Brad Mehldau has never been keen on giving interviews. From his low piano stool, deeply bent over the keys, he seems to shield himself from the outside world. After the publication of the first volume of Mehldau’s memoirs, his media shyness becomes more understandable. Instead of sprinkling crumbs of information, the pianist chooses to describe in his own words what moves him as a musician and as a human being. Formation, Building a personal canon has become a painfully candid portrait of the genius musician as a young man.
Mehldau writes honestly, his self-criticism occasionally relentless. He analyses his motivations without falling into the anecdotal drinks-table language so often peculiar to musicians. Key moments pass by in different versions. First, Mehldau describes the actual incident and then reflects on its formative effect. Frankly, he opens up about all sorts of things the general public was not yet aware of. The musician did not grow up with his biological parents. Mehldau puts a positive spin on his adoption past: he felt welcome in his new family and he reveals that he was lovingly raised.
Still, his adoptive parents could not prevent young Brad from having a hard time at school. Because of his multifocals, he was nicknamed: ‘four-eyes’. It made him vulnerable and insecure, which actually exacerbated the bullying. “It really messed me up. Mostly because I didn’t get where the venom was coming from. What did I do?”, Mehldau still wonders 40 years later.
His skills as a pianist brought him out of his isolation. But that did not end the woes. He started searching for his sexual identity and had homosexual experiences with friends. When he ended those experiments, those ‘friends’ retaliated by chalking ‘Brad is a fag’ on the school wall and they spread slanderous stories about him. At the end of his high school days, he fell short of passing marks and fell prey to sexual abuse from the head of the school.
A new era dawned in New York when Mehldau became part of a prolific generation of jazz musicians in the early 1990s. He describes both his active and passive musical development. As a listener, he is an omnivore: he listens to classical, jazz of all shapes and sizes, and pop music. He sees a similarity between John Coltrane and Johann Sebastian Bach: both composers connect to God in their music.
Hilarious is the story about New York musicians using Wynton Marsalis’ records as frisbees. The trumpetist was far too conservative in their opinion. Mehldau could only make the choice between classical and jazz after studying the essay ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz’ by Theodor Adorno (1903 – 1969), whom he initially admired. This German sociologist, philosopher, musicologist, composer and literary critic compared jazz to what he considered superior Western classical music. In his essay, Adorno revealed that he had no aptitude for ‘swing’ and denied its value. Moreover, he wrote rather condescendingly about African-American traditions. “It was the end of my infatuation with ‘high’ culture – whatever the hell that meant,” Mehldau states.
Mehldau was looking for a style of playing that allowed him to bridge the gap between musical freedom and tradition. “A creative act is not a disavowal of tradition. It is an inquiry into something much larger than myself, something that was there long before I showed up with my shifting convictions.” With like-minded fellow musicians, he drew from a wider source than their predecessors. They did not limit themselves to jazz standards but, inspired in part by hip-hop artists, chose appealing pop songs.
The wounds of Mehldau’s childhood years hadn’t been healed when the pianist recorded his first records with Warner Records. The musician numbed the pain and emptiness he experienced with large amounts of drugs in increasingly heavy varieties. During this period, he lost several friends to overdose. In an attempt to kick the heroin, he switched to booze and then played so badly that saxophonist and bandleader Joshua Redman was forced to fire him as pianist. Mehldau joined David Sánchez’s band, whom he also horribly failed while recording an important album.
1991
A phone call from the record company president brought about the turning point in his life: whether the pianist wanted to report for a meeting. At Warner headquarters, he met not only his chief but also a huge delegation of friends, family members and fellow musicians. If Mehldau would get himself admitted to a rehab centre in Los Angeles to shake off his demons, Warner Music was willing to invest in a series of trio albums. “With the help of God who stayed with me all this time, I managed to get rid of my addiction,” Mehldau concludes the first part of his autobiography.
Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny, Larry Grenadier, Jeff Ballard, 2007
Brad Mehldau is married to Dutch singer Fleurine. Together they have three children. His varied oeuvre comprises at least 33 albums. Hopefully, the second volume of this memoir will appear soon.
Brad Mehldau – Formation, Building a personal canon, Part I. Equinox Publishing, Sheffield. 295 pages.