Brad Mehldau and voice leading
This interview is quite wonderful: Rick Beato, prolific music Youtuber, interviews Brad Mehldau, jazz pianist.
I'm not the most loyal fan of Beato's channel. Once you see a few of his analyses and interviews, you start to pick up on a very particular kind of bias, equal parts charming and (demographically) predictable, towards a certain genre of "musician's music" from the US 70s and 80s. Steely Dan! Pat Metheny! It's also a bit funny to still do "TOP 40 X"-type music journalism these days (didn't we mostly stop doing forced rankings like that some time ago?) but I guess it's good for engagement. Then again, he's done some really nice interviews before (the Keith Jarrett interview is quite amazing).
I'm also not that big of a fan of Brad Mehldau anymore. But I used to be, somewhat. For quite a while around the end of high school, I was very much into his Radiohead covers specifically. I did my own takes on them (on piano, somewhere halfway the Mehldau versions and the originals). Played them at a few concerts at the time, and once at a funeral. They also inspired a marimba (yes) arrangement of Paranoid Android) I did for my final percussion exam.
The main reason this interview is great is just: the time he takes to explain ideas and techniques at a very musically detailed level, and illustrates right away on the piano. But what makes it especially delightful is how it answers several questions I used to have when listening to Largo and Art of the Trio and studying their liner notes in 2006.
Some of the fascinations I had back then: why are so many of the pianists I liked most classically trained? Mehldau, but also Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett before him? (I'm quite sure this trend doesn't hold any more these days, except for perhaps Nina Simone). And then, why Radiohead, why the Beatles? How did he end up there and why did it work so well?
His answer: some of these were just the songs that influenced his musical taste at a crucial age. But there's another angle to it: his particularly interest, when it comes to "covers," is not so much in rock songs, but in well-written *guitar* tunes. And the good ones do interesting guitar-specific things like using open strings and open tuning. The example where he slows down
Which in turn happens to create structures that can't be reduced easily to just chord changes, as in, the melody and harmony are fundamentally intertwined (that is, as compared to your typical Jazz standards, or at least how they're typically played). And so you get a very distinctive sound.
Another way to put this is to say that you the voice leading becomes a big part of the tune. Which is where you can start to draw on ideas from Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. Voice leading, pedal points: it's all quite classical. He then proceeds to *specifically* name-check Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett.
I'm also reminded of Mehldau's version of River Man by Nick Drake, who was famous for the way his songwriting and sound are colored by the use of open tunings. And who happened to be one of the other artists I spent a lot of time listening to at 18. I guess my intuition for the connection between all these things was quite on point.
And then there's questions that the interview doesn't answer. This one comes to mind: how do you go about deciding which particular notes of a song's melody get to stay and which ones can go? There's something about certain (most?) pop melodies where, even if you would play them on a piano, you can tell they're not originally instrumental.
I've always thought it was something about the way notes repeat: melodies that are set to a lyrics will have repeated notes in a way that instrumental music doesn't, a way of accentuating and phrasing things. Perhaps some notes and rhythmic structures are only there because there's more syllables than "notes" in the melody. Would I keep those? Personally I tend to want to explore that space much more, perhaps leaving a lot more of the melody out. We'll need another interview like this.