Day Is Done - Brad Mehldau

Dec

25

Day Is Done - Brad Mehldau

≡ Category: 2000s, Post Bop, Reviews, Worth A Listen |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

WORTH A LISTEN

Rating:

On Day Is Done, Brad Mehldau pushes his penchant for intellectualizing jazz to the limit and beyond.

Day Is Done mostly (thank God) consists of covers. Once again, Mehldau shows his veneration for the Beatles and Radiohead.

His cover of Knives Out keeps the spirit of the original, but is far more frantic. Jeff Ballard’s drum skitters away, keeping pace with the shards of melody produced by Mehldau’s percussive attack on the piano. It works, in part because of the strong melody and harmonic structure of the original.

The same can be said for Martha My Dear. Mehldau filters the straightforward Lennon and McCartney tune through the prism of 20th century classical piano music. The song splinters into wildly divergent paths, but never entirely disintegrates, which is a tribute to Mehldau’s powers of concentration. The form of the tune is so strong that it is recognizable through almost any of Mehldau’s permutations, no matter how bizarre.

The problem comes when Mehldau tries to use the same methods on his own songs. He always swings, and individual runs are as scintillating as ever, but the impulse to endlessly deconstruct his music grows tiring, and even more so because his own themes aren’t strong enough to stand up under this kind of intellectual assault.

Mehldau is fond of shifting the melody from the left hand to right hand, using the shape of the melody in a different key, counterpoint, chopping up the bar in rhythmic bursts, and lots of other tricks. And that’s what they sound like after a while — tricks.

This works fine with something like Paul Simon’s 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover because it was a terrible song to start with. The more violence Mehldau does to the song, the better. But he completely destroys whatever poetry existed to start with in Lennon and McCartney’s She’s Leaving Home.

In short, Day is Done is only intermittently successful. Too often, Mehldau is overly concerned with expanding the possibilities of the piano trio within a jazz context, to the detriment of the tunes he is supposed to be interpreting. Another way of putting it is that it seems as though Mehldau is only using the tunes as a vehicle for his explorations, which seems a little egocentric and disrespectful to me.

Anyway, over the course of a CD, Day Is Done stops challenging and starts irritating. Brad Mehldau remains one of the most important pianists of his generation, but Day Is Done is not one of his finer efforts. Listen to it at your own risk.