Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau with Britten Sinfonia

The Arts Desk

London Jazz blog

Villabourani blog

Jazzwise Magazine

Brad Mehldau, Barbican Hall
Written by Peter Culshaw, The Arts Desk

Brad Mehldau is a cool cat. An intellectual one, introverted to the point of semi-autism, precise and clear. A strong mystique based on critic-proof good taste and hardly talking to anyone, least of all many music journalists (I’ve tried). At least that’s what I used to think before last night’s extraordinary show. He still looks a bit of a nerd, hunched over his piano and pale as a baby polar bear locked in the attic for too long, but this was a warm, enveloping trip of a gig. The 21st century is the century the nerds took over - Gates, Zuckerberg, Mehldau. The jocks, the lookers, the sexy ones: your time is up - you really should have been concentrating in algebra, after all.

This gig (part of the London Jazz Festival) was the première performance of Mehldau’s madly eclectic and ambitious album Highway Rider, in which he attempts a path that many have stumbled on - a jazz-classical fusion. It may well be that the worst music ever made has been jazz attempts at fusion. It appeals to all the worst instincts of jazzers who want to be taken seriously as artists. They or their forebears have suffered for decades in smoky bars where people didn’t listen to every note, possibly because they were actually having fun. Those days of smoky bars and having fun are over. But Mehldau’s pretention turns out to be rather enjoyable anyway.

‘It reminded me of the Islamic carpet-makers who always include a deliberate mistake because to be perfect would be to ape Allah and thus be blasphemous’
 
Highway Rider is that despised thing, a concept album. It’s a quest, a cyclical journey with an actual chamber orchestra on it - last night the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Scott Yoo, in the first of six concerts across Europe. Mehldau has opened up and is having a bash at being a proper composer, and the risk more or less paid off. As my late colleague and friend Robert Sandall put it when we made it CD of the Month in March - one of Robert’s last pieces - “By the end, you’re not quite sure what it is you’ve witnessed - a compelling jostle of contemporary classical, chamber jazz and ingenious post-rock pianissimo - but you know that it’s an addictive mix that you’re going to have to revisit again and again.”

Live, the passages with just the Sinfonia were all over the place. Normally that would be a criticism. A little bit of the chaos may be due to lack of rehearsal, but Mehldau’s wild eclecticism is evident - at various times you were listening to echoes of film music, Brahms, Berg, Nick Drake or The Beatles and all points in between. It also may be that Mehldau is still finding his voice as an orchestrator.

But Mehldau’s piano-playing - and he is a master of his instrument - brought it all together. That and his strong band, fronted by one of the best saxists we have, Joshua Redman, whose lines were like a lead vocalist for much of the evening (several passages cry out to be sung, actually). Mehldau knows restraint, as we know, but often during the evening he was positively wigging out, tripping the light fantastic on his keyboard. We had waltzes, blues, meditative music, and at one point he seemed to be channelling the steamy piano of New Orleans jazz great Professor Longhair, even if it was Prof Longhair with a PhD in Higher Mathematics. Those fiendish time-signatures would send a dervish into orbit.

He is a wonderfully ambidextrous pianist - his left hand seems to be just as fluid as his right. “Into the City” started with a left-hand vamp, with various virtuoso flourishes - we were in a Post-Modern-film car chase. In others it was more Schubertian. A wonderful tune, “The Old West”, was a masterful duet between Mehldau and Redman, both alternating, semi-improvised, between lyricism and rapid-fire rhythm. Other pieces on the journey were pictures of highways with space and speed and mountains, with elements of cragginess and dizzying vertigo. There were surprising sweeps of Romanticism and even the odd flash of muscular near-funk.

The snatches of atonality were like a splash of cold water to stop this becoming too sentimental - although it turns out that Mehldau is a bit of softie, after all. The lack of perfection and perfect tonality were rather human. We are all flawed, and so was this. It reminded me of the Islamic carpet-makers who always include a deliberate mistake or two because to be perfect would be to ape Allah and thus be blasphemous. The human scale was emphasised by the small drums, the handclaps, the handmade nature of some of the percussion.
As a premiere it had the virtue of great freshness and the downside of problems to be worked out in sound balance. The last number “Always Departing, Always Returning” should have been a “Hey Jude”-like uplifting mantra, with its lift-off repetitive chords, but on this one the Sinfonia sounded a bit bolted-on. This will improve in further concerts. It was, anyway, a warmer, more vulnerable Mehldau we saw last night. And all the better for it.

