Irony in the Earlier music of Brad Mehldau

For more than a decade, Brad Mehldau has been among jazz’s top players and although many cannot decide whether his music’s chamber-like maturity and intellectual density represent the next great paradigm or merely a bloated excess of bourgeois aesthetics, there can be little doubt of his place among the contemporary jazz elite.[1] Primarily with the help of bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy, but also as a soloist, Mehldau has established himself as the current generation’s most high profile and accomplished pianist. His work is noted for its contrapuntal textures, use of asymmetric meter, total independence of left and right hands, his classical influence and a moody, meditative decorum. Even more idiosyncratic are his signature appropriations of unlikely composers, such as English rock band Radiohead as well as the late English folk singer and guitarist Nick Drake, the choices of whom clearly reflect the dark, reflective streak that characterizes much of Mehldau’s work.

Drake’s composition “River Man” is illustrative. Set in a moderate but restless 5/4, the chord progression begins with a motion from C major to C minor, immediately followed by a turn towards Ab via the applied half-diminished chord. Example 1 shows a summary of the main chord progression along with Drake’s lyrics. The troubling subject matter expressed through parallel major-minor and I-bVI relationships provides ideal fodder for Mehldau’s approach to jazz.[2] Most important at this point, however, is to acknowledge Mehldau’s appeal to a shadowy scepticism.

Bill Evans and Brad Mehldau

As the white leader of a piano trio, Mehldau has courted the assumption that Bill Evans served as a primary influence.[3] This initially seems a logical move; in addition to their being white and their characteristic introspection at the keyboard, they both battled heroin addiction. But it nevertheless remains problematic, a point Mehldau does not hesitate to take up, writing in 1999 that, “The constant comparison of this trio with the Bill Evans trio by critics has been a thorn in my side.”[4] Before embarking on other weightier topics in jazz historiography, Mehldau’s invective goes on to assert that comparisons between the two are based on nothing more than a few biographical facts and racial tropes. Yet the specious claims that Bill Evans was a strong influence or, worse still, that Mehldau is nothing more than an Evans epigone, point beyond even Mehldau’s own plea for creative space; discernible in the work of each pianist are two distinct Weltanschauungen. This difference, moreover, suggests a path towards a deeper understanding of Mehldau’s approach to playing and composing.

The worlds evoked by the two pianists are obviously similar in many respects, largely owing to their polished, classical sensibilities and use of the piano trio format. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and their respective beliefs, so to speak, in the material they play begin to diverge. Evans’s performances involve a sincere and univocal transference of meaning or affect. For instance, when Evans plays such tunes as “Some Day My Prince Will Come” or “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” he appears interested in transmitting the emotional content found in the tune as it existed prior to Evan’s coming to it, albeit in the jazz idiom. Hence, although Evans, the consummate jazz virtuoso, elevates these lighter, more frivolous, even child-like tunes to a much higher artistic level, absent is any trace of self-consciousness of the irony of such an act in a turbulent and troubled world. This ethos pervades Evans’s entire oeuvre, yet despite the pain of his chemical dependencies and tragic personal life, his art resolutely presents a unified vision—namely, one that includes happy endings, Broadway charm and a sincere commitment to the transparent beauty of the American popular song. On his approach to jazz, Evans would say, “Especially, I want my work—and the trio’s if possible—to sing. I want to play what I like to hear. I’m not going to be strange or new. If what I do grows that way naturally, that’ll be O.K. But it must have that wonderful feeling of singing.”[5]

A call for a kind of jazz monody, Evans’s comment is unlike not the Rousseauian aesthetic, which suggested that even instrumental music, despite its speechless character, should nevertheless seek to objectify concrete affects or emotions in an unambiguous manner, imitating the passions so perfectly expressible with the human voice. [cite Essay][6] As Evans himself wrote, “You try to express a simple emotion—love, excitement, sadness …”[7] When hearing Evans play, one cannot escape the emotional evenness of his performances. It is very much the case that each performance embodies one, or at most only a few, emotional states or ideas, none of them particularly contrasting one another. Additionally, one gets the feeling that throughout Evans’s work there hovers sincerity, under which the emotion or affective state being conveyed is not interrogated or suspected of falsity; everything is how it seems in Evans’s world.

