Brad Mehldau: The Greatest Jazz Pianist of Our Generation

Hello everyone, I'm Rick Biato Brad mdo stands as a beacon of innovation in the world of

jazz

, weaving the richness of classical music with the spontaneity of

jazz

to create a sound uniquely his own with a career spanning more than three decades and a space has been made. for himself not only as a

pianist

of exceptional skill and depth, but also as a composer who likes to explore and combine genres. His ability to traverse musical landscapes from the works of Bach to the songs of Radio Head has not only earned him critical acclaim but also a dedicated following.

In this interview we delve into the creative process Brad has approached to blend different musical traditions. and his thoughts on the evolution of jazz needless to say I'm a big fan of Brad's music Here's my interview Brad welcome thank you thank you it's a great It's an honor to have you here. I saw you play last night in Athens. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about, we talked about it a minute before, is that you play a lot of contemporary or contemporary music, I would say to your life. right, and historically the head of radio, you played Neil Young, Bob Dylan, you played The Beatles, you played Elliot Smith on my way home.

I started thinking, well, it's like the American songbook that jazz musicians of the past play and I don't want to lump them together. for you to be a jazz musician to me I think of you as an improviser what is this songbook you are playing or is it not a songbook? Yes, it would probably be a personal songbook. A personal Canon, if you will. I know of things that have impacted me, a lot of them are early in a kind of formation, you know, those first experiences you have with music where something really hits you and then it seeped into my musical identity and with a lot of that. things, um, there was a little delay because I got into jazz when I was a teenager and I put it aside and became kind of a jazz snob for a while and then, um, it just happened, I ended up being in The um when it was 26 lived there for about 5 years and went to This Place Largo, where John Bryan had a regular gig and I hung out with singer-songwriters like Elliot Smith, played there all the time, Fiona Apple, Ricky Lee Jones, and I'd hear them cover a song by the Beatles. the way we played a C Porter song in New York and seeing and hearing that music again, rediscovering it and also discovering some new things from that period that I didn't know about and then finding a way to seep into what I was doing.

I started doing a lot of solo stuff and incorporating some of that trio stuff, so it happened pretty intuitively, but I think if I were to say what makes it a songbook in itself, a lot of things would immediately differentiate themselves. of what we call the American songbook is the guitars, you know, a lot of these songs were written with guitars and what I seem to be drawn to over and over again is doing guitar things with open strings and just trying to put them on the piano or strum. things you know, playing things with your fingers um and just wanting to do that on the piano and that comes out and of course then it's a different thing because on some pianos you approximate those things by the types of figures that you play, yeah, yeah, how I want to say. for example, last night I think I did it as an encore to Mother Nature's Son, yeah, and you know I listen to that.

I don't think I'm playing exactly, but it's or you know I've played Black Bird a lot. So you can right away correct me if I'm wrong, but there is an open thread that makes all of this so rich and beautiful. Here it's G and open, yeah, and it's in the middle, which is really special and sometimes it gets really special. nice, crunchy, yeah, a lot of harmonic movement, but that as a base, um, and then with this, it's on the bottom, it's the D of Mother Nature's Son, um, so it feels good on the piano and then It also connects with a lot of other music that connects.

Going back to Bach and what you would call a pedal point or an organ pedal where there's this and Brahms also loved it, you know a lot, so when I hear that stuff for me it's oh, it feels like you know the radio. I can feel like Brams, you know it or you know it all, everything starts to connect. Can you talk about the jazz standards that you would have played as a kid and then these songs that you're playing now? a different harmonic structure and maybe demonstrate if you were to take a jazz standard and talk about the types of chord progressions you would have versus songs that are rock songs that you cover well, let's say if we did, if we stuck with Mother's Nature.

It's such a great melody that in some ways a jazz musician could listen to it and say it's simpler because it's simple, and then if I go to a jazz melody, let's say "I love you," maybe they'll try to do it the same way. manner. key and D so actually sometimes what I get a little stuck on with jazz is the way that here we have a half diminished two up to a five playing very simple versions of the chord, but just to show that jazz in this type of American song. The framework of the book we're in is here's a chord here's another chord and here's another chord and it's a convenient and somewhat pragmatic way of having a group of people improvise in a specific setting of here are the chord changes and They call them changes, you know, but when we're in the vibe of um um, how am I going to make a chord chart like that?

