Brad Mehldau, Bravissimo!

Oh, the indescribable joy of jazz festivals! I've just come home from a tremendous performance by the Brad Mehldau Trio at the Vancouver Centre for Performing Arts. The venue was perfect, and the crowd eager to clap and make noise after every single solo. Mehldau was very cool at his piano, keeping the rhythm by sliding his shoulders from side to side...his hands dancing over the ivory keys as he glanced occasionally at bassist Larry Grenadier.

There is a certain air of reverence at jazz festivals that has always surprised me...it feels as if the audience acknowledges that jazz musicians are a different breed, magicians that have a superior level of understanding about music. The stage becomes an altar of improvisation, in which creation occurs every instant and the sound is indescribably authentic. If you've lived through a 10+ minute piano solo, where the suspense grows with every note as you realize the music can take any direction, you might understand what I'm trying to say.

Back to Brad. They started off with a Thelonious Monk masterpiece. Then I believe they played a Coltrane song (please correct me if I'm wrong), and an Ella Fitzgerald classic. The common denominator in these songs was Brad Mehldau's incredible ability to improvise...to simply sit in his piano, feel the sounds coming from Jeff Ballard's drums, and reinvent songs that have been going around for decades.

After the fourth piece, Mehldau suddenly grabbed the microphone to tell us its story. He told us he dreamed the song while watching the movie "Easy Rider" on an airplane. He said his song was an imaginary eulogy that would be delivered by Wyatt (Peter Fonda) to George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) after his death. Priceless!

Then, unexpectedly, the trio began playing Sufjan Stevens' "Holland"! They started slowly, softly, in that very melancholy Sufjan mood...and then picked up the pace, stopped for a couple of solos, and suddenly bang! Holland appropriated by Mehldau!

And like a true maestro, Brad Mehldau saved the best for last. Yes...as you might have expected, he treated the audience with a Radiohead cover. (I must confess that the first Mehldau song I ever heard was his version of "Paranoid Android", about 5 years ago. I bought his "Largo" album and became an instant follower. One of the reasons why I wanted see him tonight was to hear one of his Radiohead covers). Fortunately, on this beautiful night in Vancouver, Brad Mehldau surprised the audience by finishing his performance with a magnificent version of "Exit Music (for a film)"!

I left my seat (orchestra, T-30) humming the last song and thinking that, although I adore the unpredictability of jazz (and the beauty of trying not to get lost in every song, thanks to my ADD), there is something inherently attractive about listening to an alternative version of a song you know by heart.