano, which he plays as well as he does the bass. At first, he wouldn’t tell me anything, but when he finally gave me the time of day he said, ‘There’s another piano player named Chris Anderson who can show you what to do—and Billy Wallace.’ I couldn’t believe how many songs they knew. They were listening to Nelson Riddle’s orchestrations for Sinatra. When Charlie Parker played at the Beehive in January 1955, with Norman Simmons, Victor Sproles and Bruz Freeman, he was playing all these standards he learned from Big Nick Nicholas that other guys weren’t playing then, like ‘Dancing In The Dark’ and ‘Let’s Face The Music and Dance.’ Between sets, Bill and Billy and Chris would call out the changes for Norman that Bird might play next.

“Chris influenced Herbie Hancock, as did Andrew Hill. Chris and Herbie and Ahmad are geniuses in voicing chords, and Billy could play the same way, but he’d play a chord for every note of the melody. That’s where my harmonic concept comes from. Watching Billy, I learned to comp; same chords, more space, less busy.” For his overall attitude to piano expression, though, Mabern cites Jamal, who he became aware of through Booker Little. “I was as impressed with him as with Phineas,” he said. “I’d never heard anyone play with such command and or conceptualize sound like that. ‘Music, Music, Music’ was a corny song. Ahmad said, ‘Not the way I play it.’ Ahmad reintroduced it to us in a stylized, modern way. After ‘Poinciana,’ I knew I wanted to play like that. I tell students that if you approach the piano with anything less than an orchestrational mindset, you’re going to lose out.”

A faculty member at William Paterson University since 1981, Mabern has taught, among others, drummers Tyshawn Sorey and Bill Stewart, bassist Doug Weiss, and Alexander, who caught his ear on the first day of the 1987-88 academic year. Twenty-seven years and countless tours and recordings later, Alexander observed that Mabern’s close study of the arranging techniques of Riddle and Don Costa allowed him to “absorb and deeply understand the detailed inner voice movement and potential substitute ideas for all the Songbook tunes.” He continued: “Invariably, when we start playing through any tune I bring him, whatever I thought were the best possible changes, he’s got something better. He likes to comp more than solo, and he’s peerless at setting up the horn player to sound good no matter what they’re doing.”

Which is perhaps why so many singers kept Mabern so busy after the spring of 1961, when he came off the road after a year with Lionel Hampton, and joined Betty Carter. “I played with Betty at Birdland two-three weeks at a time, opposite Coltrane, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, or whoever,” he said. “She taught me the art of playing slow. I also worked opposite Coltrane with Johnny Hartman, who wouldn’t leave home without me. I’m proud to say that’s probably where Coltrane got the idea to record with him. Jimmy Jones and Jerome Richardson recommended me to Joe Williams, which I thought was quite a compliment.” So busy was Mabern that he subbed out singer gigs to then-aspirants Chick Corea and Hancock. “Once I paid Herbie $18, which was a lot,” Mabern said. “Scale was $15; I had a $25 gig.”

In the liner notes for Mabern’s 1993 CD, The Leading Man, the late Mulgrew Miller, a close friend, wrote that “under the hands of Mabern, the piano is challenged to ‘live up to’ its formal name—the piano-forte, for Harold dramatically plays the whole range of dynamics.” On Afro-Blue, as fifty years ago, Mabern recalibrates for singers. “I play from my shoulders, from my whole body, which is why I’m percussive,” Mabern said. “With singers I play with less force, less aggression. I use the soft pedal. You don’t voice the chord with the leading tone. You wait for them to sing a phrase, then fill in the space.”

For all the erudition he brings to any encounter with a piano, Mabern considers himself first and foremost “a blues pianist who understands the philosophy of jazz.” “Coming up in Memphis, we wanted to play bebop,” he said. “But the people had to dance. George Coleman and his brother and I would tell the drummer to keep a shuffle beat for ‘The Hucklebuck,’ and then we’d play the changes to ‘Perdido’ or ‘All The Things You Are.’ That’s how we got over. Gene Harris said, ‘I’m a blues player with chops,’ which is pretty much what I’m saying. I can play what Jamil Nasser called the ‘bone-chillin’ blues,’ I can play boogie-woogie, but I can still play the old ‘Milestones’ or ‘Moose The Mooche.’ I’m never going to stop being a blues pianist.”

“I played with Joe Williams at the Half Note. Jimmy Witherspoon came in first set, and said, ‘Hey, Joe, sing the blues.’ He said, ‘Spoon, it’s too early for the blues.’ Spoon said, ‘It ain’t never too early for the blues.’ Oh, no. I’m always blues first. As someone said, I am the blues.”
[—30—]

Harold Mabern Blindfold Test (10-1-04) – Raw Copy:

1.  Earl Hines, “Don’t You Know I Care” (from EARL HINES PLAYS DUKE ELLINGTON, New World, 1970/1997) (Hines, piano; Duke Ellington, composer) – (5 stars)

Duke Ellington’s “Don’t You Know I Care.” I can’t say that I right away recognize the pianist. I like what I’m hearing. It’s hard to tell if it’s a recent recording or something that was done a few years ago. Right now, Ted, I must say you’ve got me on this one so far, even though the sound… Right away, I know it’s not, but right now I can’t say who it is. Phineas recorded this, but I know it’s not Phineas, and Mulgrew Miller recorded this recently—I know it’s not him.  It’s not Ray Bryant, and it’s definitely not Hank Jones or Tommy Flanagan or any of those people. And it’s not Art Tatum.  It’s not Teddy Wilson. So if I had to take a wild guess (I don’t know if guessing is permitted), I would have to say someone like Jay McShann, or probably someone like Earl Hines. That’s just an educated guess. Of the two, I would say Earl Hines. I like the overlapping phrases with left hand and right hand. And the touch of the right hand. His touch seems to be a little heavier than Teddy Wilson’s, whose touch was a little more velvety, like Art Tatum’s was. 5 stars. [AFTER] What I’m accustomed to do, as I tell the students: Process of elimination. Eliminate who you know it’s not, and then you feel it can only be one or two people. I possibly could have said James P. Johnson, but I didn’t, or Fats Waller. When I first came to New York City, I worked at Smalls Paradise with the MJT+3, and a couple of the old-timers were there, and they looked at me and said, “Young man, you remind me a lot of Earl Hines.” To me, that was a compliment, because I didn’t know much about Earl Hines at that point. However, we all know that was Nat Cole’s hero in Chicago. He was doing everything he could to be around Earl Hines whenever he could be. I was told that he even dressed like Earl Hines—very impeccable. As they say, Earl Hines was like the Bud Powell of his time; he just opened up everything. I had a chance to work opposite him on a Newport Jazz Festival in San Remo, Italy. George Wein produced it.  I was with Wes Montgomery. We had a chance to talk. We had some pictures taken together, if I can ever find them—little small snapshots.

Reflecting back, I don’t know if you watch the Westerns channels, but they’ve been showing a lot of the black cowboys, and they mainly talk about Herb Jeffries, who was the first one to really get some prominence. He was singing with Earl Hines’ band in Chicago. Every time I hear his name, I think about Herbie Hancock. People don’t know this, but Herbie was named after Herb Jeffries—Herbert Jeffrey Hancock. A little bit of trivia.

2.  Uri Caine, “Stiletto” (from LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD, Winter & Winter, 2004) (Caine, piano, comp.; Drew Gress, bass; Ben Perowsky, drums) (3 stars)

Right now you really got me, because he could be anybody, blanket statement. I don’t hear enough of the concept to really say. We know it’s avant-garde, or controlled or uncontrolled freedom, whatever way you want to look at it, and I’m not really into it that much, even though I can appreciate some of the things I’ve listened to by Cecil Taylor over the years. Well, I can see at least it has some kind of form to it, even though I still don’t recognize the pianist. I don’t think it’s Cecil Taylor, because the form is a bit on the traditional side…whatever that means. It’s more of what I would call, as I said before, “controlled freedom,” because it has some kind of theme to it. But as to who it is, at this point it’s hard to say. Conceptually speaking, I think it’s probably somebody on the younger side, one of the younger generation guys. To take a guess (because I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything by this pianist), Matthew Shipp. That’s just a guess. Or another pianist who I also don’t really know a lot about—Jason Moran. Again, that’s just a guess. It’s definitely somebody who’s been influenced by McCoy Tyner and Herbie, even though, as I said before, it’s a little bit on the free side.  But it swings. I like the sound of the drums. See, with this kind of music, at least if it swings, you can get some kind of musical enjoyment out of it. As I said, not to be redundant, I hear traces of McCoy and Herbie and them. Is it possible it could be a female? I don’t think Geri Allen, but perhaps someone like Rachel Z—even though I’m not that familiar with her playing. It’s definitely somebody younger than I am. One person comes to mind, but again I haven’t heard a lot of him—Eric Lewis. But I don’t think he’s recorded yet. Or possibly Marcus Roberts. That’s just a guess. 3 stars, because it swings. [AFTER] I know who he is, but I’m not familiar with his playing at all. Once they got into the form, I enjoyed it. It was swinging. It took on a theme of its own, so it was something I could grab onto.

