They'renotmusic - Part 1: Brad Mehldau - Young & Foolish

I'd put Brad Mehldau on the short list of essential musical acts. He's somebody you owe it to yourself to see live at some point in your life. Non-jazz listeners find him immediately accessible because of his rocking sound and hip repertoire - his trademark tunes include ass-kicking covers of Exit Music (For a Film), Paranoid Android, Bottle Up and Explode, among dozens of others.

The fact that he covers cool shit isn't really all that impressive. Jazz, as a form is essentially all cover music, and for every truly brilliant jazz musician, there are about a billion that are doing nothing particularly interesting with their source material. This is where Mehldau separates himself from the rest of the pack. He breathes new life into every tune he covers, bringing out everything you thought was cool about it in the first place while at the same time filling in the spaces with delicate melodic flourishes.

Often he's content to play the forms straight, letting the music do exactly what it did in the original recording (see Bottle Up & Explode and Paranoid Android above). But he unleashes when he's soloing (see Exit Music), attacking the music from all kinds of different angles, toying with odd meters and phrase lengths, thundering through twisted dense harmonies and then rolling sublimely out into softer, liquid note pairings.


It's Mehldau's ear for harmony that kills me the most. Most people, when you hear them pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano play the expected. This chord goes into this chord and then into this. The best harmonists work on deeper levels. They understand that chords, composed of individual notes, flow into each other best when the individual notes are allowed their own life and direction from chord to chord. For any series of chord changes, there's a virtually limitless set of possibilities. The better you are at recognizing those possibilities the more intriguing your harmonies will sound. Whenever Brad is completing a solo, I find myself laughing in disbelief at his last four or five chords because he visualizes his chord changes so well and his trip from point A to point B always includes a few heart-stopping pirouettes along the way.

To draw an analogy, think of the best talker you know -- most of us here would pick Jordan or Octo, I'm sure. Whenever I talk to Octo, especially about something I'm feeling really emotional over (which is often), I find that when he reflects back to me, he always finds some way of retelling my predicament that captures all of the angst I was feeling when I said it, but with all of the humanness and love and innocence I wish I knew I had. He says exactly what I'd just said, but he says it better, funnier, sadder, more poignant, all at the same time. That's Brad Mehldau's playing, right there.


Young & Foolish was written by Albert Hague for the musical Plain and Fancy (I've never heard of it either). It's about making drastic and stupid decisions with the bullheadedness only a teen could have. It's a particularly relevant song to Mehldau, a one-time heroin addict.

It begins with a free-time exploration of the different harmonic areas of the song and when it kicks into its main groove, it proceeds at a slow, shambling pace, giving Mehldau tons of room for mid-phrase decorations. It ends as it begins, with another free-time exploration, but something's different this time. His playing is more urgent, more anguished. He builds to a pulsing, constant 16th note climax and then at its peak, he floats out like a feather back into a rephrase of the main melody. His final phrase drifts up to the highest keys, the notes getting weaker and more distant. It's like just for a moment at the end, we've opened up a music box we haven't opened since we were 6 and we realize, with a lump in our throat, how much promise we had then, before we were humbled by the mistakes and the misplays of our later years.

The saddest piece of music I know.