Brad Mehldau’s performances, especially of standard or at least familiar tunes, on the other hand, conjure a much more self-conscious, uncertain and emotionally turbulent atmosphere. Rarely content to reproduce meaning or emotions at face value, Mehldau always interrogates standard tunes that aren’t his own, just in case that deep within them lies the potential for another mode of expression. His 1997 performance of Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here” jettisons the original character of the tune in favor of a rendition fraught with desolation. Typical of Mehldau’s earlier style is this type of ironic approach, which is related to some we will pursue later. Mehldau is interested in capturing something paradoxical in something apparently as simple as a standard tune. In explaining his performance of the standard “Young at Heart,” which begins by coaxing a playful texture out of the piano alongside an innocent-sounding music box before sealing off such innocence in a prolonged fit of Sturm und Drang, Mehldau gives insight to his early approach to standards:

That was an idea I got from seeing a guy named John Bryan who performs here in LA … a singer-songwriter who does all sorts of crazy things like that within his performance. I saw him use music boxes and a whole bunch of other things to create this kind of soundscape. And then he went to the piano and on top of this whole thing he had created with music boxes and guitar feedback and lots of other stuff, he sang “When You Wish Upon A Star.” It was exactly what I was talking about … there was this sense that “When You Wish Upon A Star” took on this whole other darker level. That really blew me away.[8]

By way of briefly highlighting this idea of dark standards in contrast to Bill Evans, consider the opening moments of Mehldau’s performance of Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time is Here” heard in the cartoon A Charlie Brown Christmas, the chart to which is given in Example 2. Example 3 is a transcription of Mehldau’s solo introduction, followed by the first eight bars of the head, when the rest of the trio enters.[9] The melody is of course recognizable and in the customary key of F major, but the accompaniment has nearly frozen to death. The left hand’s second note, Db, is obviously a reference to the original’s Eb7/9/#11 but the bass simply hasn’t the will to progress. At 2, the piercing Bb-Ab sonority sets up the dramatic A-F gesture, [10] and the music can finally warm itself by the fire as the A-natural and F melt into Db and Gb harmonies. Rich chords built mainly from fifths and fourths follow, semi-tones banished from the hearth.[11] Yet the air of loneliness and frostbite returns at 3 as Mehldau works towards the head of the tune. Once the band has entered, Mehldau continues on his Winterreise. Traditional lyricism is stunted at first, and when the melody is finally permitted to ring during mm. 5-8, choppy interruptions in triplet quarter notes in the accompaniment cut into the upper line, as the normally whimsical and unobtrusive chromatic, descending minor 7^th chords momentarily seek to strangle the melody.[12]

On my reading, this is the essential difference between the two pianists, usually thought to be so similar, and that, moreover, this difference can be animated further by accounting for Mehldau’s style as a species of Romanticism. That Mehldau practices a kind of Romanticism has already been pointed out by a few other student writers and journalists, but these accounts rely on little more than an appeal to Mehldau’s classical influence and speculation on whether he used a theme from a Brahms Intermezzo in one of his compositions.[13] At any rate, such discussions do not frame the question of Romanticism in a way that is productive in spelling out the differences between Evans and Mehldau. In order to try and do this, we shall embark on a guided tour though an interesting reading of irony in early German Romanticism.

Lebenskraft, Chemistry, Chua

In a vivid and entertaining account of early Romantic ideas, Daniel Chua informs us that very near the end of the eighteenth century, scientist and member of the Romantic circle in Jena Alexander von Humboldt inserted a silver rod into his anus and a zinc disc into his mouth and electrocuted himself.[14] Why did he do this and how on Earth is this science? To begin with, the early Romantics were suspicious of an Enlightenment instrumental reason that would separate the subject from the object. This, then, seemed a unique—if somewhat crass—way of circumventing this scenario; although Humboldt and his early Romantic colleagues supposed that chemistry—Lebenskraft—held the “productive power behind an organic structure,”[15] there was no way short of destroying an organism to isolate this phenomenon. Life in the post-mechanistic world, it appeared, was difficult to capture in action.

