One of the more intriguing developments in jazz of the ’90s has been the emergence of a school of bold young minimalists.
As if reacting against the hyper-virtuosity of the young lions of the ’80s, these players have taken pains to strip their music down to its essence. Headliners such as pianist Jacky Terrasson, singer-pianist Patricia Barber, drummer Leon Parker and others have strived to express profound ideas with comparatively simple, unadorned musical gestures.
Generally speaking, pianist Brad Mehldau shares this aesthetic philosophy, but he deepens it with elements of the European classical piano tradition. He has invented a somewhat quirky but thoroughly appealing musical vocabulary that distinguishes him from most of his under-30 keyboard brethren. He proved the point with his trio during Wednesday night’s installment of the Rising Stars of Jazz series, at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park.
Mehldau, of course, is hardly the first jazz pianist to draw inspiration, techniques, harmonies and voicings from the classics. In fact, the palpable influence of Claude Debussy upon Bill Evans, Darius Milhaud on Dave Brubeck and J.S. Bach on John Lewis are but a few precedents for the impact Robert Schumann obviously has made on Mehldau.
You could hear as much from Mehldau’s exquisitely Schumannesque treatment of the first work on the program, Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are.” The rapidly arpeggiated figures that swirled directly beneath single-note melody lines might just as well have come from Schumann’s “Arabeske” or “Kinderszenen,” but for the swing rhythms and American vernacular phrasings of the tune at hand.
Similarly, the broken-chord accompanying figures that Mehldau divided between both hands in his own “Madrid,” the ravishingly lyric tone he brought to his “West Hartford” and the sustained legato lines he spun in the standard “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” evoked a broad range of 19th Century romantic pianism.
But Mehldau obviously has studied the work of comparably individualistic jazz pianists, as well. Certainly the spontaneously conceived, free-flowing melody lines he offered in his composition “29 Palms” recalled the famous piano soliloquies of Keith Jarrett. So did the chromatic chord modulations and cantabile tone that characterized much of this performance.
Yet even as Mehldau incorporated this broad spectrum of musical influences, he expressed it with fewer notes and sparer keyboard textures than one expects from young jazz pianists on the ascent.
The prime example was Mehldau’s genteel treatment of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” with the pianist playing the melody line straightforwardly in the right hand and accompanying it mostly with basic triadic harmonies in the left.
The sheer simplicity of this version, which showed ample reverence for composer Sammy Fain’s original, proved disarming.
As the sole showpiece of the night, Mehldau and his empathetic collaborators (bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy) produced a dynamic version of John Coltrane’s “Countdown.”
Most striking was Mehldau’s extended opening salvo, which featured perpetual motion rhythms and telegraphically repeated chords recalling Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 7.
Few young jazz pianists would think of drawing upon such material, and fewer still could have done so as convincingly.