3. Danilo Perez, “Overjoyed” (from …TILL THEN, Verve, 2003) (Perez, piano; Ben Street, bass; Adam Cruz, drums) (5 stars)

I like the song, Stevie Wonder, “Overjoyed.” But I have to figure out who the pianist is. So far, I like what I’m hearing. It reminds me a little bit of one of my favorite pianists, but I don’t think it’s him. I hear it in the left hand-right hand. Geoff Keezer comes to mind, but I don’t think it’s Geoff. I like the sound of the recording, too. The bass is in tune, good sound on the drums. Very interesting.  Here we go again; educated guess again. It’s not Geoff Keezer. It’s not Mulgrew Miller. Possibly somebody like Brad Mehldau.  That’s just an educated guess. I enjoyed it, so I’d say 4 stars for the performance, and another star for the genius of Stevie Wonder. So 5 stars. [AFTER] Isn’t that something. I should have known it, because I think I heard it recently on the radio. I’ve heard Danilo do some wonderful things with Roy Haynes.

4. Alice Coltrane, “Walk With Me” (from TRANSLINEAR LIGHT, Verve, 2004) (Coltrane, piano; James Genus, b; Jeff Watts, d) – (4 stars)

It’s a good sound coming out of the instrument. So far I haven’t heard enough to put my finger on anybody that I recognize. It has what you call a gospel type theme to it. Whoever the pianist is, they have a good sound out of the instrument, good technique, good chord voicings in the lower register. But right now, I don’t know who it is or who it could be. Something about the theme reminds me a little bit of Keith Jarrett, but I don’t think it’s Keith. Some parts of it remind me a little of Stanley Cowell, one of my dearest and closest friends and a true musical giant, but I don’t think it’s Stanley. 4 stars. [AFTER] I noticed the harp-like qualities in the right hand. Alice Coltrane, nice. Very, very well played.

5. Eric Reed, “La Berthe” (from E-BOP, Savant, 2003) (Reed, piano; Rodney Whitaker, bass; Rodney Green, drums; Elmo Hope, composer) (4 stars)

Nice little theme. It reminds me of something that maybe Thelonious would have written, theme-wise and the way it’s syncopated. I like the performance. I like the pianist.  Nice touch. The concept reminds me of the kind of stuff that Woody Shaw used to play. But I don’t have an idea who it could be. I like the piece. I like the concept. It’s a good touch from the pianist. It’s the kind of song I would enjoy playing. But I can only take a guess on who it might be. Like I said, I hear a lot of Monk influence in the performance and in the theme itself. Possibly someone like Jessica Williams, but that’s just a guess. I think it’s an original composition. That’s the feeling I get. What period? It sounds like something that could have been written within the last year or so, conceptually speaking. Both the piece and the performance sound very up-to-date. 4 stars. [AFTER] Sorry, Eric. But he’s one of my favorites. That just shows music is never dated. Because conceptually speaking, it sounds like it could have been written last week. Eric Reed is a tremendous young musician. I have a lot of respect for him. He understands all phases of the music. I told him he’s one of the few young pianists who understands the difference between blocked chords and locked hands, and he looked at me and said, “Oh, do I really?” and we laughed. But he’s a tremendous young man. Stride, boogie-woogie, everything. I have a lot of respect for him.

6. Don Pullen, “Warriors” (from NEW BEGINNINGS, Blue Note, 1988) (Pullen, piano; Gary Peacock, bass; Tony Williams, drums) (5 stars)

Right away, it sounds like a pianist I always enjoyed, because he proved he could play on the edge of being out, but he could play inside, he could play tradition. He was also a very good organ specialist. Just listening to the theme and the pianistic things he’s doing, it reminds me a lot of Don Pullen. Bingo!  At last! He was a tremendous musician. [Who do you think the drummer is?] I get a feeling it’s someone like Ed Blackwell. I don’t know if it’s him, but… The thing I like about Don Pullen… One night at the Vanguard years ago, before they got the new piano, and the upper register was a little bit out, I asked him, “Don, how did you hear up there without… You make it sound so…” He said, “I just play it.” The upper register can be a little tricky. He did wonderful things, and it didn’t seem to detract from his performance. I had a lot of respect for Don Pullen. Great musician. You can hear his classical training in his piano playing. I guess the obvious thing to say about the drummer, since they worked together, would be Dannie Richmond, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be him. Something about him reminds me a bit of Roy Haynes. I don’t hear enough of the snare sound and the cymbal, but rhythmically it reminds me a little taste of Roy Haynes. Or possibly Tony Williams. Ah, see, that’s that Massachusetts connection with Alan Dawson, Roy, Tony. Boy, could Tony play. I’ll give it 5 stars for the overall performance. To me, that’s what you call controlled freedom. The things he was doing on the piano made sense because you can hear the skills he had developed through his classical training coming through.

7. Geoff Keezer, “Gollum’s Song” (from WALK ON, Telarc, (Keezer, piano; Scott Colley, bass; Karriem Riggins, drums) (5 stars)

I like that. Geoff Keezer comes to mind. The concept of the song, the touch in the right hand, the ideas in the right hand. At first, a little bit, it reminded me of Mulgrew; they have a similar kind of thing at times.  But listening, it reminds me a lot of Geoff. But I need to listen a little bit more to the right hand. If I had to guess, I’d say Geoff Keezer. Give him 10 stars, if there’s such a thing. I mean, he’s that good. He’s a tremendous musician.  The one thing I love about him is that he’s really captured the essence of Phineas Newborn, Jr., more than any pianist that I can think of. Naturally, Mulgrew and Donald Brown. But Geoff has captured the little nuances. Not just the obvious stuff, which is hard enough, but Geoff has captured those little nuances that Phineas used to do. And consider the fact that Geoff never met Phineas, and all he had to go by was what he heard on records and the one video.  But I have tremendous respect for this young man. He never ceases to amaze me. I like the interplay with the bass and drums. I heard Scott Colley once with Herbie Hancock at the Blue Note; he’s a very good bassist. Geoffrey Keezer. Eau Claire. Wisconsin. 5 stars. He’s even found a way to get into his playing a lot of those Latin montuno rhythmic things. He’s been getting into that a lot.

8. Herbie Hancock, “Blue Otani” (from THE PIANO, Columbia/Legacy, 1978/2004) (Hancock, piano, composer) (4½ stars)

I like it. Naturally, it’s the blues. You can’t go wrong with the blues. Now I’ll try to figure out who it is! Oh, I like it. It’s a lot going on. When it first started out, the chord things reminded me a little bit of Herbie Hancock. Then it reminded me a little bit of Ray Bryant. But I’m sure it’s neither one. I enjoyed the performance, but I must say I’m stumped on that one. I have no idea. But 4½ stars. To play like that is very hard to do. That’s the thing that separated Art Tatum from all of us. To play fast or slow, and play it where the consistency of the time is still going on. He had some nice ideas, too. Good technique, good ideas—I liked the overall performance. But I have no idea. [AFTER] You’re kidding! See, I got half of it right! Years ago, we used to talk about solo piano and stride and stuff, and years ago he wasn’t really interested so much in the stride aspect.

9. Brad Mehldau, “Anything Goes” (from ANYTHING GOES, Warner, 2004) (Mehldau, piano; Larry Grenadier, bass; Jorge Rossy, drums) (5 stars)

Hmm, “Anything Goes,” huh?  Nicely done. Cole Porter. Yeah, I like that. I like the concept. I like the fact it’s odd-metered; it sounds like it’s in 5/4. It’s nice to take a song like that, which is unique in its own way. At this point, I don’t know who the pianist is, but I like what I’m hearing. Good right hand, good left hand. I’d guess Brad Mehldau because of the ideas in the right hand, and the way he uses his left hand. You can tell he has a good left hand also. And the overall concept of the piece. Good harmonic concept also. I’ll tell you, with the quality of the crop of pianists coming out within the last 5 to 10 years, if I had to start now, I wouldn’t choose the piano.  There are some rough guys out there, man. And ladies, too. 5 stars.

10. Denny Zeitlin, “E.S.P.” (from SLICK ROCK, MaxJazz, 2004) (Zeitlin, p.; Buster Williams, b; Matt Wilson, d) – (5 stars)

Right away, I know I like the composition. I don’t want to give the wrong composer credit, but I know it’s either Herbie’s tune or Wayne Shorter’s. Sometimes I get them a little mixed up. But that much I know. The tune is either Herbie’s or Wayne’s when they played with Miles.  There’s some stuff there chordally that reminds me of Ahmad. Another one of these two-handed pianists. It reminds me a little bit of a gentleman that I used to hang out with in Chicago, when he was studying at Johns Hopkins. Denny Zeitlin comes to mind because of the harmonic concept and the ability to use both hands equally well. But that’s just a guess. Again, process of elimination, I know who it’s not, but he comes to mind. The cymbal beat from the drummer reminds me a little bit of Tony Williams. I just heard something from the bassist that reminded me a little of Ron Carter, but it’s not Ron Carter. Oh, that’s Buster Williams. Tremendous musician. Unsung hero. Would that possibly be Matt Wilson? So it’s Denny Zeitlin. A couple of years ago, I saw that trio working at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase in Chicago 5 stars, mainly because of our Chicago connection and the love we both have for Chris Anderson, Ahmad Jamal and Billy Wallace. He had a lot of respect and still has a lot of respect for Billy Wallace, Dr. Denny Zeitlin.