Furthermore, how could one attain self-knowledge this way when the very act of studying oneself necessarily involved changing the self from the self that had begun the inquiry? Repetition of the process would simply extend the process indefinitely in a kind of dialectical infinity. Only by an ironic reflective act through this impasse, back to the previous unchanged state, could one hope to gain self-knowledge in this game. The subject/object synthesis hoped for could not be swept under the carpet, and could only be expressed as irony. Chua writes:

So [Humboldt] is not only inside and outside the experiment, he also rises above it in a self-reflexive manoeuvre that detaches him from his own participation in the experimental process. It is this higher synthesis of opposites that initiates the ironic glance of German Romanticism.[16]

This resonates with someone like Friedrich Schlegel, in whose writing on art there is the idea that romantic art exhibits inferences of an ultimately unknowable but existing Absolute. And by exposing this inability to grasp such knowledge, irony emits the “sense of the infinite.”[17] Even Schlegel’s understanding of the latest scientific advancements of his day reflects this process. According to Alison Stone, for Schlegel:

… in chemical processes, substances strive to realize their hidden affinities and to dissolve their separation, but, even when they unite, only produce new, discrete, items to be drawn into fresh chemical cycles … In chemical processes, bodies try to overcome their separation (likewise, the poetic self tries to overcome its limitations and know about the infinite), but bodies only end up forming another finite body (likewise, the self realizes that its attempted knowledge was merely perspectival). Since poetry produces the sense of the infinite through this oscillation, Schlegel claims that this sense is produced “chemically” and, by extension, that poetry portrays the infinite as chemical …[18]

Whence such an admixture of perspectives? Writing around the turn of the nineteenth century, Schlegel bemoaned Nature’s loss of enchantment, of mystery, under the condition of modernity as he understood it, namely as a culture of scientific experimentation that believed Nature to be knowable. Under such conditions, analysis of objects divides them into particulars but only at the cost of ultimately understanding the mysterious whole.[19] Fortunately for Schlegel, the very atmosphere of analysis and reflection that gives rise to modern scientific endeavor also facilitates Romantic poetry’s capacity for irony, which required a self-awareness that “enables the poet to temper his enthusiasm for knowing about reality with dispassionate reflection on the partiality of his efforts.”[20]

At this point it is important to hone the conception of irony under consideration. In a brief but useful discussion of the topic, Kai Hammermeister distinguishes a specifically romantic appropriation of the concept as distinct from its traditional rhetorical usages:[21] as a figure of speech, it denotes an expression that means exactly the opposite of what it says; and in Socrates, it refers to his feigned ignorance in respect to that of his interlocutor, which allows him to unravel the latter’s presumed authority. Both tropes still result in positive statements with tangible results, and that is precisely what Romantic irony does not do: “This type of irony gestures toward the infinite by rendering all finitude unstable and incomplete … The self never arrives at full self-knowledge or self-certainty, but remains elusive, the object of (romantic) longing.”[22] Romantic-ironic utterances may resemble statements of predication but upon undoing them, a stable conclusion is not thereby reached—as it might in a traditional ironic statement, where the actual semantic meaning is nevertheless understood—and all conclusions are regarded as suspect.

Thus Schlegel can assert an analogy to chemistry as he understood it: the lack of consensus in the emerging field of chemistry at turn of the nineteenth century, in Schlegel’s eyes, showed complex substances—mostly notably oxygen—to be comprised of smaller particles and their hidden affinities, but because scientists did not understand their subject matter to a satisfactory extent, they re-enchanted Nature in Schlegel’s image, seemingly despite themselves: “… in chemical processes, substances strive to realise their hidden affinities and to dissolve their separation, but, even when the unite, only produce new, discrete, items to be drawn into fresh chemical cycles.”[23]

