This engrossing 2007 Enjoy Jazz Festival performance in Mannheim marked bassist Charlie Haden and pianist Brad Mehldau’s first public duet.
On paper, Haden’s mellifluous tone and unhurried aesthetic may seem somewhat at odds with Mehldau’s two-handed fluency and steely intellect. But Haden, who died in 2014, was both friend and mentor to the younger Mehldau, and believed the pianist’s wayward imagination and precise sense of time were the mark of a kindred spirit. Mehldau’s vivid harmonic pathways and time-tugging lines roaming freely over the bassist’s somnolent wanderings and throbbing strums show how right he was.
The album opens with a precise statement of “Au Privave”, a Charlie Parker blues.
Theme stated, a change of key signals a narrative switch to flurries of notes, trills and single note lines. Haden, unhurried, shifts harmonic focus underneath until the theme returns, pulled into fragments that lean back on the beat.
The rest of the concert turns to the songbook for inspiration. The torch song “My Old Flame” hovers just above ballad tempo, is saturated with the blues and features a singing bass solo. The Irving Berlin waltz “What’ll I Do” ends with dazzling Mehldau counterpoint, lower register left hand playing the melody, right hand decorating with sprays of single notes, minor key inflections and hints of abstraction higher up the keyboard. And the closer, “Everything Happens to Me” implies a fast tempo, but delivers acres of space.
The title song comes mid-set and, at over 15 minutes, is the album’s longest track. The theme statement is cursory, the tempo sprightly and the play-out turns an afterthought into an epic. “My Love and I”, a simple waltz, is almost as long. Mehldau caresses the melody over two-note bass, and the duo sustain the song’s delicate mood with layers of detail and depth. It’s a Haden favourite and a fine album’s standout track. — FT