11. Anthony Wonsey, “Darn That Reality” (from BLUES FOR HIROSHI, Sharp-9, 2004) (Wonsey, p; Richie Goods, b; Tony Reedus, d) – (5 stars)

Sounds like “Darn That Dream” but rearranged. I like it. The pianist sounds very familiar, but I can’t quite call him. David Hazeltine comes to mind because of the arrangement of the song, for some reason, but I’m not sure. The drums sound like it could be Joe Farnsworth, but again I’m not totally sure. It sounds like David Hazeltine to me, even though a lot of the stuff he’s doing in the right hand is a little out of character. By that I mean it’s not normally the way he would play.  But because of the arrangement, I would have to say David Hazeltine, possibly Farnsworth, maybe Peter Washington. 5 stars. It’s not? Well, I still give it 5 stars. I hear a lot of Phineas Newborn type of influence in the right hand with the triplets and things. Swinging. [AFTER] Oh, Mulgrew Miller’s ex-student. That’s why I could hear a little of the Phineas Newborn influence. Wonsey. I’ll still give him 5.

12. Bud Powell, “Tea For Two” (from BIRDLAND ‘53, Vol.1, FRESH SOUND, 1953/1991) (Powell, piano; Oscar Pettiford, bass; Roy Haynes, drums) (5 stars)

I know it’s an older recording. Just listening to the concept, I’d have to say Bud Powell, off the top. I’ll stand by Bud Powell, and give him all the stars you can muster up. “Tea For Two.” As an educated guess, I’d say the drummer is Max, and the bassist is either Mingus or George Duvivier. Possibly Arthur Taylor? Just an educated guess. Bud definitely opened stuff up. He and Nat Cole. Two different schools, but very influential. 5 stars.

For Brad Mehldau’s 44th Birthday, A 2006 WKCR Conversation, a 2011 DownBeat Cover Story, and a Link to 2000 DownBeat Blindfold Test

No pianist of his generation has had a greater impact on the sound of jazz circa 2014 than Brad Mehldau, who turns 44 today. For the occasion, I’m appending first  the transcript of a conversation we had on WKCR in 2006, which was originally web-published a few years ago on http://www.jazz.com, and then a DownBeat cover story I was given the opportunity  to put together in 2010-11. Some may also be interested in this uncut DownBeat Blindfold Test, which I posted on this blog in 2011.

* * *

IN CONVERSATION WITH BRAD MEHLDAU

You met Jorge Rossy, the drummer in your working trio between 1995 to 2003, in the early ’90s, perhaps when he arrived in New York from Boston.

Yes. Jorge already had a lot of musical relationships with people that I met after him—for instance, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier as well, Joshua Redman, Chris Cheek, Bill McHenry. A lot of people who you hear about now as fully developed, with their own voices, at that time were also growing up together. As a lot of people still do, they went to Boston first, and then came to New York. I met them all when they came here.

You, on the other hand, decided to jump into the sharkpit right away.

I came straight here.

I recall someone saying that they asked you what it was like at the New School, and you responded that it was a good reason to be in New York!

Yes. [laughs]

Reflecting back, how would you evaluate that early experience, newly-arrived at 18? You’re from Connecticut, so presumably you knew something about New York at the time.

A little bit. I knew that I wanted to come here because it was everything that the suburbs wasn’t. I was a white, upper-middle-class kid who lived in a pretty homogenized environment. Yet, I was with a couple of other people, like Joel Frahm, the tenor saxophonist, who went to the same high school as me. A group of us were trying to expose ourselves to jazz. So New York for us was something that was sort of the Other, yet it wasn’t too far away—a 2-hour-and-15-minute car or bus ride. What really cemented me wanting to go to New York was when I came here with my folks during my senior year of high school, and we went one night to Bradley’s, and heard the Hank Jones-Red Mitchell duo. That blew me away, seeing someone play jazz piano like that, about six feet from you.

A couple of blocks away from where you’d be going to school.

That’s right. The next night I heard Cedar Walton’s…well, the collective Timeless All-Stars formation, which was with Bobby Hutcherson, Billy Higgins, Ron Carter, and Harold Land, small ensemble jazz. The immediacy of hearing Billy Higgins’ ride cymbal and seeing Cedar Walton comping, after hearing it for three years on all those great Blue Note records I had. That was it. I knew I had to come here, just from an actual visceral need to get more of THAT as a listener.

When you arrived at the New School, how did things progress? How fully formed were your ideas at the time?

I was pretty formed. Not to sound pompous, but I was more developed as a musician than maybe half of the students there,. But a few students there were a little ahead of me, and also two or three years older, which was perfect, because in addition to the teachers who were there, they acted as mentors and also friends. One was Peter Bernstein, the guitarist, another was Jesse Davis, the alto saxophonist. Larry Goldings was there, playing piano mostly—he was just starting to play an organ setup. Those guys were immediately very strong influences on me. I have a little gripe in the way we tell the narrative of jazz history, or the history of influence. People often are influenced by their peers, because they’re so close to them, and that was certainly the case for me. Peter and Larry had a huge influence on everything I did playing in bands at that time. That’s pretty much what I was doing. I wasn’t trying to develop my own band. I was just being a sideman and soaking everything up.

If I’m not mistaken, your first record was in 1990, with Peter Bernstein and Jimmy Cobb. Jimmy Cobb had a little group at the Village Gate maybe at the time?

Yes, Jimmy Cobb had a group that was loosely called Cobb’s Mob with Peter and [bassist] John Webber. He still has it in different incarnations. It’s a quartet, most of the time with Pete playing guitar. Jimmy Cobb taught at the New School, and his class was basically play with Jimmy Cobb for 2-1/2 hours once a week. For me, that was worth the price of the whole thing.

I think Larry Goldings said that during the first year, when the curriculum was pretty seat-of-the-pants. . .

Very loose! Arnie Lawrence would interrupt the harmony class, and say, “Okay, Art Blakey is here for the next three hours,” and that would become what the class did.

But getting back to this notion of influences from your contemporaries, how did their interests augment the things that you already knew? I’d assume that by this time, you were already pretty well-informed about all the modernist piano food groups, as it were.

A fair amount. I came here at 18 completely in a Wynton Kelly thing. Then it was early McCoy, then Red Garland thing, and then late ’50s Bill Evans. I was jumping around stylistically and still absorbing stuff I hadn’t heard maybe until four years in New York, and then I slowed down. It’s that whole notion of input and output, where you get just so much, and then slow down to digest.

But in New York, I suppose you’d have to find ways to apply these ideas in real time.

Right.

I’m interested in the way that process happened, to allow you to start forming the ideas that people now associate with your tonal personality.

Definitely. When I came to New York I had sort of a vocabulary, but not much practical knowledge of how to apply that in a group setting, which to me is indispensable if you’re a jazz musician. Part of my definition is playing with other people, and, if you’re a piano player, comping. Comping in jazz is very difficult to teach in a lesson, because it’s a social thing, an intuitive thing, something that you gain from experience—the seat of the pants. It also happens through osmosis—I watched players like Larry Goldings, Kevin Hays (who I was checking out a lot), and of course, people like Cedar Walton and Kenny Barron. Nothing can replace the experience of watching a piano player comp behind a soloist. If you watch closely and to see what works and what doesn’t, that will rub off very quickly. I’d say doing that helped me become a more social musician, versus friends of mine who came to the city at the same time I did but stayed in their practice room the whole time. You don’t develop in that same social way, which to me is indispensable as a jazz musician.

Did you have direct mentoring from any of the older pianists?

I had some very good lessons at the New School with Kenny Werner and Fred Hersch, and Junior Mance was my first teacher there. He was a little different than Fred and Kenny. Fred concentrated on getting a good sound out of the piano and playing solo piano a lot, which was great, because I hadn’t gotten there yet. Perfect timing. Kenny showed me ways to construct lines and develop my solo vocabulary—specific harmonic stuff. With Junior, it was more that thing I described of soaking it up by being around him. We would play on one piano, or, if we had a room with two pianos, we”d play on two. I said, “I want to learn how to comp better. I listened to you on these Dizzy Gillespie records, and your comping is perfect. How do you do that?” He said, “Well, let’s do it.” So we sat down, and he would comp for me, and then I would comp for him and try to mimic him. Yeah, soak up what he was doing. Junior is a beautiful person. A lot of those guys to me still are models as people, for their generosity as human beings, and Junior is certainly one in that sense.

Did you graduate from the New School?

I did. It took me five years. I took a little break, because I already started touring a little with Christopher Holliday, an alto sax player. That was my first gig. But I did actually get some sort of degree from there.

But as you continued at the New School, the Boston crew starts to hit New York, and a lot of them are focused on some different rhythmic ideas than were applied in mainstream jazz of the time.

For sure.

I’m bringing this up because once you formed the trio, one thing you did that a lot of people paid attention to was play very comfortably in odd meters, 7/4 and so forth, and it’s now become a mainstream thing, whereas in 1991 this was a pretty exotic thing to do. How did you begin the process of developing the sound that we have come to associate with you?