All this has consequences for Chua and his understanding of instrumental music at this time. In needing to appear as part of nature, art was obliged to exhibit precisely the perfect synthesis of subject and object called into question by the Romantics. It is the negation of this idea that can be found throughout the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The “jokes” and curious juxtapositions of styles of the Viennese Classics—the subject flickering in and out—arise not out of a guileless amiability, but rather out of the ironic sense of the subject attempting to see the work as organic. To analyze with an imposed instrumental reason is to kill the piece (organism), and instead the music struggles to catch a glimpse of itself as organic. The humor in this style was read by the Romantics as a continual process designed to shock the listener out of the complacency that would understand the piece as a seamless component of Nature. Thus for Chua, the coda of the finale Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, which actually began, we recall, with an immediate juxtaposition of learned white-note counterpoint and buffa accompaniment, is not the result of some organic process, but rather, “… more a play of with that side-steps the coherence of the form to give an inkling of the absolute behind the clever connections of chemical affinity.” It is the movement coming into “contrapuntal self-consciousness” of itself.[24]

Turning back to jazz, what, then, is the musical upshot for thinking about Brad Mehldau? For one, jazz in the hands of Brad Mehldau is like the organism under vivisection, the scalpel perusing for what traces of Lebenskraft it can find, pure jazz expression left to be infered. Still identifiable as an organism (or in this case, a jazz performance), the tune is wounded by the intrusive hand of the subject. In addition, something of Schlegel’s notion of chemical irony can be recuperated for our purposes, for we shall see instances in Mehldau’s performances where closure is made problematic by idiosyncratic procedures that do not permit the piece to “know itself to be whole,” as it were, and imply a continuous combinatorial behavior between diverse elements.

Jazz as Ironic Experimentation

But jazz has enjoyed almost yearly advances - “new takes,” if one objects to the assertion of progress per se—in harmony and playing “outside” has in many ways come to be completely normative. Furthermore, many features such as surprising modulations or odd juxtapositions of styles are common in jazz and are very unlikely to stir in us the awe of irony, of a self divided by the act of trying to understand itself.

Exemplary of the aestheticization of irony is his Village Vanguard performance of “Moon River” by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. The tune itself, a Sinatra staple of the wedding reception and cruise ship, is an unlikely candidate for the hip treatment it receives from Mehldau’s trio. Mehldau performs the melody in the key of F major, his right hand alternating between, initially, a flowing, legato style and, after that, some choppier interruptions.[25] In this way he creates a dialogue between a traditional singing style with this a more frustrated, rather un-speech-like, fragmented one that Bill Evans would rarely employ. And neither can claim to “be” the piece and it is the contrast that defines the melody; they comment on one another and the melody cannot be reduced to one or the other. As the piece becomes familiar with itself, so to speak, the trio effortlessly modulates into D major, the key in which the entire solo section occurs, before coming back to F for a return to the melody.

With the completion of the form, however, something extraordinary happens, just as the piece has satisfied the familiar procedures for closure in a jazz performance. But Mehldau has not actually given us the final tonic and at very point of deleted resolution, Mehldau ignores all that has come before and gently but eerily slips into a free fantasy. Example 4 shows how the interrupted closure is initiated. The harmonic material immediately borrows heavily from the relative and then the parallel minor, the former heard as a negation of the D major solo section and the latter hitherto active really only as dominant coloration. The tension grows as the texture thickens, all of which defuses quietly back into F major for one final iteration of the tune. Only this statement cannot shake off the damage done by Mehldau’s free interpolation [see recording, 9:47]. Semi-tone slips abound as the rhythms begin tripping over their own awkwardness. Since this material would normally end the performance, we can perhaps acknowledge this is as still a comfortable, or at least not overly “signified” form of closure. But then Mehldau returns briefly to his interpolation for closure and ends the piece in F minor. Is the melodic fragment at the end a cancellation of the interpolation heard previously, or was the return of the melody merely an illusion in the midst of a larger, freely improvised section that envelops it? At the very moment when total synthesis could have occurred, Mehldau has once again prevented the piece from seeming whole. He leaves us unclear as to which is the “real” ending: the traditional, if demented and unsinging one? Or was this swallowed by his singing improvisation in the parallel minor? An ironic reading does not require one to arbitrate, and allows the constituent elements that went into the structure of the composition, now fully aware of each other, to remain unsynthesized, a chemical compound dissolved in a subjective solution but unable—and for that matter not required—to recombine into a single whole.[26]

