There is always something daunting hanging over anyone playing piano at New York's Village Vanguard. Whoever is seated at the keys is dwarfed by a photograph of the late jazz piano deity Tommy Flanagan playing on the same stage, and it must feel a little like playing in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. And yet a few photographs away from Flanagan's is a picture of 35-year-old pianist Brad Mehldau. Mehldau was there on the stage recently, playing to a sold-out crowd, and the sales of his recent CD, Day Is Done (Nonesuch) have been reassuring, at least for jazz, which comprises less than 3 per cent of the music industry--and that includes Kenny G.
Mehldau can have a touch so light, it seems in danger of melting into air. But he is also cannily percussive when he feels like it, giving Thelonious Monk a pounding or summoning his inner Keith Jarrett -- and this tendency has been spurred on by his trio's recent acquisition of the forceful drummer Jeff Ballard. In such moments, Mehldau's carefully rationed aggression turns repetitive, and he'll hammer away at the keys so relentlessly, in endless quarrel with the same note, that you just want to throw up your hands and surrender to let this ambitious fellow have what he wants. This approach is working for Mehldau's Gen X demographic. Yet unlike most of his fellow Gen Xers trying to make an honest living in jazz, he has a label, an international reputation, and a working trio.
After watching two sets on two different nights during his week at the Vanguard this winter, the formula behind the virtuosity became increasingly apparent. A slow and lyrical beginning with a classy block chords intro (Jerome Kern's "The Folks Who Live on the Hill" or Reed Evans and David Mann's "No Moon,” already crooned into posterity by Nat Cole), an up-tempo Cole Porter, and then some rock covers sure to produce a chuckle of recognition or two from the audience.
"Martha My Dear," The Beatles' dance hall-style ditty to Paul McCartney's sheep dog, isrendered as a baroque variation of the melody, which gets weirder, more intricate, and more complex with every chorus, while "She's Leaving Home" makes a peripatetic getaway. And on Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover," beginning with bassist Larry Grenadier's vamping groove, Mehldau comes up with about 5,000 more ways. Get on the bus, Gus. Make a new plan, Stan. Drop off the key, Lee. If Mehldau's version had lyrics, the names would be endless. And on a thrilling extended cadenza, Mehldau gets himself free.
Like any sensitive artiste, Mehldau feels above being pigeonholed, so when I tried discussing his covers of Radiohead, The Beatles, Paul Simon, and Nick Drake backstage before his second set at the Vanguard, negotiating the journalistic shorthand about pop covers proved to be an annoyance for him. He was too busy smoking cigarettes with his French girlfriend and figuring out where to place his Drake cover in the set.
"If these songs help younger people get into my music, then that's great," he told me. "But if it doesn't, that's cool, too. I really don't care."
Mehldau's indifference to his demographic seemed convincing as he and his girlfriend puffed away, and I scurried back to my seat, but when he broke into his cover of "Day is Done," the contrast between his own savvy rendition and Drake's tortured original was striking. Drake's song is the title track of Mehldau's latest Nonesuch release, continuing the Drake ardor evidenced on his previous CD, Live in Tokyo, which contained covers of Drake's "River Man" and "Things Behind the Sun," and the moody chords suited Mehldau's own brooding tendencies.
Drake, one of the legendary nut-job pop geniuses this side of Syd Barrett, recorded three albums of original material, played acoustic guitar and a little piano, and sang lovely self-hating ballads in a sonorous voice with a London lilt before dying of a (maybe) accidental overdose of antidepressants at 26. The tragic young Brad clearly loves the tragic young Nick; no surprise, since Mehldau did call his publishing company Werther music. But this Young Werther (unlike young Drake) has more than just sorrow -- he has marketing savvy, and when you compare Mehldau's "Day is Done" with Drake's, the virtuosity of Mehldau's version feels pretty well oiled.
On Drake's recording, you are hearing an achingly beautiful prelude to a suicide note --which his final album, Pink Moon, essentially was. Drake, too delicate and fey for this cruel world, had to be dead many years before Volkswagen discovered that the anguished title track to that album would make a neat car commercial. “Day is Done” is in D minor-- the saddest of all keys according to This is Spinal Tap -- and Mehldau begins his version moodily enough, with Jeff Ballard riding the cymbals to the abyss. But then when the melody is plonked by Grenadier and Ballard breaks into a kind of funky march, the effect seems more calculated than emoted. Mehldau scrunches his eyes and sits back in Olympian power over his instrument, but he does not appear to be breaking a sweat. Before the song, he takes a swig from a Starbucks cup, and if he wasn't doing product placement, it was a missed opportunity.
Starbucks has good musical taste, of course -- selling superb compilations with the cooperation of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Elvis Costello, artists who should figure in future Mehldau covers. Mehldau's sinuous journey with Drake goes down as easy as a mocha latte, but you have to wonder what the ferociously talented Mehldau would do if he were to really get those adept hands dirty. Otherwise, ultimately, what will it mean when the day is done?
David Yaffe is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University and the author of Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing, published in January by Princeton University Press.
