Piano trio

I'm a great fan of jazz piano trios, such as the Brad Mehldau Trio with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy or Jeff Ballard, and the classic Bill Evans trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. But until today, I never realized that the first piano trio I ever got into was not a jazz trio but a rock trio: Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Consider the piano/bass/drums passages of "Take a Pebble," from their first album:

This was definitely the first such music I ever heard, several years before I got into jazz.

[I was listening to ELP this morning because of this post about ELP by Don Brown.]

Mehldau Redman Basel May 16 2010

Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman played as a duo at the Stadtcasino in Basel tonight. They opened with a Mehldau original called "The Falcon Will Fly Again," during which I was struck by how much Redman's playing has developed since I last since him early in the millennium. He was already very good, but his phrases and phrasing tonight were so much more fluid and individual then they had been back then. In contrast, I wondered if Mehldau had any more room to develop at all: I've seen him four or five times since I first saw him in a solo show at the Basel Art Museum in 1999 or 2000, and he's always been fantastic, so good that there's little room to develop. His playing on this first piece was fabulous, but for this diehard Mehldau fan, not very surprising.

But then they played "Monk's Dream," and Mehldau proved me oh so wrong! I've always loved the way he plays that tune, but he and Redman arranged it in such a way that its usual driving rhythm only slowly developed out of an almost rubato approach. In Mehldau's long solo, one stunning passage went into the stride piano that was where Monk originally came from, but a version of stride refracted through the combination of the 80 years of jazz history since its heyday and the classical chops that have always been Mehldau's forte. Absolutely stunning—yes, he has developed since I first saw him!

The other highlight of the show for me was their arrangement of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." They made it sound so wonderfully melancholy, only to have it explode into something like the power of rock and roll near the end of Redman's tenor solo (Mehldau had taken the first solo). I love how Mehldau turns "pop" into jazz just as wonderfully as his predecessors did.

Meeting a Man from the Motor Trade

I've long loved the Beatles song "She's Leaving Home," but I've also long been puzzled by the line "waiting to keep the appointment she'd made, meeting a man from the motor trade." The Wikipedia page on the song has lots of information about how it was written, but it does not saying anything about the significance of "the motor trade." Does "the motor trade" have any significance here? (Perhaps, as an American, I am missing some British slang?)

Here's Brad Mehldau's version of the song, in any case:

Whisky, by Ciaran Carson

Sometimes literature can make you thirsty. The late fifties and early sixties novels of Marguerite Duras (such as Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia) all made me want to get drunk on whatever the characters were drinking, even before I found out Duras was an alcoholic.

I don't recall ever reading something that made me want to get stoned or do other illegal counterfactuals. (Not that I was unable to find other reasons ...)

This one from Ciaran Carson's 1996 collection Opera Et Cetera made me want to drink some whisky, among other things (it also made me want to try to interpret it, but I'll leave it at typing it again to see how the lines feel under my fingers):

Whisky

Of how the life of water is distilled to liquid gold; how the water of
The Liffey becomes Guinness; how explosive cocktails take the name of Molotov;

How the wild mountain thyme blows around the blooming heather, and the perfumed smoke
Of poteen rises high into the azure sky; how turf is the conducive agent, and not coke;

How coke is crack, not heroin, nor smack; how marijuana is La Cucaracha,
Maryjane, or blow; how many States of mind there are in Appalachia;

How you turn into an insect overnight, or after-hours, from eating
Magic mushrooms; how the psilocybin got your brain and led to some 'Strange Meeting';

How the tongue gets twisted, how 'barbarian' is everyone who is not Greek;
How things are named by any other name except themselves, thereof I meant to speak.

While I was typing, the associations began to flow:

The wild mountain thyme brought to mind Penelope Houston, whose punky folk I loved so much in the early to mid nineties (shortly before I read this book for the first time, in September 96): she did a burning cover of that song.

Poteen made me think of Brian Friel's Translations, which I played a small part in and co-directed in Saarbrücken in 1994.

Turf made me thirsty for Laphroaig.

The Appalachian States of mind made me think of Brad Mehldau playing "New York State of Mind" as solo jazz piano. Far-fetched? I don't care!

Turning into an insect overnight? You know what I thought when I read that; you thought the same thing after all.