I’m not sure. A lot of it certainly had to do with Jorge Rossy. To give credit where credit is due, those ideas were in the air with people like Jeff Watts, who was playing in different meters on the drums. But Jorge at that time was very studious, checking out a lot of different rhythms, not just odd-meter stuff. He was grabbing the gig with Paquito D’Rivera and playing a lot with Danilo Perez, absorbing South American and Afro-Cuban rhythms. I never studied those specifically, but by virtue of the fact that Jorge was playing those rhythms a lot and finding his own thing to do with them in the sessions we had, it found its way into my sound.

We’d take a well-known standard like “Stella by Starlight,” and try to play it in 7 and in 5 as a kind of exercise. Some of them actually led to arrangements, like “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” in 5, which is one of the first things we recorded in an odd meter. Then we moved on to 7, and got more comfortable with it. It was fun and exciting, and it seemed to happen naturally. But Jorge was ahead of me in terms of the comfort level. There was a lot of him playing in 7, holding it down while I’d get lost and then come around again.

How long did it take?

It took maybe six months or a year where I felt as comfortable in those meters as I was in 4. Then also, I started to crystallize this idea about phrasing. If you listen to Charlie Parker or to someone really authentic playing bebop, like Barry Harris, you notice that they are completely free with their rhythmic phrasing. It’s swinging and it’s free on this profound level, because it’s very open. But when you hear people who take a little piece of bebop and condense it into something (they can also have a very strong style), it gets less interesting. One thing I’ve always loved about jazz phrasing, is the way, when someone is inflecting a phrase rhythmically, it’s really advanced and deep and beautiful, and also makes you want to dance. One thing I heard that perhaps we were trying to do was get that same freedom of floating over the barline in a 7/4 or 5/4 meter as you could find in 4/4, versus maybe… Not to dis fusion or whatever, but some of the things that people did with odd meters in the ’70s had a more metronomic rhythmic feeling, more literal—“Hey, look, we’re playing 7, and this is what it is.”

Another influence that filtered into the sound of your early trio was classical music, which seems as much a part of your tonal personality as the jazz influences. Were you playing classical music before jazz?

Yes. I started playing classical music as a kid, but I wasn’t getting the profundity of a lot of what I was playing. I didn’t like Bach, and I liked flashy Chopin stuff. I did already have an affinity for Brahms, though; he became sort of a mainstay. Then jazz took over.

Fast forward. I was around 22, maybe four years in New York, and for whatever reason, I started rediscovering classical music with deep pleasure. What I did, what I’m still doing now, as I did with jazz for a long time—I absorbed-absorbed-absorbed. I went on a buying frenzy to absorb a lot of music. A lot of chamber music…

Records or scores?

Records and scores. A lot of records. A lot of listening. A lot of going to concerts here in New York. I guess it rubbed off a little. For one thing, it got me focusing more on my left hand. Around that time, I had been playing in a certain style of jazz, where your left hand accompanies the right hand playing melodies when you’re soloing. That’s great, but I had lost some of the facility in my left hand to the point where I was thinking, “Wow, I probably had more dexterity in my left hand when I was 12 than I do now.” So it was sort of an ego or vanity thing that bugged me a little, and it got me into playing some of this classical literature where the left hand is more proactive.

Were you composing music in the early ’90s? After your first record, most of your dates feature original music. Around when did that start to become important to you? Was it an inner necessity? Did it have anything to do with having a record contract and having to find material to put on the records?

I’ve never actually thought of when I began writing tunes until you asked the question. I guess there were a few sporadic tunes from the time I arrived in New York until 1993, or 1994 even. I guess I was comparatively late as a writer in that I was an improviser and a player and a sideman before I was trying to write jazz tunes. Two of my early originals appeared appeared on my first trio record with Jorge Rossy and his brother, Mario Rossy. On my next record, when I got signed to Warner Brothers, Introducing Brad Mehldau, there were a few more.

A lot of your titles at the time reflect a certain amount of Germanophilia.

At the time, for sure.

You wrote liner notes that referenced 19th century German philosophy, but applied the ideas to the moment in interesting ways. Can you speak to how this aesthetic inflected your notions of music and your own sense of mission?

What I was trying to do was bridge the gap between everything I loved musically, and there was this disparity for me between Brahms in 1865 and Wynton Kelly in 1958—all these things I loved. Looking back, at that age, I was very concerned with creating an identity that would somehow, if it was at all possible, mesh together this more European, particularly Germanic Romantic 19th Century sensibility (in some ways) with jazz, which is a more American, 20th century thing (in some ways).

One connection that still remains between them is the song—the art songs of Schubert or Schumann, these miniature, perfect 3- or 4-minute creations. To me, there is a real corollary between them and a great jazz performance that can tell a story—Lester Young or Billie Holiday telling a story in a beautiful song. Also pop. Really nice Beatles tunes. All those song-oriented things are miniature, and inhabit a small portion of your life. You don’t have to commit an hour-and-a-half to get through it. But really good songs leave you with a feeling of possibility and endlessness.

Not too long after your first record for Warner Brothers in 1995, which featured both your working trio and a trio with Christian McBride and Brian Blade, you began to break through to an international audience. You had a nice reputation in New York, but then overnight to receive this acclaim, where people pasted different attitudes onto what you were doing, whether it was relevant to your thoughts or not. . . . Trying to develop your music and stay focused while your career is burgeoning in this way could have been a complicated proposition. Was it? Or were you somewhat blinkered?

It was complicated. I think I was sort of in the moment, so I don’t know if I viewed it as such, but retrospectively, if you’re addressing the attention factor from other people, I developed a sense of self-importance that maybe didn’t have a really good self-check mechanism in it. If I could go back and do it all over again, some of the liner notes would be maybe a little shorter! Not completely gone…

You did write long liner notes.

Long liner notes. And I still do.

Using the language of German philosophy.

I still do, so I shouldn’t even say it. But I suffered a bit from a lack of self-irony (for lack of a better word). I think I’ve pretty much grown out of it now—an old geezer at 36.

People became accustomed to the sound of the first trio with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy, and when you formed the new one, as an editor put it to me at the time, his friends in Europe were saying that they were afraid that now you wouldn’t play as well, that the things that made you interesting would be subsumed by a more groove-oriented approach, or something like that. Speak a bit to the way the trio evolved into the one you currently use.

What you’re alluding to is certainly true. A lot of people approached me directly and said, “What are you doing, changing this thing you have that’s so special?” That was interesting. One way I can mark the progression is that at first Larry and Jorge and I had a lot more to say to each other about the music. As I mentioned, Jorge and I would have these sessions, and work specific things like playing in odd meters. All three of us would talk about whether or not something was working on a given night, what it was about, what we could do to make it better. Over the years, as it became easier to play together intuitively, we reached a point where we had less and less to say. It was either working or it wasn’t. I don’t want to say that we were resting on our laurels, but there was a slight sense that almost it was too easy. That even was Jorge’s phrase. I think he was feeling that as a drummer, personally—just as a drummer, independent of playing with us—and wanted a new challenge playing a different instrument.

Then I heard Jeff Ballard in the trio Fly [editor’s note: with Mark Turner and Larry Grenadier], and felt a sense of possibility in the way Larry was playing with him. Larry plays differently with different drummers—he plays one way with, say Bill Stewart, and a different way with Jorge and me. In Fly, he plays in a way I’d describe as more organic and intuitive, and it surprised me. I almost felt sort of a jealousy. I thought, “Wow, I never heard Larry play like this, and I’m playing with him all the time.” It made me almost want to grab Jeff!

What was it about what he was doing? Was it a more groove-oriented approach?

I would say yes. A certain groove, and also, though it may sound strange, my trio has become more precise since Jeff joined. The way Jeff and Larry state the rhythm is very open-ended, but precise in the sense that I can play more precise rhythmic phrases, which adds a bit more detail to the whole canvas. You can see the details more clearly, let’s say. Jorge was always very giving; he usually followed my lead in terms of how I’d build the shape of a tune. One thing that Jeff does that’s different, which is sort of a classic drummer move (if you think of Tony Williams or Elvin or someone like that), is putting something unexpected in the music at a certain point. Say we’re on the road, we’ve been playing one of my originals or arrangements for a month, and we do a big concert somewhere in front of two thousand people—and he starts playing a completely different groove. At first, I had to get used to that—if I don’t change what I’m doing, it won’t make sense. So I have to find something new. Then we’re actually improvising again, developing a new form or canvas for the tune.

Talk about the balance between intuition and preparation, how it plays out on the bandstand.

I don’t write really difficult road maps, as they call it. Maybe some of my stuff is a little hard, but most of it is not too difficult where you’re going to have your face in the music. I like that, because then you start forgetting about the music, and it becomes more intuitive, which hopefully is the ideal. That’s how it feels with the three of us. A lot of times with a band, you start playing a tune, an arrangement or your own original. You find certain things that work formally within the entire shape of the tune, places along the way, roughly, where you build to a climax, or a certain thing that one of you gives to the other person, like a diving board that you spring from to go somewhere else formally. In that sense, the process becomes less improvised, because you get this structure that works, and it helps you generate excitement and interest.