I can, but it's going to look really weird, it's going to be a bunch of Slash chords with a g and then it's okay. here's a triad in C major here's something like a is what we call this a half diminution in C sharp no, it's just two tones and then this is kind of a G major over G major 7 over, but actually it What makes it so beautiful, of course, is the specific voice, the note choices and the lack of notes, the emptiness, this nice architecture of the chord shapes themselves and the melodic voice that leads what we call this is doing this going up chromatically, it has a nice little melody, so a chord chart may provide some information, but it won't do justice to what makes the melody work and then that leads to the next discussion: how am I going to play that?

I won't be able to touch it maybe or It will be a waste of time trying to apply the changes. I'm going to have to have some other interaction with the melody than with the American songbook, which will be, you know, you know, I really could. open that up and if I'm in the rain, you know what it's Bill Evans and then Keith and all these great

pianist

s, but I can really lead the vocal and go further, but I'm still going to have those chords moving. which are a convenient way for the bassist to play so that we can all play together in this way, that is, a little more and I'm not criticizing Jazz, but I'm just saying that it could be a way to answer the question of how the songbook American that we use we're going to have to use this other type of more contemporary guitar pop music, we're going to have to use the information in a different way to improvise in a different way that will probably be more unique.

I'm listening to two of the tracks that were just released with you, Chris Potter, Brian Blade and John Patatuchi. Oh yeah, cool, cool, and I noticed your songwriting is different. You use more triads and things like that more than you would have composed. maybe 20 years ago this interesting, did you notice the difference or even think that it might be the factor of what I find a challenge in playing with a monster like Chris Potter, who is like how sunny Rollins made him? I don't use pianists too much, because it's almost the feeling I have that I didn't need them, so Chris is covering a lot of harmonic material, in the solo itself, it's all there, you know, the melody is there and the harmony.

It's all on the line, yeah, and it's very dense, so maybe what you want to find when you're racing him is that he doesn't need your support, he doesn't need you to complete him, but maybe something that's key. the phrase or the chord or the melody that might give him more story to tell in that sense, you know, that probably means less notes, not like Den in practice, it's like with Charlie Parker, you take away the music, it's all there. you know what the progression is like in Bach, you don't like it, I mean, Bach is kind of the model, right, the model because it's like we have, let's say, or maybe the most famous of all, so it's an arpeggio, it which means he is spelling. a chord that I could play, that if I was composing behind Chris I would play a chord, but if it's already on the line, it does two things, it gives me the harmony, but it's also a nice melody, you know, so it's both when you're competing for yourself if you have a bass player, do you think about playing these notes here and then these other notes could give you the dissonance against it and I'll use both hands to spell different things.

I think it varies and depends on the context and one general thing I could say is that if I'm playing a ballad or something with more space, there will be less of it and it might be really evenly matched in terms of, let's say great Johnny Mandel. tune where do you start um so Larry is down here we're in the key of D flat and uh I can really give I think it's a good exercise when I occasionally teach I try to tell the pianists, can you find me the two notes that you need to count the history of this melody and the harmony um, so here we are just in a triad.

Well, I'll first touch on the first four sentences in context, so again, they're very simple. I like my pedal points um. that goes through the chord so I'm going to keep that D right where D flat is and now this on a jazz chart we might see an A flat sus or something like that and we might be tempted to pick what would be cool and maybe that . I'll find a piece, but I like to start from a very simple point and then when I get to the first 25 that we have, which is a 25 to uh G flat major, I could go, you know, and we have a nice 9 flat natural 13.

I know I could do it, you know like that, but maybe, what can I find? The notes that only tell that story. She's beautiful, so there's my voice, but yeah, that's not me. I mean, that's Bill Evans. You know, this is all great. really lead vocal, but that might be one thing, but then if I'm on a tune where I'm in the blues, let's say in a totally different context and we're getting into something that I like to make dense in my left hand as a songwriter. so we have these original voicings, you know, we hear a lot of what we call original voicings on a C7 dominant chord which would be the first chord of a blues.

