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[Giant Steps]
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Modern moods
Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau go ‘contemporary’
BY JON GARELICK

Two of jazz’s most contemporary young musicians recently released their most contemporary-sounding CDs, yet what "contemporary" means today is far removed from what it meant in the days of bebop, the "new thing" avant-garde of the ’60s, or the jazz-rock fusion of the ’70s and ’80s. Saxophonist Joshua Redman’s Elastic appears to be yet another variation on the jazz organ trio, which has come back into vogue with the advent of the jam-band scene. Pianist Brad Mehldau, who’s best known for his work with his acoustic trio with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy (he also played for several years in Redman’s quartet), has come out with Largo (both are on Warner Bros.), an album laced with rock, funk, and drum ’n’ bass beats and sporting an expanded palette that includes woodwind choruses and various electronics.

What’s most different about the two albums, though, is not so much the product as the process. In the past, these musicians have relied mostly on jazz’s audio-vérité approach to recording. Much of the work in Mehldau’s now five-volume "Art of the Trio" series is taken from live recordings at New York’s Village Vanguard. As Redman puts it, "As a jazz musician, you rehearse the band, you do your gigs, you go into the studio, you roll tape, you play together, and that’s it."

For Elastic, on the other hand, not only did keyboardist Sam Yahel go beyond Hammond B3 organ to a variety of electric keyboards, but Redman also used various effects with his saxophones and even overdubbed a few parts. Mehldau, for his part, insists that everything on his album is "live," with no overdubs. The difference from his other work is in the production by Jon Brion, a singer-songwriter who’s also worked with Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, and the eels. Mehldau had met Brion at LA’s singer-songwriter haven, Largo, for which the album is named. Aside from bringing in strings and woodwinds, and various studio musicians like legendary rock drummer Jim Keltner, Brion supplemented the studio sound with various electronics, doctored the strings and soundboard on Mehldau’s piano in the manner of one of John Cage’s "prepared" pianos, and achieved other tricks in the final mixing and editing.

Although liberated by studio technique, both Redman and Mehldau were conscious of wanting to maintain a limit on where and how far their projects would go into the world of pop production values. "One thing I learned from the whole production process," Redman told me over lunch when he was in town to promote the disc, "was that even though I went further with this record than I have with any other record, less is still more. There was a point at which a lot of these songs sounded much denser than they do now. There was a period where I tried everything, and I realized that basically most of the best stuff is what happens naturally, what happens live. And it’s a matter of augmenting little things and doing it tastefully."

Mehldau credits Brion with keeping Largo focused. "When you’re in the studio, you have a lot of options," he explains on the phone from his home in upstate New York, "but they’re not all good, so it’s great when you have someone who has a really strong point of view and not just, ‘Wow, we’ve got Pro Tools, we can go apeshit!’ " Brion’s attitude, he says, "is pretty analog." Aside from a Midi adapter for one of the three acoustic pianos in the studio, Brion used analog tape and instruments "really from an earlier era in rock," like the Chamberlin keyboard on Mehldau’s blending of the bossa chestnut "Wave" with the Beatles’ "Mother Nature’s Son." The rockist noise fest "Sabbath" is credited to drums and "distorto piano through Leslie [speaker] with whammy pedal."

Mehldau’s album is in fact the more radical of the two, and for fans of his trio records it will come as the bigger shock. Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy are still here, but on some tracks there are as many as three drummers. The drum ’n’ bass and occasional rock rhythms are stiffer than the free-floating three-way rhythmic conversations on Mehldau’s trio albums — an organic ensemble cohesiveness that’s earned him comparisons (often to his annoyance) with the legendary original Bill Evans Trio. And Mehldau concedes to having written more simply in order to accommodate what might unfold in the studio.

Yet all the hallmarks of his musical personality are here: the lush romanticism in his harmonic reach, the virtuoso independence in both hands, the melodic invention. Those strengths go hand in hand with a tendency to overindulge pet ideas or carry some romantic notions to the point of being saccharine. In the opening "When It Rains," his piano melody floats in on a wave of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons before Matt Chamberlain’s hip-hoppish beat enters and the tune develops to near-toothache sweetness. But it isn’t long before Mehldau is breaking up the melody with staggered melodic fragments and tugging at the key with little chromatic tangents. Radiohead’s "Paranoid Android" gets a sectional development of sonata-like complexity and detail. Mehldau’s "Dusty McNugget" has a pop single’s hookiness — a simple riff-based eight-bar phrase over a loose rock beat from Chamberlain and Keltner with a lovely horn-enhanced, Beatle-esque bridge (to my ear, "Black Bird").