A few years ago, maybe around 1999-2000, you began to look for new canvases by incorporating contemporary pop music into your repertoire, and on Day Is Done it comprises the preponderance of the recital.

Right.

That development coincided with your move to Los Angeles and associating with the producer Jon Brian, who it seems showed you creative ways to deal with pop aesthetics.

Mmm-hmm. What I loved about him when I first heard him at this Los Angeles club, Largo, was that I felt like I was going to see a really creative jazz musician—in a sense even more brazen than a lot of jazz musicians. Really completely improvising his material, the material itself, taking songs that maybe he had never played from requests from the audience, and then developing a completely unorthodox, strange arrangement in the heat of the moment, right there, for those kinds of songs, which were more contemporary Pop songs. Also Cole Porter and whatever. All over the map. Completely not constrained by anything stylistically. That was definitely an inspiration for me at that point.

As somone who’s played a good chunk of the Songbook and as a one-time jazz snob, can you discern any generalities about the newer pop music of that time vis-a-vis older forms? You’ve said that you see the limitations of a form as a way of finding freedom, rather than the other way around.

Right. For me personally, not a judgment on other stuff. I need to have some sort of frame. I need to have a narrative flow. That’s what makes it cool for me, if I’m taking a solo or whatever. With more contemporary pop tunes, pop tunes past the sort of golden era that some people call the American Songbook, all of a sudden there are no rules any more. That’s the main thing. With people like Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, you can often hear similar structures, with verse, chorus, that kind of stuff. But in a lot of pop music and rock-and-roll, it’s not that the forms are complicated, they aren’t at all, but there is not a fixed orthodoxy. In the songs of Cole Porter songs and Rodgers and Hammerstein and or Jerome Kern, there’s a verse and then the song itself, which is often in an AABA form, something within the bridge, and then that something again with the coda. These forms often keep you thinking in a certain way about what you’re going to do when you’re blowing on the music. When you get out of that, it becomes sort of a wide-open book, with often the possibility for a lack of form to take place. I try to take some of these more contemporary songs and somehow impose my own form on them in the improvisation. That’s the challenge. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn.t.

Given that you’ve been a leader and highly visible for more than a decade, it seems to me you’ve tried hard to sustain relationships with the people you came up with and to keep yourself in the fray, as it were—being a sideman on Criss-Cross dates and so on. Is it important for you to do that?

Someone like Keith Jarrett comes to mind as someone who is really in his own realm, who hasn’t been a sideman. But I value the experience of connecting with other musicians who are outside of my band, and not being a leader. Not to sound self-righteous or whatever, but it does teach a certain humility when you go into a record date and you have to submit your own ego, to a certain extent, to someone else’s music, and go with the musical decisions they want to make. The challenge is to negotiate a balance between your own identity, which the person who called wants to hear, and the identity of their music, what they’ve written. To try to do justice to that is always fun and exciting, and I like that challenge.

*-*-*-

Brad Mehldau DownBeat Article (2010-Directors Cut):

 

The announcement last spring that Brad Mehldau would be the first jazz musician to occupy the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall for the 2010-11 season—an honorific he shares with such luminaries as Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, John Adams, and Thomas Adès—drew surprisingly scant notice from mainstream cultural gatekeepers as a watershed event.

With the exception of Wynton Marsalis, it’s difficult to think of a musician possessing greater bona fides in the classical and jazz arenas. From his earliest albums, Mehldau established his ability to weave the harmonic language and feeling of Brahms and Mahler into the improvisational warp and woof—swinging or rubato—of trio and solo performance. He gave his songs Germanophilic titles (“Young Werther,” “Mignon’s Song,” “Angst,” “Sehnsucht”), and described his intentions and thought process in liner notes and essays that refracted a long timeline of German philosophy and literature, producing as extensive an aesthetic manifesto as ever produced by any jazz musician not named Anthony Braxton. His deep grounding in the various tributaries of post Bud Powell piano expression came through in the career-launching Introducing Brad Mehldau, which also documented his knack—he was then 25—for getting to the heart of a ballad. By Mehldau’s second recording, The Art of the Trio, Volume 1, he displayed a nascent comfort zone with 5/4 and 7/4 time signatures, constructing contrapuntal phrases with a flowing, over-the-barline quality. Numerous pianists of his Gen-X peer group paid close attention. They kept listening as Mehldau, after moving to Los Angeles in 1996, increasingly brought contemporary pop songs into his mix, resolving, as he once wrote, to “bypass the temptation to use the collective language of the past.”

Long a devotee of art song, Mehldau upped the ante five years ago with Love Songs [Nonesuch], a pair of fully notated song cycles set to poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Louise Bogan for interpretation by the prominent mezzo soprano Renee Fleming. Fellow diva Anne Sophie von Otter, already a fan of his trio recordings, was impressed, and requested Carnegie Hall to commission her own project with Mehldau. The result is Love Sublime [Naive], comprising one disk on which von Otter sings five stark, ravaged Sara Teasdale lyrics from the ‘10s and ‘20s, and a poem apiece by E.E. Cummings and Philip Larkin, and a second on which she traverses a varied menu drawn from a trans-genre cohort of songwriter-composers, among them Jacques Brel, Joni Mitchell, Leo Ferré and Bob Telson. Throughout the proceedings, Mehldau, the virtuoso soloist, embraces the role of accompanist, playing throughout with restraint and dynamic nuance. For the poems, he adheres strictly to the scores, which are at once fresh and idiomatically evocative of the lieder tradition; on the “middlebrow” fare, he imparts an old-school saloon piano feel, interpolating graceful comp with solos that contain no wasted notes.

“Brad plays beautifully, in the truest, most seriously meant sense,” von Otter emailed. “During one of our early meetings, I described my my range to him, my strengths and weaknesses, what I would encourage and discourage in the vocal lines. We also discussed our tastes in poetry. The songs sound American to me—Copland comes to mind, though not overly so. But they also have a strong Mehldau style, meaning that Brad has managed—and this is not so easy—to create his very own sound, something fresh and new.”

` There’s no mistaking the Mehldau touch on Highway Rider [Nonesuch], his first recorded exploration of the orchestral implications of his pianism. Recorded last March, It’s a motivically connected, 15-movement suite on which a two-drummer edition of Mehldau’s working trio and saxophone soloist Joshua Redman interact with a chamber orchestra comprised of 23 strings, three french horns, bassoon and oboe, each given a separate part on two selections, and functioning sectionally elsewhere. Both on the orchestral selections and the quintet, quartet, trio, and duo pieces that comprise much of Highway Rider’s second part, Mehldau weaves into his own argot a host of dialects—Euro and American streams of classical music, various iterations of post-songbook pop and classic rock, swinging and odd-metered jazz, flamenco and bolero, the blues. The piece, which has an imaginary screenplay quality, is chock-a-block with achingly gorgeous songs—seasoned with well-proportioned dollops of atonality, and threaded together with recurring harmonic and melodic themes—that seem to be begging for a lyric.

Mehldau toured Highway Rider in early November, recruiting the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for a three-concert American leg that concluded with a November 9th appearance at Zankel Hall, in advance of a fortnight-long, seven-concert European sojourn. During the afternoon runthrough, Mehldau negotiated the mix section by section with conductor Scott Yoo and Zankel’s efficient soundman. Occasionally, he responded to the flow with extemporaneous contrapuntal responses; at other points, he walked to different spots in the auditorium to hear for himself. After all these issues were settled, after Yoo and SPCO had resolved to their satisfaction various nuances of phrasing and vibrato, the quintet soundchecked with a brisk version of Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology.” Left leg crossed over right, leaning into the keyboard, Mehldau tossed off an intense, ready-for-prime-time solo of several choruses, abstracting the refrain, alternating block chords with hurtling single-note passages.

Hit time was 8:30, and Mehldau had a five o’clock meeting with pianist-composer Timothy Andres at Steinway’s 57th Street premises for a pre-dinner parsing of the selections from Andres’ two-piano suite, Shy and Mighty, that the two were slated to perform at a March 11th Zankel Hall concert that would conclude Mehldau’s composer-in-residence obligations. (The third concert, on February 19th, presented Mehldau and Von Otter in support of Love Songs; for the second, on January 26th, Mehldau played solo, per his 2011 Nonesuch release, Live at Marciac.)

Before leaving, Mehldau took ten minutes to sit with me. He turned 40 last year, and his dark hair contains the barest intimations of gray. He’s taller and more buff than is evident from a distance or in photos, with ropy arm muscles—accentuated by a tattoo on his left bicep—that are a pianist’s equivalent of an embouchure. Unfailingly polite, he reiterated a message conveyed by management the day before: He had no time to meet face-to-face before his departure for London two days hence, and he’d remain in Europe through December with his wife Fleurine, the Dutch singer, and their three children. Our conversation would have to be by phone.

On the appointed day, Mehldau spoke at length about a variety of subjects. But taping goblins interfered. The proceedings evaporated into thin air. With a deadline drawing nigh, Mehldau agreed to a second go-round via email.