London Jazz Festival Review (7): Brad Mehldau 
 Barbican, part of London Jazz Festival, 13th November, 2010, review by Thomas Gray LondonJazz blog

Londoners have been spoilt for chances to catch Brad Mehldau recently, thanks to his extended residency at the Wigmore Hall. In contrast to those intimate chamber concerts, his appearance at this year’s London Jazz Festival (serving as the European premier of ‘Highway Rider’) was an opportunity to experience his ambitious musical vision writ large, with support from the Britten Sinfonia, regular trio partners Larry Grenadier on bass and Jeff Ballard on drums, with Matt Chamberlain on percussion and Joshua Redman on saxophones.

‘Highway Rider’ is an extended work uniting jazz with classical and rock, two influences that have long coloured Mehldau’s solo and trio output. This concert featured the work in its entirety, played exactly as on the album, with the obvious exception of Mehldau’s and Redman’s improvisations. Although this may be unusual for a jazz concert, it was sympathetic to the work’s journey-themed narrative.

For a person prone to fierce intellectualism (see the liner notes to his early albums as an example), Mehldau writes remarkably accessible and engaging music. He has previously hinted at the romanticism of Brahms and Schuman as an inspiration. This came across in several poignant solo interludes and cadenzas. Yet, the overriding sound of ‘Highway Rider’ was distinctively American, notably on ‘We’ll Cross the River Together’ with its Copland-like theme evoking the wide-open spaces of Mehldau’s home country.

During long periods of the work, the classical musicians sat on the sidelines as the music broke down into different small group configurations, offering much variety. A quartet featuring Mehldau and Redman with Ballard and Chamberlain on hand percussion provided some of the evening’s creative high-points, with Redman on daring form as his beguiling soprano lines swooped and tumbled over Mehldau’s driving accompaniment on ‘Capriccio’. The bustling, drum-and-bass infused ‘Into the City’ was the only piece featuring Mehldau’s regular trio. Here, Mehldau’s thrillingly warp-speed improvisation showed that in addition to his composing, he remains committed to pushing forward the vocabulary of jazz piano.

However, it was when the full ensemble combined—with Mehldau’s dense and brooding string arrangements set against the tandem rock rhythms of Ballard and Chamberlain on separate drum kits (on ‘Walking the Peak’ and ‘Always Returning’) —that the music packed its greatest emotional punch. The Britten Sinfonia has made crossover projects such as this their speciality, and their rendering of this score (under the baton of Scott Yoo) was flawless.

Throughout the best part of two hours, ‘Highway Rider’ captivated the Barbican audience, and even after a slightly overwrought finale, nobody could begrudge Mehldau the ecstatic standing ovation he received. For an encore, he stripped things down with a sublime contrapuntal solo account of Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Martha My Dear’. As with the work that had come before, it was difficult to suppress the word ‘genius’ from my mind..

Villabourani blog
Brad Mehldau ‘Highway rider’ live at the Barbican November 2010
 
This year’s London Jazz festival has a whole host of talent on display and it’s good to see that audiences are attending despite seasonal weather and tube train disruption. Last night at the Barbican Centre was the European premiere of Brad Mehldau’s epic ‘Highway rider’.

Highway Rider’ is a two disc concept album which was released earlier this year, which I suppose represents some kind of ‘fusion’ between Classical and Jazz, due to its use of a chamber orchestra for seven of its tracks. The very mention of ‘fusion’ will undoubtedly make many musicians and listeners run a mile and that’s looking from both genre’s respective corners! However, ‘Highway Rider’ never seems to compromise, the chamber orchestra sections are effective, at times, sounding Coplandesque, Ivesian, with a real ‘American classical’ tradition, when the piano plays at the same time it’s almost like listening to a modern piano concerto at times. When the orchestra don’t play, the jazz is there, with a fine mixture of styles coming from Brad Mehldau and his trio (Larry Grenadier on Bass and Jeff Ballard on Drums). In addition there is an extra percussionist, Matt Chamberlain, and the fantastic Sax playing of Joshua Redman.

