Mehldau Stirs Up a Compelling, Elegiac Mix

A nightclub performance is not generally the location in which one might expect a performer to make a career-altering transformation. But that’s precisely what pianist Brad Mehldau did Tuesday night at West Hollywood’s Largo. Universally admired as one of the most adventurous pianists to arrive on the jazz scene in years, Mehldau played a solo mini-concert based completely upon the rhapsodic original compositions in his new Warner Bros. album, “Elegaic Cycle.”

Other pianists have made similar appearances--Fred Hersch and Keith Jarrett immediately come to mind--performing semi-spontaneous music that maintained a jazz sensibility while eluding specific genre labeling. Mehldau, however, has been a bit more precise about his intentions, both in his playing and in a long, explanatory essay included with his album.

Both deed and word revealed his broad fascination with romanticism in art and philosophy and his specific focus--in this collection of music--upon the penetrating intimacy of the elegy as a musical form.

“An elegy,” he writes in the essay, “can have this purpose: To celebrate those very things that make us mortal.”

And, to a large extent, Mehldau’s superb performance often found the center of that enigmatic encounter between mortality and memory. But was it jazz? In the flat-out traditional sense, no. But it was music that could only have been produced by an artist with jazz skills, an artist who--like Mehldau--could be simultaneously lyrical and swinging, harmonically rhapsodic and melodically spare. And it was music that was hypnotically compelling.

Intimations of Chopin, Schumann and Beethoven drifted through the pieces, their classical references frequently offset by sudden bursts of bebop. Equally important, and transcending the conscious goals of Mehldau’s music, was a bounty of lovely melodies.

Elegiac though its intentions may have been, it was music whose allusion to life and death were illuminated by a sense of optimism and celebration that kept coursing through each theme--even those bearing titles such as “Resignation,” “Trailer Park Ghost” and “Goodbye Storyteller.”

Above all, it was a performance by an artist with both the capacity and the desire to expand his creative vision. And the full-house crowd, listening intently to every number, was at least as responsive to that vision as the most formal concert hall audience.

* Brad Mehldau, performing a solo piano program at Largo, 432 N. Fairfax Ave., tonight at 9. $10. (323) 852-1073.