In a 2006 conversation on WKCR, Mehldau related that when he was “around 22, maybe four years in New York,” he “started rediscovering classical music, which I’d played as a kid, with great pleasure. I did what I did with jazz for a long time—I went on a buying frenzy to absorb a lot of music. Scores. A lot of records. A lot of concerts. It rubbed off a little. I’d been playing in a style where the left hand accompanies the right hand playing melodies when you’re soloing, and I’d lost some left-hand facility to the point where I thought I had more dexterity in my left hand when I was 12. It was a sort of ego or vanity thing that got me into playing classical literature where the left hand is more proactive.”

In 2010, I asked about the gestation of Highway Rider.

I like to read scores like someone else reads a regular book—in the train, in bed if I’m trying to fall asleep, wherever. It’s a great way to get inside a composer’s head; I feel like I’m getting to know the person who wrote it, even if he’s been dead for 200 years. It’s like he’s telling you everything about himself, right there in the room with you. So writing for orchestra came on its own time. The inspiration was cumulative. All the events in my life led to that moment.

Mehldau cited a passage from Rilke, first in the original German, then in translation: “Everything is gestation and then birth. To let every impression and every germ of feeling complete itself, wholly in itself, in the dark, the unsayable, the unconscious, unreachable by one’s own conscious understanding; and then to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour of deliverance, when a new clarity comes: This alone is the artist’s life: in comprehension as well as in creation.”

Highway Rider is the largest scale thing I’ve done. I don’t mean just the amount of musicians; I mean the aspiration to have formal continuity throughout an extended, multi-faceted piece. The process in which I wrote it might be something like writing a novel, in the sense that when you start to write, you are not starting at the beginning, and as you go along, you don’t know where it’s leading. You have to pay attention, and not over-extend yourself by adding too much material—you achieve continuity by vigorously sticking with one central idea. What happens, then, is super cool: At a certain point in writing—maybe about one third of the way—the theme starts to take over. It starts to dictate what you’re writing, and, in spooky ways, large-scale connections between the various parts of the whole start connecting to each other, without your effort, by their own accord. I wrote the first piece for Highway Rider—it wound up being the title track—in a dressing room when I was touring with Pat Metheny. I let it sit awhile, thinking maybe it could be a trio tune. Then, a month later, in the tour bus with Pat, I got some ideas for the string piece, ‘Now You Must Walk Alone.’ I saw a thematic connection, and thought that was interesting and maybe I could exploit it. Then I began to consciously stay with that motif. But the order of the pieces, and more importantly, what I think of as the narrative ‘arc’ wasn’t there yet—it took another year.

As the titles imply, said narrative arc pertains explicitly to travel—the notion of a journey, a life cycle. Since the 2000 trio recording, Places, the road, a fundamental reality for any working performer, has been an ongoing trope in Mehldau’s work.

Music travels through time; often we are traveling through space. So travel works well for me as a metaphor for music. I think that’s pretty universal—when you begin a piece, you feel like you’re in one place, and when it ends, you have gone somewhere. Or perhaps, like in a few things I’ve done already, Highway Rider included, you’ve traveled back to where you started, and maybe you’ve had some kind of gnosis: You’re where you were, but you’ve gained something. Music always expresses itself through the dialectic of a fixed identity and difference: As a piece develops, some part of its identity is constant, but there is also constant change. Likewise, in a journey, there is always the traveler—his or her surroundings change, but he or she remains the same conduit for all of those varied surroundings.

As a teenager, Mehldau discovered the Songbook tunes that would later enter his repertoire through recordings by female singers like Julie London and Peggy Lee; he’s described instrumental lyricism as striving for a voice-like quality. He addressed the way these concerns play out in his musical production in 2006, responding to a question on his Germanophilic predispositions.

“I was trying to bridge the gap between everything I loved musically, from Brahms in 1865 to Wynton Kelly in 1958. I was very concerned then with creating an identity that would somehow mesh together this more European, particularly Germanic Romantic 19th Century sensibility (in some ways) with jazz, which is a more American, 20th century thing (in some ways). One connection that still remains between them is the song—the art songs of Schubert or Schumann, these miniature, perfect 3- or 4-minute creations. To me, there is a real corollary between them and a great jazz performance that can tell a story—Lester Young or Billie Holiday telling a story in a beautiful song. Also pop. Really nice Beatles tunes. All those song-oriented things are miniature, and inhabit a small portion of your life. You don’t have to commit an hour-and-a-half to get through it. But really good songs leave you with a feeling of possibility and endlessness.”

[2010]: As a pianist you have the limitations of your instrument, and the big one is that the note dies away after it’s played. Still, you have all these models from the human voice, horns, and bowed stringed instruments, where the sound continues. You try to find your own way of sounding like a horn. A lot of the expression comes in the actual intention—if as a piano player you are getting inspired by a horn and try to play with a horn-quality, you won’t sound like a horn, but something different will happen in your playing.

Do ‘classical’ and ‘jazz’ sides coexist within you? Do you enter different mind-spaces in addressing one idiom vis-a-vis the other, or is the process more holistic?

It doesn’t feel holistic, but it is. Basically, my gift is this: I have the ability to synthesize the classical music I’m listening to, studying, and playing, and let it find a way into my conception. I’m an okay classical player, but I never would have made it as a virtuoso concert artist. You have to have steel balls for that; it’s just not in my character. For example, a few years back I worked on Prokofiev’s seventh piano sonata—a real warhorse ass-kicker—for a few months. I gave up in self-disgust after trying to play it for some friends and completely flailing. But then it seeped into my solo thing—different parts of it at different times. So I never stop learning classical music or exposing myself to new things. Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock—each of them let classical music rub off on their jazz playing.

In the program notes for Highway Rider, Mehldau states that the structure and instrumentation mirrors/responds to Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, a civilizational threnody composed in 1945, at the end of World War Two.

Metamorphosen is the perfect piece of music for me if there ever was one. It has everything: That thematic economy I mentioned, on a high level, and the perfect marriage between “horizontal” and “vertical” expression—very harmonic and very melodic all at once. The contrapuntal rigor is unparalleled, yet at times the piece can come at you like a big, fat, beautiful series of chords. Strauss’ harmonic language at this period in time—and early Schoenberg in pieces like Pelleas und Mellisande, and Mahler in his later symphonies, particularly the Ninth and the unfinished Tenth—is a language that I want to inhabit. It’s right on the edge of the abyss; yet it’s still tonal. There’s a tragic, hyper-real feeling to that.

Scott Yoo: After our last concert in Paris, I told Brad that the more I dealt with the piece, the more I liked it, and that I enjoyed conducting it most on the last day of the tour. That’s something that happens with Mozart or Beethoven or Brahms—the really great pieces are the ones you enjoy more as you do them more. I’m as much of a layman on jazz music as you can get, but with each different show, I could see what stayed the same with the group and what changed. For example, Brad had a lot of what we call cadenzas. One of them is the epilogue, and he played it very straight the first time I heard it. I thought, ‘ok, fine; that makes sense.’ From night to night, the cadenza became more elaborate. Actually, it was very classical. There were times where I thought it was a shame that what he was putting forth wasn’t being documented, because he was making up such profound music on the spot. Then I realized, ‘Aha, so this is what jazz is all about.’ The ephemeral quality of something existing in a brief second of time, and then evaporating, never to appear again, that’s the whole beauty of it. It was a little disconcerting to hear different notes every night. But once you understand that, and let go, then it’s not so hard.

Joshua Redman: I’d played ‘Don’t Be Sad,’ ‘The Falcon Will Fly Again’ and ‘Old West’ on duo gigs wtih Brad in 2008 and 2009, and he sent us demos a few months before the recording. But although I had some sense of the general vibe of the songs, I had no conception of the orchestral aspects going in. Often when I’m soloing, it’s in the context of orchestral passages with bold, sometimes dissonant harmonies. So it was a wonderful challenge, hearing it for the first time in the studio, to interact and figure out how to make my soloistic voice blend [with] and complement what the orchestra was doing. On the tour, the challenge, night after night, as I gained more insight into how everything fit together, was somehow to approach the music like I was playing it for the first time, to preserve that freshness and spontaneity.

There’s a lot in the piece that’s new and groundbreaking, but it sounds like a natural extension and development of all the musical ideas Brad’s worked with in the past. To me, almost every band he’s had, almost every record he’s done, there has been a sense of arrival, of completion, as though fully formed in its time. He’s a true virtuoso, but it’s not intimidating—in in every instance he employs his chops in the service of musicality and an emotional statement, not for display. You feel so much warmth and empathy and soul and love, as well as the intelligence, rigor and complexity music should have. Hands-down, he’s the best comper I’ve ever heard; he plays exactly what you would play for yourself if you were smart enough to think about it and empathic enough to feel it. The raw, God-given musical talent; the skill he’s acquired through years of playing, listening, and working on music; and that empathy—I’m not sure I’ve encountered that combination of elements in any other musician.

