Metheny Mehldau - Pat Metheny/Brad Mehldau

Aug

26

Metheny Mehldau - Pat Metheny/Brad Mehldau

≡ Category: 2000s, Highly Recommended, Music Reviews, Post Bop |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING

Rating:

When I listen to Metheny/Mehldau (released on Nonesuch Records), the first thing that comes to mind is the piano/guitar duets of Bill Evans and Jim Hall, and that’s not to suggest that Pat Metheny sounds like Jim Hall or that Brad Mehldau sounds like Bill Evans. They do not. But the ethos of the collaboration is the same.

A great deal of care has been taken to balance the instruments. Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau approach the material and the date as equals. There is no ego here. Neither one tries to play over the other. Instead, there is obvious respect. The depth of the collaboration here is astounding, a true meeting of the minds.

Brad Mehldau steps up his game for this collaboration. There is none of the dithering and academic fussiness evident in his Art of the Trio series. Instead, you have the muscularity of his work on such dates as Largo and Anything Goes.

Likewise, we get the incisive Pat Metheny of The Way Up and his collaborations with Michael Brecker, McCoy Tyner, and John Scofield, not the namby Pat Metheny of his earlier efforts with his own group.

As if that weren’t enough, most of the tunes on Metheny Mehldau seem to have been written expressly for the date. We don’t get the usual lazy rehashing of the collaborators’ greatest hits. I am only familiar with one of the tunes, Pat Metheny’s Say The Brother’s Name. And all of the new tunes are good! It’s truly an embarrassment of riches.

Brad Mehldau’s Unrequited starts out the date, and it’s a good name for the tune. It’s full of familiar melodic turns and chord progressions, but they somehow never resolve. The tune just keeps shifting and cycling, going nowhere beautifully. Metheny nails the longing implied in the title, although Mehldau’s dominant rhythmic pattern, a sort of jittery, fragmented 3-3-2 Latin beat, seems a little academic for the material. Still, it makes for an interesting contrast with Metheny’s approach.

The next tune, Metheny’s Ahmid-6, has a characteristic loping rhythm. The chord progressions travel in unexpected directions, but with a minimal amount of altered chords and dissonance. Even without a drummer and bassist, Metheny and Mehldau have no trouble making the material swing.

Bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard, from Brad Mehldau’s working band, join in on the explosive Ring of Life. Once again, the influence of hip hop has reached into jazz. You can hear it in Ballard’s drum patterns, which owe nothing to traditional jazz. Mehldau contributes off center chord clusters which tend to incorporate major 9nths with no dominant 7th while Metheny gives us the melody. It’s a really cool concept. Mehldau has the first solo, maintaining the form of the tune with his left handing stabbing away, while letting loose with blistering single note runs with his right hand. But it’s not all scales. Sometimes Mehldau with stutter on one note. Other times he’ll give us brittle arpeggios. But all of the elements are integrated flawlessly. Metheny drags out his guitar synthesizer for his turn in the spotlight. He’s a little too fond of ending his phrases with upward glissandos for my taste, but you can’t argue with his bebop lines, which are as scintillating as anyone’s in the business. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. From his humble beginnings, Metheny has developed into a monster player.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The date has lots of variety. It’s got barnburners like Ring Of Life, ballads such as Summer Day, but it’s all rendered with consummate taste and not a little bit of fire. The duets are models of sensitivity and selfless collaboration, while the group efforts truly rock. Metheny Mehldau is everything that you could hope for in a collaboration between one of a handful of great jazz guitarists working today, and one of the most important pianists to emerge in recent years.

There is one slight problem with Metheny Mehldau, if you can call it that. The music on this album is so rich in ideas and so dense in terms of execution, that it’s hard to digest in one sitting, in spite of it’s accessible nature. After a while, you might stop actually hearing what the musicians are doing. Which is okay. Metheny Mehldau functions perfectly well as background music. It’s just that, if you really want to get the most out of the music, it might be a good idea to just listen to a couple of songs at a time, so you don’t get overwhelmed.