“What matters to [Brad Mehldau] is the music, a fact that’s obvious when you give a close listen to one of his trio recordings or see him play live. Even his most relaxed and open tunes have an intensity that you can almost touch His concentration is completely focused on maintaining the narrative of his improvisations. His impeccable technique allows him to explore the piano with formidable confidence, leading his trio down remote tangents and returning again to familiar ground His interest in subject matter is broad, ranging from standards to compositions from such non-standard sources as Lennon & McCarteny and Radiohead. In short, he is a real thinker, a deep cove.” -Ernie Redeout

Biography:
[soure: www.musicianguide.com]

Brad Mehldau was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and spent the first ten years of his life moving between Georgia, New York, and New Hampshire, before his father settled his medical practice as in Hartford, Connecticut. Mehldau began studying piano at age six and continued until he was 14. At that time, as a student at Hartford’s Hall High School, he joined the school’s accomplished jazz band. Through his performances with that band, he won the prestigious Berklee School of Music (Boston, Massachusetts) high school competition as Best All-Around Musician. As a student at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, he was enrolled as part of that school’s well-known jazz and contemporary music program, studying with Junior Mance, Kenny Werner, and Fred Hersch. Another instructor, long-time drummer Jimmy Cobb, brought Mehldau into his quartet.

While still a student, Mehldau began touring the United States and Europe with various groups. European jazz festivals particularly brought attention to his rising fame. It was when he joined Joshua Redman’s quartet that he began to gain recognition that only heightened with the release of his first album. In 1997, Mehldau moved to Los Angeles while continuing to tour worldwide and record. He told Enright that what he liked about Los Angeles was the fact that there was “no geographical scene like you have in New York, with the West Village and the East Village and Lincoln Center Uptown.” In Los Angeles he noted, the scene was “all spread out,” and “you can go to a club in West Hollywood where on any given night they’ll have anything from brash metal to a big band with a torch singer. It’s almost like nothing is sacred.”

The intensity of Mehldau’s music has been compared to musicians that preceded him long before. In billing for the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1997, Mehldau’s piano style was described in comments at the North Sea Jazz Festival website as having, “the power and energy of Beethoven, the improvisational richness of [legendary jazz saxophonist] John Coltrane and Miles Davis and the emotional approach of Bill Evans.” Much of his style was born of his own love and inspiration from jazz piano greats such as Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, McCoy Tyner, and Keith Jarrett. In his review of Mehldau’s June 1999 appearance at Symphony Space in Manhattan and Mehldau’s creation, “Elegiac Cycle,” Adam Shatz wrote in the New York Times that the comparison of Mehldau to the legendary Bill Evans, considered one of the greatest white jazz pianists was a bit misleading, at best. “The real reason behind the Evans analogies, one suspects,” wrote Shatz, had “less to do with music than with race.” Yet Shatz agreed that his “eccentric sensibility” was reminiscent of Evans. “Like Evans, he is profoundly drawn to classical music, but where Evans invoked early French modernists like Debussy and Ravel, Mr. Mehldau demonstrates affinities with 19th-century German Romantics like Schubert and Brahms.” Mehldau’s particular fascination with German musicians and literature brought a reflection from a recent interview Shatz quoted. Mehldau said that “if there’s any German ethos that attracts me, it has to do with the incredible amount of welled-up emotion that’s being conveyed. There’s a kind of longing that you feel in the literature and in the music of Schubert and Schumann.”

Mehldau’s Approach To Music:

Much of Mehldau’s recorded work has a deeply personal, introspective tint. His goal is to express himself as a person, an artist, and a musician, and while he wants to take his audience for a ride, he does not pander to them. His communicates in pure music, taking people on a journey of thematic and harmonic development. His attention to the melody, the harmony, they rhythm, the way it’s referred back to or now, the way it begins and ends – is important; however within all of that, he also has a commitment to being spontaneous, and this quality gives him the ability to reach the levels he does.

Whenever you see a Brad Mehldau performance, it has at its focal point this great quality – the meticulous attention to the development of ideas coupled with an unpredictable yet masterful abandon. You never know where he and his trio are going to go, and to Mehldau that feeling of surprise and anticipation is what he wants to communicate to an audience.

The spontaneity doesn’t just come about on a whim, however; this a logic and discipline behind the freedom. Brad achieves this in a variety of ways, among them a tendency to play to the deeper harmonic structure of a piece rather than following the literal path of its II-V-I progressions, and the use of pedal points. When you look at a single-note melody and a bunch of chord symbols above it, a lot of the interest comes from the extent to which you deviate from those chord symbols, or not. A lot of the ways in which you can deviate from a chord have to do with voice leading, making melodies within that chord, not just superimposing other chords on top of it. With a typical II-V-I progression, the goal is to is to see what we can do within those changes melodically, to make it fit together. Finding ways to moves voices between those chords re-animates them in a way and makes them come alive.

This example will let you hear the most characteristic II-V-I progression
in C minor: Dmi7(b5)-G7alt-Cmi(MA7).

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