In 2006, Mehldau related that although he was well-conversant in jazz vocabulary when he arrived at Manhattan’s New School in 1988, he “had not much practical knowledge of how to apply it in a group setting.” He added that comping was “part of my definition of being a jazz piano player,” that it’s “a social, intuitive thing,” better learned by osmosis than in the classroom. He observed elder peer-groupers like Larry Goldings and Kevin Hays, and veterans like Cedar Walton and Kenny Barron, noticing what worked and what didn’t, and learning on the job on gigs with veterans like Jimmy Cobb, and contemporaries Mark Turner, Ugonna Okegwo, and Leon Parker. Junior Mance, Mehldau’s first teacher at the New School, helped, too. “I told Junior, ‘I listened to you on these Dizzy Gillespie records, and your comping is perfect. How do you do that?’ He said, ‘Well, let’s do it.’ We sat down, and Junior would comp for me, and then I would comp for him and try to mimic him. Doing these things helped me become a more social musician, versus friends of mine who came to the city at the same time I did but stayed in their practice room the whole time.”

[2010]: Comping is just plain fun. Think about it: Someone is blowing his or her brains out in front of you, telling a story. What to do? Do you interject? Do you support? Okay, you support, but…do you support strongly like a church choir, or softly like a harp? Or a little of both? It’s like playing basketball—you’re where you need to be right when your guy needs you to be there. That takes maturity. Comping is also a quick way to find out how a pianist thinks about harmony. You may showcase some worked-out stuff in a solo, but comping will show your actual knowledge of things like voice leading, register considerations, etc.

This being said, the preponderance of Mehldau’s schedule until the end of April are solo concerts in support of Live in Marciac.

I felt like I had something to say solo with Elegiac Cycle, but my solo concept wasn’t as loose in the concert setting. The looseness—the relaxed thing I have playing trio—kicked in the next few years and I gradually got drawn to doing it more and more in concert. I put out the first live record, In Tokyo, because it represented for me a transition in my solo conception—the end point of something that had developed, and the beginning of something that was hatching. In the same way, Live in Marciac is the summation of certain things I’ve done, with some glimmers of a new conception, which is now in full throttle, I would say.

In the January solo concert I’ll intersperse music from the classical repertoire with my own music and talk a little, showing examples of how various composers have influenced how I write, improvise, and arrange other people’s tunes. I never take this approach; it’s intentionally didactic, and that’s not my thing. But I’m doing it in my role as the composer-in-residence at Carnegie Hall, and I’ve given it some real thought. The position is certainly a great honor. A lot of ink is spilled about how the jazz and classical music worlds inform each other, and it’s been a tired trope for years—it kind of knocks the danger out of each one. The only way for both genres to inform what you’re doing in a meaningful way, whatever kind of musician you are, is to engage deeply in both disciplines.

Brad Mehldau’s Blindfold Test From 2000 (Uncut) — He Turned 41 Yesterday

Eleven years ago, I had an opportunity to do the DownBeat Blindfold Test with Brad Mehldau, then 30, and in residence at the Village Vanguard for a week-long engagement. It was conducted in Mehldau’s hotel room on the Upper West Side; if memory serves, he listened to the selections through headphones on a Sony Diskman…or maybe it was an Aiwa. In any event, here’s the pre-edit version.

Brad Mehldau (Blindfold Test) – (9-21-00):

1.    Art Tatum-Red Callendar-Jo Jones, “Just One Of Those Thing,”  THE COMPLETE ART TATUM GROUP RECORDINGS (#1) (1956/199_) (5 stars)

Tatum.  “Just One Of Those Things.”  I guess I know it’s Tatum from his melodic concept on here, because he’s not playing solo, which then you can really hear it in all his voice leading.  Just aesthetically, I prefer his solo playing.  With the rhythm section… I don’t know who this is.  Is this Slam Stewart? [No.] I’m hearing the drum solo now that he’s playing four-to-the-floor.  I have a feeling I should know this drummer from his style on the brushes.  I can’t put a name with it.  But he sounds great.  The bass player, too. [you’ve haven’t heard this before.] No. [Is Tatum someone you’ve listened to a lot?] More his solo stuff, like the Pablo reissue of his solo albums, where it’s just one standard after another and these incredible things.  But this is really something I want to check out. [AFTER] Jo Jones!  Unbelievable.  Definitely 5 stars.  His whole melodic approach to lines, the way he’s playing over changes is so much not-informed by bebop.  It’s so fresh to hear that.  But very unto itself, really dealing with the changes.  He’s also using the whole instrument.  Even though he’s not playing solo, he’s really getting down there.  Amazing.

2.    Chick Corea, “Monk’s Dream,”SOLO PIANO: STANDARDS (Concord, 2000). [solo piano] (4 stars)

I really don’t know that person’s style.  I wouldn’t even know who to guess.  It’s “Monk’s Dream.”  I would give it 4 stars, because it’s really creative and interesting harmonically.  This kind of feel for me is a little jagged.  As a performance, it left me feeling a little unsettled rhythmically, just for my own taste.  But really creative, interesting harmonic things he’s doing, using the upper register there and different melodies going on at the same time in some places. [AFTER] Really?  It’s a live performance, huh?  Nice recorded sound, too.  You can hear a lot of the room in there, which I also like.

3.    Christian McBride, “Lullaby For A Ladybug,”  SCI-FI (Verve 2000). [Herbie Hancock, piano; Diane Reeves, vocal.] (4 stars)

It’s a beautiful composition.  I don’t know the vocalist.  I don’t feel like I know anyone.  The piano player is somebody who’s been influenced by Herbie Hancock, but I’m not sure whether it’s Herbie himself.  It’s a tough call. [Why is it hard to tell?] That’s a good question.  There are some spots where the piano player is playing a lot, maybe more than sometimes Herbie does — but sometimes Herbie plays a lot, too.  That would probably be my only criticism, is that on the actual piano solo itself it’s a little out of context to what’s going on around the whole thing, and sometimes he’s jumping on the vocalist a little with some of the things that he’s reacting to.  But just my taste; that’s a taste thing.  But the track is beautiful.  The composition itself, and the recorded sound is great. [So do you think it’s Herbie or not?] I’d probably guess Herbie.  [LAUGHS] I got a couple of them right here.  Diane Reeves?  I don’t know who the composer was. [AFTER] No kidding?  I didn’t even recognize Christian, because he’s so unobtrusive.  Wow, I’m going to have to get this record.  Who is the drummer?  He’s great.  4 stars.

4.    Hank Jones-Dave Holland-Billy Higgins, “Yesterdays,” THE ORACLE (Emarcy, 1989). (4 stars)

That’s got to be Billy Higgins on drums.  It’s kind of tough to tell the piano player.  I’m not sure about the bassist.  Maybe Ron Carter?  The piano player, there’s a feel there that’s kind of like the feel I associate with Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, but I’m not sure whether it’s one of them.  I really don’t know.  It was a little aimless in some parts of the arrangement, but it felt great.  I liked how it started out in D-minor, I think, and then modulated down, and I liked that little bass thing.  4 stars.  Every record Billy Higgins is on is just going to feel great.  I’ve played with him a few times with Charles Lloyd.  The experience of playing with him is like nothing else; it’s like being taken for a ride.  I should have just guessed Hank!

5.    Geoff Keezer, “Maple Sugar Rays,”  ZERO ONE (GMN, 2000). [solo] (3-1/2 stars)

Maybe Mulgrew on some solo record I don’t know? [You’re warm.] I don’t want to make a generalization, but for me the style was a little too much of the same thing for the whole thing.  It’s kind of predictable after a while.  Really inside the harmony, and a certain kind of melodic vocabulary that sort of sounds like a vocabulary already.  So after a while I’m not too interested listening to this.  Also, dynamically it’s always pretty loud, which after a  while gets on my nerves.  There were some spots in the arrangement that were nice, where he was doing some harmonic stuff that made it interesting, but for the rest of it I felt like he was kind of running stuff.  It got to be a little of the same after a while.  3-1/2 stars. [AFTER] That’s interesting, because I have this but I’ve only listened to it once.  Was this an original?  Some of the pieces on here were really different, where he’s treating the piano.  That makes sense, because it’s a certain style… It’s more of an aesthetic thing than an actual qualitative thing, because that’s a whole school of piano playing that I haven’t gravitated towards too much, like Harold Mabern and some of those guys.  It’s not my taste.

6.    Bill Charlap, “All Through The Night,”  ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT (Criss-Cross, 1997). [Peter Washington, bass; Kenny Washington, drums] (4-1/2 stars)

I really enjoyed it.  It was tough, because the solo introduction was sort of in a different style than what it turned into with the trio.  I was thinking about the trio as it went along… Maybe Ahmad Jamal.  I don’t know who it is, then, but I really loved the performance.  I thought this arrangement where they kept going back to that theme reminded me of something Ahmad might do.  But the melodic concept was… You could hear some of a bebop kind of  thing in there.  Also, we were just listening to Tatum.  There are some triple-time things he was doing, but very original, though, in his or her own right, with the lines, doing some different, creative, fresh melodic things that really were fun to listen to.  I really liked it.  A great, swinging trio thing.  It was really locked-up.  Not 5 stars, because I could have done without the intro, a lot of flashy stuff.  4-1/2 stars.  Cole Porter really has a specific sound as a composer.  Sometimes it reminded me of “From This Moment On,” sort of the way his harmonic movement is.  But Bill put in some great changes on his own, too, that really were nice, the way they worked with the melody under it.

