Brad Mehldau's career began, as did many jazz pianists today, with heavy classical training long before he was exposed to jazz. He started experimenting with the piano when he was just four and began taking lessons when he was six, continuing until he was fourteen. He then attended Hartford, Connecticut's Hall High School and played in its jazz band (a perennial winner of the Berklee School of Music's High School competition, he subsequently studied there and won its "Best All Around Musician" award while in his junior year). Brad continued his education at the prestigious New School For Social Research in Manhattan as part of the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program. While there, he studied with such notable jazz pianists as Junior Mance, Kenny Werner and Fred Hersch. He took a class devoted to Rhythmic Development from noted percussionist Jimmy Cobb and along with fellow student Peter Bernstein ended up playing gigs with their teacher in a quartet, Cobb's Mob. Through his associations with other students, Brad began to tour the U.S. and Europe in various configurations, recording a number of other albums as a sideman, including Christopher Hollyday's The Natural Moment, Jesse Davis' Young At Heart and his own Mehldau / Rossy Trio's Fresh Sounds recording When I Fall In Love. Brad's first major international exposure came as a member of the Joshua Redman Quartet, with which he recorded MoodSwing (Warner Records) and toured the US and Europe for a year and a half.
In 1995 Brad released his debut album as a leader for Warner Records, titled appropriately, Introducing Brad Mehldau. Of that recording the Chicago Tribune observed, in part, that it was "... a recording that achieves its most vivid moments when Mehldau is playing original compositions. The elliptical lines, volatile rhythmic figures and unexpected bursts of color and dissonance ... proves that Mehldau writes as cleverly as he plays. The original of these compositions is starting to behold."
Brad's second Warner album, Art of the Trio, Vol.1, was released in February, 1997 to almost instant critical acclaim. Down Beat's 4 1/2 star review stated "... he never displays chops for their own sake but moves among time signatures and ambiguous progressions of chords and liberated tonalities in order to craft brilliant fragments into wholes." At his Village Vanguard debut coinciding with the release of the album the New York Times commented, "Mr. Mehldau, who spent most of the hour with eyes closed and head crooked into his chest like a sleeping bird, reached into the subconscious and took the songs at a run, re-arranging all the accents of the melodies; his song-like improvisations took off from those jumble rhythms."
Brad's classical training informs more than just his astonishing technique. Speaking of "Young Werther" a composition on Introducing, he observed, "That came about as a result of studying a lot of the contrapuntal aspects of classical music. I tried to get away from just a one-note melody and a chord under it, and tried to explore the relationships between several notes moving independently. The whole tune is based on four notes in different configurations. The idea of generating a whole composition from a small amount of thematic material is a very alluring to me, and resulted from studying the compositions of great classical composers like Beethoven and Brahms. After completing the composition, I realized that I had unconsciously taken the four-note motif from a Brahms Piano Capriccio."
Biography
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