Brad Mehldau and Jon Brion fit the definition of a mutual admiration society. That much is probably evident in this story, about their new collaboration, Highway Rider. It was certainly evident in the studio last spring, as they were mixing the final tracks of the album.
“There’s nobody else like him,” Mehldau said of Brion then.
“Because he’s got those ears on the level of engineering, and detail, and his
approach to recording. It’s creative, like a jazz musician.”
And here’s Brion on Mehldau: “For my money he’s the single most influential jazz musician going. If you want to talk about the ripple effect, I don’t see anybody else out there doing anything that is so permeating in its nature on other people playing the instrument. He has certainly to my ears become the de facto standard-bearer.”
Their previous collaboration, Largo, was striking in its calibration of the spontaneous and the meticulous: a balance crudely formulated as jazz + pop. Its influence has been serious (see yesterday’s post), and its legacy enduring. Considering it in light of Highway Rider, though, you come to the issue of the cover tune. (The new album doesn’t have any.) As it happens, the cover tune is one more point of agreement between Mehldau and Brion. Consider this exchange, which is mostly Brion:
I love the idea of the cover tune as a communal experience, and if you’ve ever been in a room when Mehldau started into a Paul Simon or Radiohead song, you recognize the power of that experience. Not everybody in a jazz club these days has that same flicker of recognition with, say, “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” (For some thoughtful musings on the function of the jazz/non-jazz cover tune, consult a pertinent post by Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus. Interestingly, irony isn’t really a characteristic ascribed to Mehldau. I think this has to do with the rote assumptions people make about extroversion and introversion in music. TBP, as a more declarative entity than the Brad Mehldau Trio, gets aligned with snark; Mehldau, meanwhile, shoulders the baggage of pretension. Both bands, of course, have their high-minded classical allusions as well as their indie-rock affinities.)
But let’s get back to Highway Rider. The album unfolds as a body of work, based on a
core melodic motif. In some ways it’s a programmatic experience, as Mehldau’s
titles suggest. (He takes this concept a step further in an interactive
storybook at his website, with hyper-textual song clips.) The number of
pieces involved, sonically, is one reason Mehldau said he needed Brion for
this: it was a complex challenge, balancing the shimmer of an orchestra with
the texture of a jazz combo. But even the simpler tracks were mixed with
extreme attention to detail. I was there for the mixing of the title track,
which simply features Mehldau, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Matt
Chamberlain. It took hours, partly due to discussion over how best
to feature the background glow of a Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer. (Brion ended up
yielding the controls to Mehldau, for a manual override.)
Another long exchange had to do with the bleed of the drums into the piano microphones. “One of the ways this thing works,” Mehldau said, “is letting Matt be louder than he would normally be. Louder than jazz drums.” Brion quipped: “Thankfully he delivered a staggering performance.”
I’ve blathered on enough, but it’s worth touching on one more aspect of the album that didn’t get center-stage treatment in my piece. And
that would be the presence of Joshua Redman, an on-again, off-again partner to
Mehldau since they both came to prominence some 15 years ago. His playing on the album is often powerfully expressive, especially on the track originally conceived as an overture (now sequenced as the final track on Disc One.) The two musicians
will be touring as a duo this spring, and probably playing at least a few of
the tunes from the new album. Here’s what Mehldau said about Redman and his contribution, at a piano during a break in the studio:
Redman corroborated that business about the score, and confirmed that he probably would have been a lot more nervous if he’d realized the scope of the project ahead of time. He also commented on Brion in an interesting way. “I remember listening back to some of the playbacks, and not being sure about the saxophone sound,” he said. “And I was skeptical coming out of that, whether I was going to be comfortable with it. That was something that, completely on a very selfish level, blew me away. I love the saxophone sound. It’s a very different sound, and it wouldn’t work for any other project, but I think he got my sound in one of the best ways its ever been captured. In the same way that he would record a voice.”
Nate, thanks for this series of pieces on Brad and Jon; I'm excited to hear the album tomorrow.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Jon in 2001 when his album Meaningless was released. I remember being surprised and thrilled when he told me he had just recorded an album with Brad. Little did I (or anyone) know the impact it would have. It took them eight years to collaborate again; alas, I've been waiting patiently for nearly a decade for Jon to release a proper follow-up to Meaningless.
Posted by: D-Bon | 03/15/2010 at 08:05 PM