Music Evaluation: Brad Mehldau connects Bach, Fauré to jazz on albums, ‘After Bach II’ and ‘Après Fauré’
Grammy-award successful jazz pianist Brad Mehldau connects the dots as if they had been so many sixteenth notes.
His two new albums, “After Bach II” and “Après Fauré,” use classical music as a basis for solo explorations that draw a by line from Artwork Tatum to Thelonious Monk to Invoice Evans to Keith Jarrett to Philip Glass. All of it seems like Mehldau, and all of it goes again to Bach.
The hybrid units are out Friday, Could 10, and “After Bach II” is a sequel to Mehldau’s absorbing 2018 album, “After Bach.” As soon as once more, interpretations of Bach items alternate with authentic compositions impressed by him. “Après Fauré” follows the same format, with the French composer’s work bookending 4 brief authentic Mehldau compositions.
It’s music to thrill a church choir or nightclub crowd. And, as Mehldau writes within the liner notes for the Fauré album, “music that breathes austerity and weirdness.”
The Fauré set contains his remaining two nocturnes, minor-key items written in 1915 and 1921. Their stressed, romantic melancholy conjures up darkish, discordant components in Mehldau’s personal items, that are crammed with percussive, looking music that underscores how Fauré’s work anticipated jazz.
There’s additionally a hyperlink between Jelly Roll Morton and J.S. Bach, which Mehldau has lengthy embraced and celebrated. The brand new Bach album options sleek, persuasive interpretations of acquainted materials, together with 5 items from Guide I of The Effectively-Tempered Clavier. Mehldau describes the Fugue in A minor as an exploration of Bach’s funkiness, and it unspools as freely as a jazz solo, whereas the acquainted melody of the Prelude in E main breaks out like sunshine.
Bach was an acclaimed keyboard improviser, so it’s becoming his Goldberg Variations are handled to Mehldau’s improvised variations. The seven embody two in a 5/8 time signature and one in 7/4, making a bizarre and wild stream that may be very twenty first century.
Mehldau’s variations are bracing and daring, breathtaking and delightful, non secular and psychedelic. Blue notes emerge from the contrapuntal complexity as he exams the bounds of Bach’s music, exhibiting there are none.
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