I like to put an extra note in there, maybe I'll put a sound that I like. To a large extent, it's putting your four right next to your third. It's actually something I learned from Peter Bernstein when I started dating him. He likes to play these chords on the guitar. Yes, many times they are open strings. There's just an open string that turns into the fourth, you know, so that might sound a lot crunchier, is what I like to call it, you know? And if I'm playing a blues, there's another one here, I have a sus chord. its 13 but let me put the root right there and I'm not going to hear it as a cheesy root because it's stuck right between the dominant seven and the nine, so you just hear it there and it gives it crunch. it's a different texture, it's a thicker texture like instead of this one that has two extra notes in there, so a lot of us are contextual depending on the context that you're in and also of course the story that you're telling in your solo going back to the on the ballot, it might start here, but at the end it might be, so let's do something different, let's go home and make it pretty thick and lush and build up to that, you know, last night when you were playing Neil Young, you played to the old man I thought it was a great voice.

I just loved what you did with it, why that song is so interesting and worked so well the way you made it. I mean, it's what we were talking about at the beginning. like this emotional connection of me being like 14 going out and buying Harvest and discovering that record listening to her voice this this fragile voice that she has um being drawn to the performance and opening up strings on the guitar there we go, you know, the intro is so evocative man, look at my you know and then there's my D again um and it's like I want to play that I want to feel that on the piano and then as you go along and try to do those kind of nice little poses solve problems as a pianist because what I'm trying to do on that and I hope I can do it off the cuff, but I'll try to play the guitar part, which I'm sure is a bastardization, but it's something like this with this little melody in there and then I'll try to do its Melody while I'm doing it , so I'm doing something that they ask us to do all the time in Bach or whatever, playing figuration and Melody, two things that you put in. all together and you get this nice rich texture, I'm sure there's at least three different things going on in a pop tune.

You know, beautiful, beautiful, when you play these extended passages with just your left hand, you don't play it like a piano. you do it you do it like a classical pianist yeah, yeah, I think I would say that and, with all due respect to the stride tradition, I think there's something where I say I'm not going to mess with that because I don't have enough technique, someone I think he's really doing new things with Step is Sullivan, I don't know how much you, but he is. I'm really2020, you know, and then it faded away and then I sat there feeling sorry for myself for a while and I was like well how can I make this happen?

There was a chance to do some stuff in a studio with a guy you know wearing masks back in June in Amsterdam, so I started doing stuff with him, um and finally I got to New York and started doing it on pieces like that, you know. , and then some things Mark sent his tracks from home, Becka Stevens and some of the other vocalists, they just recorded them themselves if they had a decent enough preamp and all that. That's how the record was made, you know? But it's cool because I feel like it led me to another type of music.

I wouldn't have made music. I wouldn't have thought of some of the crazy things I'm doing. That allowed me to improvise in a different way and make a different record with a very different sound than I would have ever made if we were all in one room. The loop you took was off of Tom Sawyer, was he singing that part? of that, the world is the world is love, so, um, so I did it starting with one that I love. Now I want to play the real version of Tom Sawyer with Chris singing. lower him while his reserve of silent defense echoes the days what you say about his companies what you say about society catch the fog catch the fog catch the Myst catch the then there is the same sample of Luca brought back and now he has found his home in the melody, now all the sync stuff you do here, for example, the synth that went in there, it's a lot like the original for sure, review well, talk about your relationship with synths and because you use synths a lot , you use all the different ones.

Textures you're not a purist and as a pianist and things like that they use all different types of sounds. It's something you've always been interested in. You know, when I was a jazz snob, I should have been learning too. about Sin, you know, my thing with synchronization is that I, um, you know, talking about analog synthesis, you know, really working with creating sounds, that's what synthesizers mean to me, you know, It is the possibility that there is a poverty of knowledge that I just had. I haven't really understood that other big thing about John Davis, um, he's pretty skilled since then and there are a number of people who would be in range of something, but then he wouldn't be able to dial back in or you.