The orchestra for the performance was the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Mehldau’s school friend, Scott Yoo. The unusual orchestration, by Mehldau, consisted of 23 string players, three french horns, 1 bassoon, 1 contra bassoon and 1 percussionist (Orchestral bells). Mehldau sites Richard Strauss’s ‘Metamorphosen’, also for 23 strings as an influence here. As we in the audience were told, we were the ‘guinea pigs’ for the European tour which is taking place with the Britten Sinfonia over the next week or so and they had only previously had one day of rehearsals altogether. All things considered, the orchestra played very well, it can’t be easy for the strings sustaining 23 solo lines at times, also for the wind and brass players, to go for long stretches without playing, before coming back in, there were some nice solo lines, in particular the two bassoonists,  who had key roles at times. It was also interesting to see the response from the orchestra players to the numbers which were ‘pure jazz’, some looks of admiration during the complex ostinati patterns of ‘Into the City’.

The performance itself was outstanding, Mehldau played the whole of the first half without a score, with his usual right and left hand dexterity, it was good to hear the changes in the improvised sections from the solos on the album, with Mehldau and Redman both in creative mood. Also of note was the rapport between Grenadier and Ballard in the trio numbers. One of the more interesting features of this work is the use of percussion, ranging from hand claps, hand-made percussion to two drum kits playing at once for the ‘monster rock’ moments, visually this was good to watch and the performers were clearly having a good time. Three changes I noticed from the album were, the absence of pump organ in ‘Sky turning grey’ , the omission of the track ‘Come with me’ from the second half and no vocals in ‘The falcon will fly again’.

Brad Mehldau spoke twice in the concert, to introduce the pieces and players, he seemed a little conscious about having to speak for a length of time and even said ‘boring’ at one point when talking about his own piece’s homage to the work of Brahms. He also mentioned that the title of the first number, ‘John boy’ was a reference to Johannes Brahms, a point he made earlier this year in his solo recital at the Wigmore hall, he also went on to again clarify that it was also a ‘nod’ towards the character from ‘The Waltons’, this time however he went further with his description, remembering a particular episode when John boy left the home and returns like a ‘prodigal son’, a little like ‘Highway rider’s’ musical narrative with its cyclic feel and the idea of ‘returning home’.

At the end of the concert, the performers received a standing ovation from many in the audience and repeated calls back to the stage resulted in an encore from Mehldau, this time not one of his own compositions but a solo piano performance of ‘Martha my dear’. A fantastic concert that I would love to watch again or have on DVD (Mr Mehldau if you’re reading!)

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning With Brahmsian Reveries And John Cage 
Sunday, 14 November 2010 12:34 – Stephen Graham JazzwiseMagazine.com

The road may be a long and winding one for a new composition particularly one as ambitious as Brad Mehldau’s Highway Rider. Last night at the Barbican the work received its European premiere. With the Britten Sinfonia, extra drummer Matt Chamberlain and saxophonist Joshua Redman plus Mehldau’s long standing trio partners Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard the work’s musical narrative knitted together remarkably well irrespective of the thematic road motifs and returning-home themes that Mehldau explained partly lay behind the story of the music.

Wearing what looked like a velour lounge jacket redolent of some bygone Bohemian parlour and noticeably enjoying himself, Mehldau even channelled his inner teenager at one point, stage grunting under his sleeve and exclaiming “Boring” when he explained that one of the Rider pieces was inspired by Brahms. After all, it was a jazz audience, hey, he seemed to be saying, although I think everyone knew that! Redman as “protagonist” was perfectly cast as hero and foil against the noted Goethe fan’s role of rhapsodic continuity figure/miracle maker. 

A very impressive London Jazz Festival debut. ‘Into the City’ above all showed some monstrous Mehldau trio interplay and ‘John Boy’ named for Brahms and the likeable, if a bit wet, character from The Waltons is a winningly lovely theme. We might be hearing more of this tune over the years, very possibly out of context. I liked the Ballard / Chamberlain / Grenadier / Redman / Mehldau arpeggiating rapport later on; while both on hand percussion and in a double-kit setting, Chamberlain and Ballard were a formidable double act. The at-times plangently impressive washes of strings and even the handsome bassoon parts added to the spell, sympathetically conducted by Mehldau pal Scott Yoo and of course Mehldau’s almost signature-level left hand figures, bouncing the right hand into some beautiful flourishes.

Later at the Vortex just a short bus ride away in Dalston after midnight there was a wonderful if unlikely end to the evening for me, with ‘Indeterminacy’, John Cage’s diary-like witticisms and bon mots read by the fine comedian Stewart Lee, with Steve Beresford and Tania Chen playing improv on electronic devices and piano. Banal at times, absurdist even, with some superb abstract touches from Chen and the quietly amusing Lee deadpanning well-honed falling cadences it was quite a gem. “Artists talk a lot about freedom”, as Cage put it, and who would disagree.

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