But after-hours made me think of the movie "After Hours", whose basic idea I would like to steal for my long unwritten tale "The Clerk," which started being pondered in the main Basel Post Office years ago.

For me, Strange Meeting is a tune by Bill Frisell I once began to write some words for.

barbarian is everyone who is not Greek: this idea always reminds me of Adorno's claim about lyric poetry after Auschwitz being "barbaric"—"not Greek"?

Perhaps this is all free association; perhaps this is "naming things by any other name except themselves."

Jazz for Obama

I suspect that New York City is full of people who are jazz fans and who plan to vote for Barack Obama. If you are one of them, kill two birds with one stone and get yourself down to the Jazz for Obama concert on October 1. A great lineup, wish I could be there! Mehldau! Lovano! Stanley Jordan! Hank Jones!

Brad Mehldau, Basel, October 26, 2007

For his second encore last night in Basel, Brad Mehldau began with some playing that sounded like "Mehldau does stride piano," his left hand managing to get into a stride rhythm while still doing what it does best: arpeggiating chords in rapid swirls of notes, rather than playing all the notes of the chord at once, as a standard stride rhythm would do. (Is there a term for that? Playing a chord "normally," so to speak, rather than with arpeggios?) Then out came the head: "Monk's Dream." And what a version followed: solo piano, first developing the bluesy stride playing, then becoming more like a ballad before moving into the swirling kaleidoscope of sound that is Mehldau's specialty.

That was one of the highlights for me. As Mehldau did not announce any of the tunes, there were only two other tunes I was sure about: Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind" (stately and elegant) and the final encore, "Mother Nature's Son," moving from beautiful highlighting of the melody to vary playful soloing. I was pretty sure I heard Radiohead's "Exit Music" in there, too.

Mehldau in Basel tomorrow night

As I mentioned a few months ago, I'll be getting to see Brad Mehldau solo in Basel tomorrow night. Here's Brad solo, the only video of him on youtube without either his trio or Pat Metheny! Unfortunately, this cuts off rather abruptly. Oh well.



"Dear Prudence" is a tune that also always makes me think of Jerry Garcia, who used to play such soaring versions of it with the Jerry Garcia Band.

Perhaps I should also mention that the duo CD Mehldau recorded with Metheny is beautiful.

Birthday coincidence

Listening to Brad Mehldau this morning ("How Long Has This Been Going On?" from Art of the Trio, Volume 5: Progression), with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy. I'm looking forward to his solo concert in Basel on October 26.

Last.fm is tracking what I listen to, and I was trying to fix something with the last.fm window, and I noticed that Mehldau was born on August 23, 1970—not the same year as me, but the same day.

Meaningless, of course, but no less touching in its own peculiar way.

"Im Verlauf meiner weiteren Beschäftigung mit den Skizzenbüchern und dem Leben Turners bin ich dann auf die an sich völlig bedeutungslose, mich aber nichtsdestoweniger eigenartig berührende Tatsache gestoßen, dass er, Turner, im Jahr 1798, auf einer Landfahrt durch Wales, auch an der Mündung des Mawddach gewesen ist und dass er zu jener Zeit genauso alt war wie ich bei dem Begräbnis von Cutiau." (W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz)

Aimee Mann on Sgt. Pepper's

I enjoyed Aimee Mann's article on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Just typing in the title is fun: what a great phrase.)

As I live with a seven-year-old Beatlemaniac (Miles), I've been listening to lots of the Fab Four for the past few years (he first turned Beatlemaniac when he was two, I think, with "Here Comes the Sun"). And one thing I agree with Mann (and others) about: SPLHCB is deservedly influential, but it also has some surprising weaknesses. The hit songs on it are brilliant, but the other tunes are only very good, even though many songwriters would kill to write even one as good. "She's Leaving Home" has been singled out in some of the commentaries I have read as a weak song, but all you need to do to hear how brilliant the music is is here Brad Mehldau play it on jazz piano.

I was surprised to learn elsewhere that "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" were supposed to be on the album, but were not put on it because they had been released as a single already.

Mehldau in Basel

Brad Mehldau will be playing with his trio at the Stadtcasino in Basel on Friday, October 26. As my friend Ulrich says, I am someone who likes to be enthusiastic about things, and Mehldau is one of the musicians I am most enthusiastic about!

So those of you who are in or near Basel: wanna go?