You know what that is, oh, that's it, you know the frequencies, you know, but what's going on here, you know, and then they would find the sound if I explained it a little bit, also midi, I don't know anything, so, do you? What are these new Prophets? The newer synth, some of them still have analogue value, but they are midi capable and that was useful for a lot of tracks here where we could sequence things with the sound with the oscillation within the midi to match. to something rhythmically that I had the idea but I would never have been able to figure out how to do it, you know, the troubleshooting of that, uh, John was great at that, do you know how to use any Daws or don't you do things like? that like Protools or anything else, you don't record in Protools, although you usually do, so I'm pretty old school, you know, in that sense, I have no control over that or the logic, you really know what I use. music writing software because it's convenient and what music software does it use, yeah, yeah, um and uh, but beyond that, you know my knowledge is pretty thin on that kind of stuff, well, Brad, if you can figure it out, you can figure it out. anything in particular.

The song I want to play is one of my favorites of yours, we talked about it briefly, this is Garden, the garden, you call it the B section, right, I guess, I guess so, and then the next one will be C. I guess so, because then there is another. a little long, yes, yes, the cesarean section for me is that there is a little interlude here, yes, the cesarean section is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard in my life. I think it's absolutely that weird, oh, the harmony, the melody, the form. that the phrases change is so satisfying oh, did this song just come from you starting with the synth sound and just making it up or did you actually have a melody in mind like this?

Yeah, actually, that's when I got this um. um, because that's not the um, that's not the benefit, I bought the other synth, the ob6 or ob8, ob8, maybe yeah, ob8, which is cool because Dave Smith and Tom Oberheim collaborated and did this, so which had this trippy sound that I didn't mess with that, maybe I took the filter off a little bit, but that was a premade sound that had this warbling oscillation and it made me want to play, so there were some melodies that were inspired by the sound of the synthesizer itself and then the vocal harmony, yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the things we were talking about with Hey Joe, you know, a Choral type voice, sings triatic, you know, it's so beautiful with all of them. the different suspensions and that and it goes for many, you know, that kind of movement, yeah, I love it, it's really, I can listen to it over and over, in fact, I've listened to it over and over, great, that's another record which came out in 2019.

I think more or less 20 2020 2019 I think you're doing, you're practically making a record a year or something like that, yeah, yeah, are these things that you're thinking about? You're like, okay? I'm going to make an album this year and I want it to be this type of album. Are you constantly thinking what am I going to do, what am I going to do next? I think there's this period with records especially. those that are kind of conceptual or where there's a gestation period where something is growing but I don't know what it is and then there's this bag of stuff that can take over a year before it starts getting into a studio, you know, and then suddenly it occurs to you that this could find a way and when that happens and how it happens, it's very exciting and mysterious, you know, the poet Randa Maria RKA.

I always come back, she spoke. about in these letters to a young poet um this young poet is writing to you know what creativity is you know and he speaks in German but he says that it is this type of pregnancy or gestation and birth so the idea of ​​the metaphor is that when something grows inside you, uh, when you're pregnant with what will be your creative growth, you don't really know what's going on there and then when it comes out, it's a surprise to both you and everyone else. of the world you're going to share it and what that pregnancy is if you were to try not to be mysterious about it, it's probably just this analysis of all these disparate things that aren't together in the At first glance, you know it's the s sound, uh Bach , you know Becca Stevens' voice, you know all this stuff and then they come together and then you get this record, so that's always really exciting because it happens that there's usually a moment where all of a sudden oh, this could be a thing, this could be being a record, how much involvement do you have in the mixing of a record?

Do you have someone to mix your records? Do you listen to them in the car? Is there any place that you think is your place? "Okay, yeah, this is good. I like this version of this. I mean, I always try to listen on a good you know, the good stereo setup that I have with two speakers, the way I've always listened to music, um, and also these days I try to listen." the MP3 that they're probably all going to be um, but on these particular projects John mixed everything and it was really his baby musically too when I worked with John Bryan it was and I've put it off, you know, John's genius, yeah and especially . with John Bryan was really her vision, um and I didn't always agree with her in terms of this very doctrinaire thing that she has with Reverb or the lack of um, but I understood that it was part of her whole sound, you know, with John.

