Review: BRAD MEHLDAU Improvises at Zankel Hall

After nearly 300 years, with all of the epochal invention and revolutionary soundscapes to emerge from Western music, Bach is still heard with increasing relevance. Brad Mehldau, known foremost as an improviser, is the first jazz artist to serve as Carnegie Hall's Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair. He has gone further, describing Bach as "radical" even today.

Interestingly, Mehldau is inverting the classical paradigm further, welcoming modern popular composers like Neil Young and Brian Wilson into the fold for his 2015 solo performance at Carnegie Hall. In his jazz recordings, Mehldau has evolved the traditional standard to the tunes of Radiohead, Massive Attack, Nick Drake and other pop artists.

Just when popular appreciation of new music appears to have conformed to catchall entertainment culture, there are surprises. The sold-out Carnegie Hall performance of Brad Mehldau's 2015 world premiere, Three Pieces After Bach, proves that the public is in for the defining musical challenge of the age.

"There's never been a time when improvisation was given the respect it deserved," said Keith Jarrett at the beginning of the documentary film about him titled The Art of Improvisation. "By virtue of the holistic quality...it takes real-time, no editing possible, it takes your nervous system to be on alert for every possible thing in a way that can not be said for any other kind of music."

"I'm essentially an improviser. I learned that by playing classical music," said Jarrett. "We don't know how Bach improvised, and the only reason is we don't have recordings."

Last year, when the great classical pianist Cyprien Katsaris introduced his performance of Bach's Concerto BWV 1054 with the Gyor Philharmonic Orchestra he addressed the audience seated in the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.

"As you know, there is a tradition which has been lost among us, classical pianists, which is the improvisation," Katsaris professed. "Liszt was a great improviser, and of course Chopin and before them Mozart, Beethoven, Bach."

Mehldau reaches into the very depths and extremities of his musical self when improvising on Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, which is the compositional basis for Three Pieces After Bach. Throughout the evening, Mehldau first performed a prelude, or fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier, before showcasing his original works. In so doing, he demonstrated an immediate relationship between contemporary and Baroque.

Through his impeccable improvisational virtuosity, Mehldau has heroically dared to unlock the modulatory and accidental secrets of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Bach single-handedly extended the range of twelve-tone music, where, for example, every note in the scale could be played uninhibitedly, such as on ancient instruments traditionally played in a pentatonic scale.

Arguments ensue as to whether fixing keyboards to equal temperament has devastated the compositional integrity of the old masters. Without an understanding of music earned by serious study, and selfless practice, the importance of The Well-Tempered Clavier is sure to fly overhead. When Bach composed, keyboards were tuned differently. He wrote for various temperaments. Currently, equal temperament has a monopoly on the way Western music is heard.

Listening to Bach with a trained ear, especially one steeped in jazz harmonics, what is most fascinating about his compositions is the timed spacing between notes in a scale, and how the chord progressions demand a stretch of the aural imagination. This was all due to his revolutionary interpretation of keyboard temperament.

While Mehldau is arguably less capable of transporting Bach music to the appreciable character of Glenn Gould, for example, there is certainly no one to parallel his uniquely bridging contemporary improvisation with Baroque composition.

Photo by Virginie Blachere

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