     Example 5 is a transcription of Mehldau’s own composition “When it Rains.” The tune is unusual for several reasons. For one, the opening chord progression is not really a string of chords dictated only to be interpreted. Rather, it presents a contrapuntal complex whose precise rendition is clearly part of the conception of the piece. The importance of the counterpoint is confirmed by the incredibly sparse melody; without the strength of the contrapuntal writing, the melody would collapse due to its own frailty. It is beautiful, but disturbingly brittle. Example 6 highlights the voice-leading features, where parallel sixths between tenor and bass slip down underneath a soprano that holds D# constant. The B major tonic in root position—voiced without intervals beyond a third and fifth—is not even given its own dominant and is instead established via a mixed plagal motion, which itself does not even go ^4 - ^1 in the bass. The unusual G-B resolution in the bass is smooth enough but remains quite peculiar in its construction. Disarmingly simple to the ear, this overall progression is nevertheless subtly awry.

The bridge begins in E major, prepared via its dominant—the only dominant-tonic resolution in the entire composition—in very much the conventional manner. After a colorful but relatively normal motion to C#9, things become cloudy as the chord shifts mysteriously back to Emaj7, canceling the brightness of E#. The return of the A section is brought about through the unusual choice of G7 (perhaps an unresolved German-sixth with an ellipsed cadential 6/4), recalling the modal mixture from the A section, with the D-natural sounding as a perverse answer to D# (of the C#9 chord) just before. Just as in the A section, even though everything is smooth and appears relatively familiar, a closer look reveals a distinctly idiosyncratic harmonic approach that hints at but does not ultimately side with traditional jazz ballad practice. We are made aware of what is Natural, but the chart is continually finding new ways to remove itself from this while remaining unnervingly close to convention.

In the recording, the form is preceded by an introduction in B minor played by piano and woodwinds. After the conclusion of this relaxed, melancholic passage, solo piano plays through the first eight bars of the chart. For the second group of eight bars, the rest of the combo comes in, woodwinds in tow, but there are two important surprises. One is the use of a pop drum sound, something totally unheard of on a Mehldau release. The effect is particularly striking since this is the first cut on the album. More cleverly, though, Mehldau has played a metrical trick on us. During the solo piano’s opening eight measures, the listener is invited to interpret the repeated chords as eighth notes in what is perhaps four long measures of 6/4. The group’s entrance foils the comfort we’d achieved.

An altered rendition of the introduction is played by solo piano to end the piece, transcribed here as Example 7. Essentially, this passage encapsulates the same paradoxical elements from before, evoking, as it does, very simple musical gestures through a distorted voice-leading prism. Note here how the high A in the fifth measure (the 7^th of a B-7 chord) quietly conflicts with the alto that has resolved down to G# over the E chord. Notice also how these II-Vs never yield the I they promise. The curious blending of suspension and resolution happens again in the alto in measure 9, this time between inner voices, and in the crunchy sonority in measures 7 and 11. Again, the major quality of the tune proper is replaced by its evil twin, the parallel minor, which is not even given a proper dominant, tri-tone substitution notwithstanding. In this composition, Mehldau paints a world that seems Natural enough at first blush. However, things are not as they seem and lurking deeper we find out that, unlike in Bill Evans’s style, II and V do not go to I and the idyllic world of American popular song has been polluted by the ironic, experimental imagination of the creative subject.

One of Mehldau’s signature recordings is his trio’s arrangement of “All The Things You Are.” Example 8a is a transcription of Mehldau’s virtuosic introduction and 8b shows the modulatory scheme. Mehldau’s four solo choruses are each in a different key, beginning on Bb minor with each subsequent chorus dropping a fifth.[27] He smoothes the space in between by converting the final Db major and its analogues into the dominant of the chord that is to begin the next chorus. As if this weren’t enough tinkering, the chords leading up to the final tonic have been re-worked in the manner shown in Example 9. The keys have been normalized for ease of comparison with the original. The ironic twist comes in two flavors. First, notice the oblique motion between outer voices, voice-leading that reflects Mehldau’s handling of the passage in the fourth and last chorus of his introduction. The fifth of the Db major7 withstands harmonic reinterpretation, achieved primarily via contrapuntal expantion as opposed to basses leaping by fifth, and winds up as the major seventh of the “wrong” tonic (of A major7, thus enharmonically G#) before being crammed back into an Ab major chord via its dominant. The ear can barely catch up, and Mehldau’s turnaround takes us to yet another key to begin the next chorus.[28]

