More Influences
I knew there was a pianist I forgot to mention in my weird little tour through one chain of influences in an attempt to figure out how much or little influence can show in one's mature style.
Brad Mehldau has mentioned in an interview that during his early days gigging in New York he moved in two different circles; in one he was known for playing in a Wynton Kelly bag, and in the other he was more McCoy Tyner-ish, but by the time he'd started his recording career the two streams had fused along with his other influences. Which is funny because (surprise!) the "other influences" are much more prominent in his playing today than either of the bags he used to play in. The Wynton Kelly thing hangs around as it does with many many jazz pianists, demonstrating one successful approach for integrating a blues feeling into a more modern context, but the Tyner has been, to me, undetectable. It's Mehldau's teacher, Fred Hersch, along with their common influences in Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett (more Jarrett for Mehldau, I think, and in one set of liner notes he memorably sounds off on critics who compared his playing to Evans'), that stands out, along with the classical influence he shares with Hersch. It's the classically-derived texture of his playing (yes, Mehldau is a pretty orchestral player) that sets Mehldau most apart from other pianists. Not that appropriating tropes from the European art tradition is anything new for jazz pianists: Bach is a perennial favorite because of the improvisatory nature behind the Baroque style, not to mention lines that clearly outline chord changes while staying melodic - a bebopper's delight - and the Debussy/Ravel influence was crucial in expanding jazz harmony from Gershwin to Ellington to Evans to Hancock. Mehldau is more squarely in the central European romantic tradition; he draws some harmonic inspiration and the texture of his voicings as much if not more from Schumann and Brahms than he does from Wynton Kelly or Bill Evans. Jarrett is a precursor in referencing this repertoire, but Mehldau's appropriation is more fully considered and more persistent. The musical ideas themselves were obviously out there in the ether (and the conservatory), Mehldau didn't just pluck them from the air like the greatest originalists, but he seems to have extrapolated far beyond the obvious precedents into some serious innovation. His most obvious stylistic influence is basically himself. Where Tyner went, other than sublimated into a penchant for rhapsodism shared with Jarrett and Schumann (less so Brahms, who I find more emotionally restrained), I don't know.
(This is neither better nor worse than anything else. At my favorite moments Mehldau is, in my opinion, more sui generis in conception than Jason Moran, but I still find Moran the more interesting pianist, and more consistently so.)
If there's an extramusical lesson to be drawn from these musings it's that the human desire to organize and categorize as a route to understanding is again flawed in the face of reality. I don't have much interest in categorizing people's sexuality, but I am compelled to categorize the evolutionary trees of musical style, and it's a flawed, failed project because a true representation would be too tangled to read in context. You could hope to make a chart for one player: This is Keith Jarrett, This is Randy Weston, but putting them all together makes too much a muddle. Make a tree for Brad Mehldau, compiling all the auditory evidence along with his own testimony, and you'd need to put Tyner somewhere in there, sticking out like a sore thumb, like a Neanderthal skull in the middle of a Cro Magnon burial ground (no offense intended to Mr. Tyner, of course), an element whose presence shouldn't be denied but can't be easily explained or contextualized. Like life.
Oooooooooooh, did that get serious and portentous enough there at the end?
Brad Mehldau has mentioned in an interview that during his early days gigging in New York he moved in two different circles; in one he was known for playing in a Wynton Kelly bag, and in the other he was more McCoy Tyner-ish, but by the time he'd started his recording career the two streams had fused along with his other influences. Which is funny because (surprise!) the "other influences" are much more prominent in his playing today than either of the bags he used to play in. The Wynton Kelly thing hangs around as it does with many many jazz pianists, demonstrating one successful approach for integrating a blues feeling into a more modern context, but the Tyner has been, to me, undetectable. It's Mehldau's teacher, Fred Hersch, along with their common influences in Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett (more Jarrett for Mehldau, I think, and in one set of liner notes he memorably sounds off on critics who compared his playing to Evans'), that stands out, along with the classical influence he shares with Hersch. It's the classically-derived texture of his playing (yes, Mehldau is a pretty orchestral player) that sets Mehldau most apart from other pianists. Not that appropriating tropes from the European art tradition is anything new for jazz pianists: Bach is a perennial favorite because of the improvisatory nature behind the Baroque style, not to mention lines that clearly outline chord changes while staying melodic - a bebopper's delight - and the Debussy/Ravel influence was crucial in expanding jazz harmony from Gershwin to Ellington to Evans to Hancock. Mehldau is more squarely in the central European romantic tradition; he draws some harmonic inspiration and the texture of his voicings as much if not more from Schumann and Brahms than he does from Wynton Kelly or Bill Evans. Jarrett is a precursor in referencing this repertoire, but Mehldau's appropriation is more fully considered and more persistent. The musical ideas themselves were obviously out there in the ether (and the conservatory), Mehldau didn't just pluck them from the air like the greatest originalists, but he seems to have extrapolated far beyond the obvious precedents into some serious innovation. His most obvious stylistic influence is basically himself. Where Tyner went, other than sublimated into a penchant for rhapsodism shared with Jarrett and Schumann (less so Brahms, who I find more emotionally restrained), I don't know.
(This is neither better nor worse than anything else. At my favorite moments Mehldau is, in my opinion, more sui generis in conception than Jason Moran, but I still find Moran the more interesting pianist, and more consistently so.)
If there's an extramusical lesson to be drawn from these musings it's that the human desire to organize and categorize as a route to understanding is again flawed in the face of reality. I don't have much interest in categorizing people's sexuality, but I am compelled to categorize the evolutionary trees of musical style, and it's a flawed, failed project because a true representation would be too tangled to read in context. You could hope to make a chart for one player: This is Keith Jarrett, This is Randy Weston, but putting them all together makes too much a muddle. Make a tree for Brad Mehldau, compiling all the auditory evidence along with his own testimony, and you'd need to put Tyner somewhere in there, sticking out like a sore thumb, like a Neanderthal skull in the middle of a Cro Magnon burial ground (no offense intended to Mr. Tyner, of course), an element whose presence shouldn't be denied but can't be easily explained or contextualized. Like life.
Oooooooooooh, did that get serious and portentous enough there at the end?
posted by medrawt at
22:43
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