7.    Earl Hines, “Prelude To A Kiss,”  PLAYS DUKE ELLINGTON (New World, 1974/1997) [solo piano] (5 stars)

Wow!  I don’t know the performance, but I think it’s Monk.  It’s not Monk?  It’s “Prelude To A Kiss.”  Whoever it is, I’ll have to give it five stars.  It’s so deep harmonically, what he’s doing inside the chords, the way it builds up as an arrangement throughout.  He starts from something and just develops out of it organically, and it gets more and more dense.  The other thing that’s great is once the time starts it’s really right there.  You can always hear the quarter-note no matter what’s going on.  I don’t know Monk’s solo playing too much; that’s why I might have guessed him. [Monk would tend to be sparer.] A little more spare, yes.  Because I did hear, again, some of those Tatumesque runs in there.  That seems to be a theme of a lot of what we’re listening to. [Do you think it was a more contemporary player or an older player?] I’m going to guess older because of the nature of the recording quality and the piano horribly out of tune!  But I just don’t know.  I’m disappointed in myself. [AFTER] [In your learning process, were you into older piano players?] Not as much.  It’s more just because I haven’t gotten around to them yet.  But the ones that I really know are some Tatum and some Duke.

8.    Ahmad Jamal, “I Love You,”  BIG BYRD (Verve, 1996). [James Cammack, ass; Idris Muhammad, drums; Manolo Badrena, percussion] (4-1/2 stars)

I’m going to guess Ahmad again.  That’s a great arrangement.  Now it’s staying on this vamp and… I don’t know his later records too much, but I’ve had the chance to hear him live a lot, and there’s still that great way of taking “I Love You” and making these vamps throughout it which make it a different kind of compositional thing.  And he plays so compositionally, too.  He plays with that arrangement.  The tune is almost incidental a lot of the time, which is what’s so great about it.  I definitely checked out “Live At The Pershing” and “Awakening,” the one that he did “Dolphin Dance,” explored the oeuvre of Herbie and Bill Evans.  The drummer has a really fat groove.  4-1/2 stars.

9.    John Hicks, “Passing Through,” AN ERROLL GARNER SONGBOOK (High Note, 1997). [solo piano] (3-1/2 stars).

I have no guesses on this one.  I’m coming up short here.  [AFTER] Again, that’s sort of not my aesthetic.  My thought was that this is someone who probably plays more in groups regularly, and solo piano is sort of a departure for him.  What I noticed is that… Maybe it’s because I’m a piano player.  I feel that his rhythmic thing is almost reacting to an invisible band that’s not there.  So as a solo performance, I wanted a little more of what the bass and drums would typically supply somehow, no matter how abstractly that might be.  It felt like there was this hole.  The composition was kind of normal for my taste.  It didn’t particularly get me too much.  3-1/2 stars.  Nice recorded sound.

10.    Kenny Kirkland, “Ana Maria,” KENNY KIRKLAND (GRP, 1991) [Andy Gonzalez, bass; Jerry Gonzalez, congas; Steve Berrios, drums; Wayne Shorter, composer]

I love the composition, but I can’t pick out which one it is.  The shape of the melody sounds familiar.  Is it a Wayne tune?  I love the way the piano player states the melody, nice and rhapsodically through the bar-line, with a nice texture building up.  During the blowing the piano player has a nice, crisp technique in the right hand which I always enjoy hearing.  The kind of crispness I associate with Wynton Kelly, a really articulate thing which is nice in the double-time stuff.  I thought it could have been maybe a chorus shorter, because after a while you hear certain melodic shapes repeating themselves over and over again.  As a group performance, I felt like there was a piano player, then there was this percussion thing that was reacting with the piano a little rhythmically in the double-time stuff, and the bass and drums were sort of in the background.  It could have been the mix.  I have no clue who it would be.  4 stars. [AFTER] Kenny Kirkland is another one I haven’t gotten to.  I kind of missed him.  I was so involved in my own listening pattern in the early ’90s and late ’80s.  I was really into guys like Sonny Clark and Mal Waldron — a lot of compers.  I loved Mal Waldron, and the stuff he did with Steve Lacy; the minimalism he uses appealed to me.

11.    Denny Zeitlin, “Cousin Mary,”  AS LONG AS THERE’S MUSIC (32 Jazz, 1997/2000). [Buster Williams, bass; Al Foster, drums] (5 stars)

That got me off the most out of anything you’ve played thus far.  It felt great.  I don’t know the piano player, but I might know the bass and drums.  Maybe it’s not them, but it sounds a little like Ben Riley and Buster Williams, that kind of feel.  Oh, it is Buster.  The drummer has that great tipping feel; it feels so good.  I love the piano player.  I never hear any vocabulary.   First of all, the arrangement of “Cousin Mary” is really great.  You would think, “What can you do with that tune?”—but he finds another harmonic thing that really is also referring to the original, with the strange, different chords for the blues.  You get the feeling that he’s blowing on that, but at a certain point he’s just getting away from what roots should be, and he’s sort of making up different forms of the blues — one thing, one thing, one thing, and then… Again, these 12-bar things.  Which I love. [Does he remind you of anybody?] You can hear a lot of the history of piano playing in there.  I’m probably going to be really embarrassed that I should have known him.  5 stars. [AFTER] Denny Zeitlin!  Wow.  I’ve never heard him.  Charlie Haden always tells me to check this guy out.  Really inspiring.  A great trio performance.  For me the piano is a little high in the mix, but it still doesn’t detract.  It’s still really great.

12.    Martial Solal, “Round Midnight,”  BALLADE DU DIX MARS (Black Saint, 1998) [Paul Motian, drums; Marc Johnson, bass] (4 stars)

The tune is “Round Midnight,” but you’ve got me stumped on the player.  Because I just heard Paul Motian play duo with Frisell in Monterrey, some of the brushwork in this kind of approach where there’s not a leader was reminding me of Motian.  I could do a deductive thing and say maybe it’s Paul Bley.  No?  Now, when I just Paul with Bill, one thing I liked is that within a rhythmic context they were following each other a lot, phrasing together.  With this, one criticism would be that the piano player was going and the other guys were following his phrasing.  So after a while it got to be a little too much of that, and not so much interaction.  It gets kind of noodly, I guess — for me.  Within all that, there were flashes of harmonic things sticking out there in between.  So it might be the kind of thing I could listen to more and start to enjoy more.  It’s definitely a brilliant performance.  I like how the bass player, too, was finding certain notes in there to ground it.  4 stars

13.    Ornette Coleman-Joachim Kuhn, “Passion Cultures,” COLORS (Verve-Harmolodic, 1997) (5 stars)

It’s beautiful.  I think it’s Ornette and Joachim Kuhn.  Beautiful!  I have another record of them that was made in the studio which is much different than this.  Somebody gave it to me in France.  It’s so great to hear a real kind of tonal thing, for the most part, taking place, these modal sections with Ornette’s beautiful melodic thing over it, and then the way Joachim Kuhn found his way out of the harmony slowly, with Ornette.  It’s a wonderful process.  A nice composition that really stands up, the whole thing.  There’s this sort of urgency or sort of mortality feeling to that melody, something haunting that Ornette has the ability to evoke so well.  They’re really together on that.  5 stars.  Definitely a great performance.  Nothing wrong with that.  I checked out mainly the early Atlantic stuff with the quartet, with Don Cherry and Charlie, like Change of The Century, This is Our Music. [Does his late ’60s stuff or the ’70s harmolodics appeal to you?] That stuff I haven’t checked out as much.  Actually, just in the last couple of months while I was on the road, Larry Grenadier was playing me a few things I’d never heard by Prime Time.  So that’s all another “yet” to me.  A lot of times with that quartet, I hear changes.  I’ve talked to Charlie Haden, and he’s like, “Hey, man, we were just making up changes.”  But there’s still definitely a harmonic component going on.

15.    Ruben Gonzalez, “Almendra,”  INTRODUCING RUBEN GONZALEZ (World Circuit/Nonesuch, 1996) (4-1/2 stars)

It’s a great rhythm section.  It sounds Cuban from the beat.  I’m not too familiar with the players, so I really wouldn’t know who to guess.  But I love the bass player and the Latin rhythm section; they’re so locked in.  The arrangement is cool, because they’re just blowing over this… You hear the beginning, the head, and it’s a V-chord.  So it’s suspended on this pedal thing for the whole blowing, because he’s just staying there.  And the piano player is rhythmically free of that and he’s sort of just playing over everything, extemporizing over that, which at first is interesting, but I guess after a while it sort of drags on a little. The content was interesting.  I found myself being reminded of Duke sometimes, actually, in the spaciousness of the way he plays melodies sometimes 2 or 3 octaves apart and leaves this wide-open space in the middle and gets in the lower end or upper register, and using those parts of the piano — and some of the voicings, too.  I thought it was really interesting, the chromatic things he was doing.  4-1/2 stars.

_________
It’s really interesting.  It’s difficult after the fifth one.  You find yourself swamped with information and it gets hard to be objective.  But you never are objective, really.  You’re listening, and then it would be nice to listen to it again.  Then your opinion might change.