At times Mehldau flirts with lounge exotica, playing vibes throughout "Wave/Mother Nature’s Son" as well as "You’re Vibing Me." But even when the music is tempting pop’s cheesiest inclinations, he’s always up to something. "You’re Vibing Me" moves from mallets to a piano that sounds as if it had been recorded in the next room — little fits of double-time runs float in from the distance before Brion brings the keyboard back up in the mix. On "Free Willy," an eerie, folkish, lone string melody vies with agitated drum ’n’ bass rhythms and a marimba-like percussion that Brion created by treating the lower register on Mehldau’s piano strings with putty. (In one passage, I’d swear some ghostly cycling piano chords are directly out of the opening of Das Rheingold.) Largo flirts with extremes without ever going soft, or soft-headed.

Indeed, one thing both albums share is an affinity for pop but with jazz’s depth of improvisation. The affliction of the jam-band scene is that it gets your booty shaking but there’s nothing for your head — instrumental noodling over two-chord vamps wears itself out pretty quickly. Keeping things interesting has been the challenge for anyone who wants to create instrumental music with the accessibility and immediacy of pop.

Redman avoids the pitfalls of the jam-band blues with arrangements that never settle for running-in-place soloing. (For the record, he insists, "We’ve never seen this as a jam-band project. We’re three jazz musicians — hardcore, modern, mainstream acoustic jazz musicians who have chosen to bring in these other sounds and styles.") Fans of his live shows know that he never fails to build narrative drama into his pieces, and his arrangements do that here. Not that the album doesn’t have its one or two-chord vamps ("I love vamps"). But listen to how the opening "Molten Soul" builds up from an insinuating syncopated repeated Yahel bass line (a figure that Redman echoes on tenor later in the piece). The pop-like tune has Redman, Yahel, and drummer Brian Blade jacking up the rhythms through a number of variations, playing with dynamics (Yahel’s swelling Hammond-B3 is crucial here, as it is throughout the album), clearing some space in the center of the piece for some spare, free-tempo explorations. Redman plays call-and-response with himself in overdubs, one tenor spread across the center of the mix, other horns answering from up in the chorus. His tenor riffing gets more furious as he kicks in his effects unit, which doubles his sound several intervals higher or lower. The tune goes out on a full chorus of horns and organ chords.

Ecstatic isn’t perfect. Yahel occasionally goes for a kind of cloying whistling effect with one of his keyboards (it sounds a little bit like the music on the closing credits of Jack Horkeimer: Star Gazer, where I like it better). And I don’t love every tune. But at his best, Redman, like Mehldau, uses pop idioms and effects as the fuel for real jazz, having his cake and eating it. The jumpy angular line of "Jazz Crimes" could come right out of the Steve Coleman/Dave Holland book. He has Yahel plays some gospel piano for "Can a Good Thing Last Forever"; "The Birthday Song" builds from a stormy free passage to straightforward folk rock. At times, his doubling effects with soprano sax and some of the scales he employs as well as Yahel’s overamped wah-wah clavinet recall first-rate Weather Report. And Blade is a marvel at every turn: the day I talked with Redman, he and his band played at the Virgin Megastore, and in an extended sequence of "fours," Blade’s cat-and-mouse with the beat continually cracked up the audience — and the bandleader.

NEITHER REDMAN NOR MEHLDAU is out to sound "contemporary" for its own sake. Much has been made of the way that jazz musicians rely on the "standards" of American popular song from the first part of the century because nothing in modern pop affords them the same mix of accessible song form and sophisticated harmony. Redman’s 1998 Timeless Tales (For Changing Times) mixed the likes of the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin with Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan, and Prince. And Mehldau has covered Nick Drake as well as Radiohead. But even Redman says, "There’s been too much preoccupation among jazz musicians trying to record the popular songs of the day. If you’re not hearing it, and it’s not coming from a creative place, it’s not going to work."

Mehldau concludes, "Whatever attracts me to a Radiohead tune or a Beatles tune is kind of the same thing that attracts me to a Gershwin tune or Schubert. If I had to critique my own playing and say what the success has been and what’s made it hopefully relevant to an audience now and not just a study in the past, it’s not so much that we’re playing a contemporary tune that was written in the last 10 years, or 30 years, but what we’re doing when we play that tune and how we manage to improvise on it. Because that’s what was so revolutionary about Coltrane when he played ‘My Favorite Things.’ It wasn’t that he was playing this tune that Julie Andrews sang, it’s that he was tearing it out a new asshole and making it totally this spiritual thing that came from his very specific musical world."

Joshua Redman’s Elastic Band plays with the John Scofield Band tonight, October 10, at the Berklee Performance Center; call (617) 228-6000. The Brad Mehldau Trio plays Jordan Hall this Saturday, October 12; call (617) 931-2000.

Issue Date: October 10 - October 17, 2002
The Giant Steps archive
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