Brad Mehldau - "Formation" - An Appreciation

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‘Formation’ Review: Brad Mehldau’s Song in the Dark

The jazz pianist chronicles his early years, in which music was the bright thread guiding him through an often harrowing maze.

By John Check

May 12, 2023, Wall Street Journal 

“The recording opens metronomically, with eight repeated notes on a string bass, each pulling you in closer. The piano enters, then the drums. After playing the melody, a familiar and endearing Beatles tune, the pianist embarks on a solo of such easy funkiness that you wish it could last forever. Eventually the melody—what jazz musicians call the “head”—returns, a conventional sign that the performance is about to end. But the end is deceptive: bass and drums drop out, leaving the pianist, Brad Mehldau, to return to the register of his earlier improvisation and mine its territory for new delights. “Blackbird,” from 1996, was on the first recording following the completion of what Mr. Mehldau calls his “Bildung,” his formation.

Mr. Mehldau explores his formation as a musician and a man in this memoir covering the first 26 years of his life; a sequel is in the works. Now 52, the winner of a Grammy Award, a noted composer, a bandleader, sideman and solo player on a string of acclaimed recordings, Mr. Mehldau is one of the top pianists in all of jazz. He is also a vivid writer with a compelling story to tell, one of pain and suffering—one, too, of persistence, hope and faith.

Mr. Mehldau spent his boyhood in Georgia and New Hampshire before settling with his family in West Hartford, Conn. His mother encouraged his music-making and arranged for him to study with good teachers, one of whom, a hotel-bar headliner in Manchester, N.H., showed him, at age 7, how to be “spontaneously creative at the piano.” In loving detail, Mr. Mehldau recounts his early immersion in music, whether it was waiting by his bedroom radio for his favorite song to play or being transported at a local swimming pool by the latest hits of Fleetwood Mac and the Steve Miller Band. For him, at this time, music “imbued everyone and everything in front of my eyes with grace and some quiet, unknown purpose.”

As years passed, he found himself drawn to darker music, especially “The Wall” by Pink Floyd—music, “like a lonely siren,” that spoke to his burgeoning sense of loneliness. By the age of 13 he was becoming a “sensualist,” a thrill-seeker, smoking cigarettes and nipping drinks from his parents’ liquor cabinet. He did these things to cope with being bullied, and out of uncertainty about his sexuality. Even so, he continued to hone his music skills and expand the range of his tastes. (“I was lost after that solo,” he writes of the experience of listening to Jimi Hendrix’s live recording of “Machine Gun.”)

The good side of high school for Mr. Mehldau began and ended with music. He started to get gigs, which forced him to learn a lot of tunes at any tempo and in any key. The bad side was bad indeed. Though bookish, he was nonetheless a terrible student, spending his teens “in a cloud of marijuana.” He skipped so many classes that graduating, and with it continuing his music study in college, was looking doubtful. His way out was an unspoken deal with the devil—the high-school principal, a predator, who used Mr. Mehldau for his own sexual gratification.

New York City, the jazz mecca of the U.S., beckoned to Mr. Mehldau from his early adolescence. In 1988 he enrolled in the New School’s innovative jazz program, soaking up the influences of both faculty and classmates, absorbing the kind of subtleties—what he calls “depth of tone”—one gleans only from live performance. Mr. Mehldau learned “comping,” the harmonic and rhythmic support a pianist supplies during the solo of another musician, from the veteran bluesman Junior Mance. The teacher’s sense of swing was so strong that it pulled the student into its gravitational pull. (“That’s not something that can be taught with words,” Mr. Mehldau adds.) It was in New York that he met many of the young musicians with whom he would later collaborate, including the tenor player Joshua Redman, the drummer Jorge Rossy and the bassist Larry Grenadier. With the last two Mr. Mehldau recorded his career-making five-volume series “The Art of the Trio” (1996-2001).

“What a partisan, bickering bunch we all were when I arrived in Manhattan, aged eighteen,” writes Mr. Mehldau. He refers to the rift between students devoted to the approach of bop stylists such as Charlie Parker and Bud Powell and those drawn to a slightly later style, hard bop, pioneered by Horace Silver and Lee Morgan. Adaptable and versatile, Mr. Mehldau learned the importance of “toggling between styles.” He participated in his first recordings in the early 1990s, around the same time he performed his first extensive tour. The experience changed his career: “I began [the tour] as one person, musically speaking, and came back another.” It was, he recalls, “the beginning of my own style.”

Mr. Mehldau speaks of an inanition [lethargy or lassitude caused by a lack of energy] that beset him and other jazz musicians of Generation X in the early ’90s: the feeling of having missed out on the musical ferment of the ’50s and ’60s, when the likes of John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter reigned supreme. What more was there to do but pay “ritualized tribute” to the past? “The fear,” he writes of himself and others like him, “was that we lacked authenticity.” Mr. Mehldau meditates on this matter at some length, seeking guidance from writers such as Harold Bloom and Terry Eagleton, Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann. The language in this section bogs down at times, but what crystallizes in Mr. Mehldau’s mind is an important realization: In his own playing, he had to draw not only on the jazz music that was his inheritance but on all the other music that played a role in forming him—classical, prog rock, hip-hop, Americana.

The last part of “Formation” delves deeper into Mr. Mehldau’s addictions and his eventual triumph over them. There are harrowing accounts of failed attempts at sobriety. The deaths by overdose of two boyhood friends leaves him wracked with guilt: “I wondered why it had been them and not me.” On a job with the Joshua Redman Quartet, trying to quit heroin, he got so drunk that he was fired. He missed recording dates. Eventually his friends staged an intervention, the first of many. Still in his mid-20s, Mr. Mehldau was wearing out the patience of even his most loyal supporters. Gigs were canceled; his parents threw him out of their house; he was down to his last six dollars. At his lowest point, he was tempted “to just end it, to end everything.” Somehow, though, through the beginnings of faith, he chose to live. He went to L.A. to make another attempt at rehab, and this one stuck. Upon returning to the East, he formed his trio and his “real work” began.

Among the songs in Mr. Mehldau’s “personal canon” is “Blackbird.” He’s returned to it time and again, finding something new with each exploration. In a solo performance two years ago at Steinway & Sons Hamburg, viewable on YouTube, he adds a few delicately played high notes above the melody. Because of the finesse with which he plays them, they acquire a beautiful fragility, all the more so in light of Paul McCartney’s corresponding lyrics, “Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.” Readers of this poignant memoir will discover what Brad Mehldau learned to see during the long course of his formation.

Mr. Check is a professor of music at the University of Central Missouri.

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Appeared in the May 13, 2023, print edition.