Brad Mehldau and Pat Metheny
Carnegie Hall
Wednesday, 11 April, 2007
Whoever is responsible for the pairing of Mehldau with guitarist Pat Metheny should be given a medal, or a bonus if sales figures are to be believed. The second CD from Metheny Mehldau, a quartet recording featuring Mehldau’s long-time trio members Larry Grenadier (bass) and drummer Jeff Ballard, was released in March. The musicians are now in the middle of a hectic US tour. I had the pleasure of witnessing them in action last week at Carnegie Hall.
While admiring Brad Mehldau’s deep understanding of the jazz tradition, extraordinary musicianship and technical facility, his improvising often left me cold and for a few years I could not listen to him. His music seemed to unfold in a realm that was increasingly cerebral, leaving my heart trailing in his mind’s wake.
Despite the risks of a guitar-piano combination, in Pat Metheny Mehldau seems to have found a balance of head and heart.
The two headliners walked on to the enormous Carnegie Hall stage, bowed, and began. The first song was Mehldau’s composition “Unrequited”. Metheny made the melody his own, his loose contemplative approach the perfect counterpart to Mehldau’s more tentative, formalist approach. Mehldau’s suit and shirt contrasted Metheny’s striped t-shirt, black jeans and sneakers, the musicians’ choice of clothes reflecting their different but complementary styles.
One of several highlights of the night was the third song for the duo, Metheny’s composition “Make Peace”, for which he switched to acoustic guitar. Mehldau’s accompaniment was tender but very powerful, in that there was a potent sense of what he was holding back. He made frequent use of his left hand to play melodic phrases, often with a bluesy inflection, keeping the rhetorical flourishes in his right hand to a minimum. This gave Metheny the necessary space to take adventurous melodic flights, and the two slowly built up to a powerful joint interpretation of the final chorus.
Immediately after this astonishing duo performance, Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard joined Metheny and Mehldau on stage. With their arrival the tempo picked up sharply. It’s a joy to watch musicians so aligned with each other; on the first quartet number, “A Night Away”, their tight playing and condensed energy created an expansive, soaring wave of sound.
Grenadier’s evocative playing, informed by melody and history, remind me of Lloyd Swanton. Soloing, both musicians keep driving the momentum of the entire song forward, no matter what interesting musical detours they take along the way.
The repertoire was masterfully programmed, reflecting these musicians’ combined decades of experience in live performance. In the more than two hours of playing the duo and quartet ranged from vibrant and anthemic to pensive and delicate. The years of Grenadier’s and Ballard’s playing together (check out their work with Mark Turner in the trio Fly) is evident in every groove and mood.
The concert peaked as the band played behind the guitarist’s solo on “Ring of Life”, a Metheny composition from the first CD. Long single notes appeared in musical space as if stung from Metheny’s fingers, then floated over the chords like wisps of cloud. The band gradually built complex layers of sound, each musician responding to Metheny’s wild imaginative solo flight and each other, to an intense conclusion and satisfying release.
Inevitably, the translation of improvised music to a concert hall setting ensures something will be lost. Despite the wonderful acoustics of the renovated Carnegie Hall, the musicians looked engulfed by the massive stage. But this is a quibble. For $66 I heard more than two hours of musicianship and improvisation of the highest level, and witnessed the intense possibilities of music that combines the head and the heart.
Virginia Lloyd is an Australian writer and editor based in New York.