Davis, I've been able to be a little bit more, have some input, but most of the time he's thinking on this completely different level just in terms of compression of the drum sound. I don't even know what question to ask, but then I'll do Well, this sounds like, oh, maybe more compression or, oh, use this microphone more, you know, for most of my Jazz Trio records. I have worked with an incredible engineer. I'm sure you know him, James Farber, who designed a lot. of my stuff, a lot of ECM stuff and uh, and there's not much to tell you, usually the rough ones already sound pretty good, you know, if you're playing with other people and they don't like his solo that he has.

It'll happen all the time right, hey, can I do another take of that? Well, I like my solo, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it happens, yeah, it depends on who the leader is, if it's your record, if it's my record, maybe I'll diplomatically say no. The solo sounded kind of cool, maybe you know, yeah, yeah, but I might pick for my solo if it's my record, to be honest, you know, it's a weird thing with ja Jazz records because you know you watch Tommy Flanigan on the case of Giant Steps. sometime, Coldron, I like my solo, yeah, tell me, let me have another chance.

I just saw this, you know, yeah, I mean, can you imagine? No, you know when I used to see Tommy Flanigan at Bradley's and Sweet Basil in the '80s when he first came to New York, he played Giant Steps all the time and he killed it. He had this great thing that he did with Trio because I think he said, I'm going to do this right for the rest of my life, you know, because he, you know. So it was a kind of happy Redemption. I always thought that being a leader in a jazz session like that is, um, you're trying to balance your personal interpretation, it's your melodies, yeah, and then the other people are trying to make them happy with what they're doing.

I mean, I will say that I've had this long-standing trio with Larry Grenadier on bass and Jeff Bard on drums and the cool thing about them is, from my perspective, when they have solos. They're all really good, yeah, and actually most of the time they don't complain, they're like, yeah, that one was good, that one's good too because it's true, you know they're particular. Larry is so solid all the time. maybe, you know, and by Jeff I mean they're very experienced, so they know to take an approach of maybe I'll do one approach, I'll be more simplistic and stick to this Motif idea rhythmically and then the next one. exploratory, I say you have two to choose from, so you usually do a couple of takes of each song, yes, usually two, no more than three, very occasionally, one is enough, let's not do another one because that and then the Records sequencing is that. great thing and the title for sure, yeah, yeah, the sequencing definitely, um, and I've leaned a little bit on Bob Herwitz at nuch for that, um, where I thought I had a sequence, I always have a sequence, I think, and then He said no, start with On this one he did it with Pat and I on the two albums we made, I generally didn't agree with him from the beginning, but for example, he had a different sequence for this album.

I did Highway Rider and Bob had the idea to Put This John Boy Song Up Front and I'm so glad he did it, but I fought with him for 2 days. I said no, no, I have something else we'll start with this heavy orchestral thing at the beginning and you know. but he was right, you know, so I have to ask Brad this, did you ever tell your kids that you have three kids that we talked about earlier? Have you ever said to your kids, hey, can I play something for you? Yes, and you should do that. true, almost never, actually, yes, because I don't want to drag him down, you know, I don't want to bore him, yes, yes, maybe it's ego, although in a different sense, maybe I don't want to be disappointed when I see that they won.

I'm not interested, I'm imagining I'm doing ego damage control beforehand, yeah, dad, whatever, you know I have to go, you know, no, but they're not like that, they love music. but um uh, it's cool, I'm just normal to them, I'm just one of many, you know, all these other things they hear, it's super cool, well, I had to ask Brad Brad, it's been so cool. It's a pleasure to have you here today. I know we've tried to do this two other times and couldn't. I'm very happy to hear it. Thank you for being patient. Yes Yes.

And uh, thank you very much. A pleasure. A pleasure. Thank you.