Brad Mehldau at the Knitting Factory: Teardrops,
black wreaths, purple fields.
"August
Ending" played more or less the usual Brad Mehldau calling
card, a black wreath surrounding a teardrop on a purple field. But it
was only the first number, and he pretty much dashed it off for auld
acquaintance sake, not that he wasn’t painfully sincere.
Before you knew it, though, the great blue hope was
playing something that sounded a lot like jazz. And the full house at
the Knitting Factory, too young to be digging this stuff, loved it
anyway.
There had been a long, dirge-paced treatment of "Alfie,"
the phrases so distended as to seem empty or at least watered down.
Bassist Larry Grenadier and a drummer struggled to keep the music from
becoming shapeless; they succeeded but just barely.
The mood lightened somewhat with a Brazilian piece, a
samba or a bossa nova that was more wistful than sad, and then came
Thelonious Monk’s "Skippy."
Now, over a good old fashioned Basie-like four,
Mehldau laid his asymmetrical within asymmetrical phrases, Monk on top
of Monk, in the cheerily expert style of any man who has found his
groove. As his improvisational prowess fed on the smooth tempo, Mehldau
became more and more the jazzman, dropping in a familiar fragment like
"Lester Leaps In" from time to time.
There was even a drum solo. The crowd went wild or at
least non-mild.
Cheerily expert improvisational prowess...
The
evening’s main course was
next, prepared by a long and not uninteresting Granadier solo on his
acoustic bass, while Mehldau comped and caught his breath after all that
blowing. The pianist eventually joined in, building an ever larger
structure with abstract phrases; but they were phraes that seemed to
have become more songlike, as though dyed by the preceding blues pool.
Mehldau found little niches to explore and concocted
gewgaws to amuse the audience, throwing in an occasional polyphonic
passage and treating the room to an extended exercise for the left hand
that progressed rapidly and even had a little boogie woogie in there.
It was the work of a time-hardened improviser who knew
just what to make of the inadvertent, and this too brought thrilled
applause.
So now the ear was ready to accept another superslow
tempo, of the Shirley Horn or Ray Charles variety, because now its
confidence had been won. "Someone to Watch Over Me" brought the
evening’s threads together, the melancholy woof and the jazz warp, into
a garment that was splendid indeed.
The evening's threads are brought together.
