For listeners experiencing genres new to them, there's a certain difficulty
in critical judgment — doubly so when the genre has a dense and
deeply contoured past. Wide-eyed philistines could be blinded by an amalgam
of clichés; newcomers may ignorantly believe they have before
them fertile soil when all it represents, generically, is tilled and
trodden ground, utterly barren, devoid of new life. So too can the naïve
be lost amid a masterpiece, wondering if it is all this good, all so
productive, new and vivified; such a first experience sets standards
that are rarely transcended.
This is more or less the acknowledged background in the cliché "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." Ignorance
is a certain kind of comfort. Things appear; we like them or we don't,
no matter what the musicologist can trace for us. Who has time, after
all, to chase down all those back-catalogues?
I don't have that kind of time, or, well, that kind of money, so there's
a gaping hole in my collection where the jazz should be. Consequently,
I don't know much about jazz, but I know what I like. Brad Mehldau, to
take a strikingly coincidental example, I like. He doesn't sing — he plays piano, but not like your little brother or sister. He might play "Chopsticks" or "Greensleeves," but
you'd only know it by the slowly emerging fragments of a familiar melody.
Jazz, as Mehldau reminds us in the best possible way, is largely interpretive,
and not nearly as anxious nor insecure about it as lawsuit-happy rockers.
Jazz permits the improvising musician to justifiably and equally be labeled
a composer.
Mehldau's rendition of "Paranoid Android," for example, is the centerpiece
of proceedings here, and he all but claims the song for his own. Alone
on stage with only a piano (and an attentive, if hardly effusive, Japanese
audience) throughout this disc, Mehldau uses the freedom of the solo
form to salvage the best elements from Radiohead's original. He excises
the pap and distils the British band's contrived, pompous and almost
parodic multi-part prog-rock composition into an 18-minute masterpiece
of truly affecting and complex emotions. Where jazz reinterpretations
can often focus too much on the original's melody or, alternately, conceal
it beneath the weight of academic noodling, Mehldau's "Android" pulls
from the original the best melodic phrases and improvises around them.
Taking a good four minutes of intro before even dropping the first hint
of the original source, Mehldau glides effortlessly where Radiohead were
stilted and rigid; Mehldau explores tangential harmonic ideas where others
would simply follow the bouncing ball. In doing this, Mehldau gives the
song a wrenching beauty largely papered over in the original, overwrought
and encumbered as it was by its "Bohemian Rhapsody" rock-opera
shenanigans and aspirations. (Mehldau is seemingly taken by Radiohead's
music, having covered Kid A opener "Everything in Its Right Place" brilliantly
with his backing band on the Anything Goes record of 2004.)
Elsewhere, he slowly wins over an audience surprisingly reluctant to
applaud the opening tracks. As the adulation grows, so too does
Mehldau's presence at the piano. Wandering along the faultline between
jazz and classical music, Mehldau adopts and adapts his performance into
either melancholic late-night jazz-club mode or tuxedo'd concert-hall
performer (you know the scene: rigidly shaking his head, arched hands
dramatically springing back from the keys) within the space of a few
bars. Nick Drake's "Things Behind the Sun," for instance, is given a
beautiful reading that makes it sound like a Russian classical composer
marrying that country's rich chamber-music history to the American jazz
tradition. The clear melodies of Drake's vocal are transposed and, like
shards of sharp sunlight, they break through passages of frenetic, densely
melodic piano work. Through all of this, it still sounds much like the
deceptively simple folk song of Drake's Pink Moon.
In a stunning record stuffed with covers and only one original, Mehldau
chooses Drake's songs to bookend the album (the soft-voiced Brit lad's "River
Man" closes proceedings). Also reinterpreted by Mehldau are songs by
Thelonious Monk, George Gershwin (who, like Drake, comes up twice) and
Cole Porter. Such varied songwriters are brought together by the strength
of Mehldau's exquisite vision, each a welcome player in this potent game
of refiguring, reinterpreting and speaking to new audiences. It's rare
that the songs of Monk, Radiohead and Gershwin can share the stage so
effortlessly and without contrived, pretentious efforts at inter-generic/inter-generational "discourse." Evidently,
each is here because it contains a good tune, that main meal around
which Mehldau so expertly arranges entrees and desserts. To say this
is not to mention it despite his utter brilliance as an equivocal
pianist; it is to see that melody is what focuses Mehldau's musical vision.
And with a foundational vision so strong and vivid, one doesn't need
a map of jazz's terrain to know that Live in Japan is a towering
monument to all that's great in music.
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