The band enters on the fifth chorus to state the melody as a group, only the chain of modulations has led them to the most unusual territory of A major, a semi-tone “too high” compared to the piece’s original key, the next in what is already a long line of both drastic and subtle subversions. What’s more, the meter is 7/8 at a terrifying clip. They run their solos for the next ten minutes in this key before performing the customary introduction at the end. After performing the “introduction” on C# and D with elaborate substitutions, the band drops out after building towards a climax and Mehldau plays a short solo passage with an extremely unlikely outcome: in a matter of seconds, Mehldau pulls apart the tonality through several small semi-tonal motions and ends in F major, of all places, reducing harmonic closure to a “that’s all, folks.”[29] Example 10 shows how it is done. The ending “introduction” dumps out onto F major, having resolved down from Gb major. The opening melody emerges at the original pitch level, having been subtly re-interpreted as the third and sixth of an F major harmony instead of the thirds of F# minor and B minor, as Mehldau plants the seed of F major without our necessarily realizing it on first hearing. He has also commenced drawing aspects of his performance into new relationships with each other, displaying his experimental attitude. The melody continues as it would normally with an amorphous, incremental left-hand accompaniment. In bar 6 of the example, Mehldau re-interprets the F/E# in the melody as the root of an F major triad instead of the third of C# major triad, as it had been in the original melody. Contrapuntal complexity unravels as the registers of the hands split off—Mehldau’s musical punch line, sympathetically greeted with laughter from the audience. Oddly enough, this last melodic utterance—not even the material with which the melody ends, but rather begins, leaving us with a mere vestigial trace—is cast in a 4/4 meter, finally.

Whither F major? Those familiar with the chart in its original form will know the internal E major cadence that ends the bridge, the melodic G# then immediately suppressed, receiving enharmonic treatment as Ab as part of the C-altered harmony that leads back to F minor and the final A section. Transposed up a step, as Mehldau has done, that internal cadence becomes F instead. Thus, Mehldau has exploited a hidden chemical affinity between his curious ending and one of the most salient features of the tune. He even ends on the third of the chord, just like the cadence in the bridge. As an ironic maneuver, Mehldau’s ending keeps “true” closure at arms length, refusing to conclusively blend and resolve the constituent elements the form as he has created it, and instead ends by proposing yet a new connection, enacting, as ironic statements do, the absence of logical conclusion.

Concluding Remarks

Mehldau appears to have little interest at all in reproducing a standard tune with its emotional core intact, nor does he care much to compose something in quite the same aesthetic mold.[30] For Mehldau, as we have seen, further tampering is required. Moreover, the means by which Mehldau and his trio reconstitute these signs are not only original, but form an essential dimension of their style.[31] It simply won’t do to continue playing the same tunes in different styles, new meters or with different chord changes, adding witty quotations or with Monk’s virtuosic sloppiness. Moreover, adding a personal, subjective touch to the “found” tune has always been what has motivated jazz musicians. These techniques, while indeed still satisfying, have been part of jazz for too long to continue to qualify as “irony” if it is to retain something of its former weight; the point all along has been, how can it be created now?[32] Instead, Mehldau and his trio consistently imply the Organic, holding it close to convention but not permitting what I have characterized as a perfect synthesis of Subject and Object, as was the case in “Christmas Time is Here” and “When it Rains.” And just when his performances offer up a last chance for synthesis, for a full grasp of the whole, we are again denied, which we saw in “Moon River” and “All the Things You Are.” Such is the nature of romantic possibilities in jazz as long as Romanticism is not considered merely to be the dour, emotional performer creating “beautiful” music. Mehldau does that, of course, but he shows us something more in his forms and his ethos, and while we are perhaps denied the frame we have come to expect, we gain a new, darker portrait.