Music from life’s mess

As evening crackles to life on Hollywood Boulevard, Brad Mehldau ventures out. Just like old times.

He wandered away from this old, cacophonous neighborhood not so long ago, but as he winds across the Knitting Factory’s crowded main stage, he slips right back into it, its rhythm and attitude. California casual, his brick-red shirt untucked, rumpled, his dark hair tousled, the pianist appears ready to retire to a wrap-around porch with a cold beer, just in time to catch the first neon flickering on.

In fact, as if teasing out the illusion, he walks past the piano, reaching instead for two mallets, then hovers over the vibes. Out tumbles a spacey, herky-jerky intro that builds into a tricked-out version of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave” before drifting into the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son.”

Arranged around him are shiny tools for improvisation: two upright basses. Two drum kits. The piano. And, through the evening, a parade of brass and woodwinds. Mehldau is hip to hip with his utility men, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy, long the backbone of his top-flight jazz trio.

On this fall night, drummer Matt Chamberlain and bassist Darek “Oles” Oleszkiewicz add another layer of texture and sass to a set of compositions that elude easy descriptors. The band, which changes incarnations throughout the evening, takes its turns through the disparate cuts that make up Mehldau’s latest recording, “Largo” -- part valentine, part journal of sonic sketches of his life in Los Angeles in the late ‘90s. This performance feels more like a no-holds-barred workshop than a prosaic “let’s toss the solos around and sail to a close” club set.

Tonight offers a through-the-keyhole glimpse of raw improvisation that just a few hundred people -- musicians, fans, curious bystanders -- are lucky enough to witness. Mehldau and his producer-conductor-compatriot, Jon Brion, are in effect sketching as they go.

Out saunters “Dusty McNugget,” a strutting, loose-hipped original that has been getting a fair share of crossover airplay for something from a “jazz album.” Angular, thudding with acoustic drum-and-bass and Mehldau’s own sly, funkified approach, it all feels buoyed by the spirits of both Thelonious Monk and Frank Zappa. Its humor is intrinsic, and never winking.

Pressing forward, the band disassembles the recognizable -- say, Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” -- or pares “Dear Prudence” down to its chassis.

A gleeful Brion, in turquoise suit coat and bird-nest coif, serves as antic ringmaster, trapezing from role to role. Conductor, sideman, cheerleader, he leaves no perspective untried, whether banging on the vibes as if on water pipes or crouched in a corner for a kid’s-eye view.

Horn and woodwind players make their way on and off stage, and Mehldau is letting it all go: “I don’t know who they are, but it doesn’t matter. They know who they are,” he jokes, his face slightly bewildered. About midway through, he scratches his mussed head: “I’ve never done this thing before. A set list ... I’ve never had such a big band to introduce,” he marvels.

His face is relaxed, alight, as if all of it is quickly sinking in, happening right before his eyes. He’s careful not to blink.

In select company

So where is jazz going?” Musicians and critics have been pulling at this for decades. A miffed Thelonious Monk once fired back a response both as direct and elliptical his playing: “I don’t know where it’s going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.”

The heart of jazz is the rush of what happens in a moment. That is the essence of improvisation, the excitement of pushing forward without signposts. Jazz itself is in a moment of improvisation, struggling with reinvention. As jazz, the marketing category, struggles for footing, Mehldau, at 32, has found his. He’s among a small young coterie of straight-ahead jazz musicians -- the Marsalises, Joshua Redman -- who sell records, mount relatively ambitious tours and enjoy some crossover recognition. He has recorded nearly a dozen discs that mix solid original compositions with creatively realized standards. He has an articulate, warm style that is infused as much by classical training as by street chops. His improvisational intuition pushes him toward the murky and uncharted, but he always finds a way back. So what’s got some jazz purists’ noses bent out of shape?

“Largo” bends expectations about what jazz is. Although Downbeat magazine featured Mehldau on its September cover, heralding his “New Jazz of a New Generation,” in the same issue’s “The Hotbox” column, the new album didn’t rise above “good”: “ ‘Largo’ starts with a lovely ‘When It Rains,’ then, like the rain, starts to sink into the ground,” wrote critic John McDonough. Added Jim Macine, “The track-to-track change of dynamics and instruments becomes disjunctive.”

But that is just what Mehldau’s getting at: that life -- and jazz for that matter -- is as much about mess and chaos as beauty and symmetry. Although “Largo” might appear to be a far-flung departure from the intuitive three-way conversation of his trio, it still feels very much like a direct relation. Yes, he’s got his “street creds” in order -- a stint at the New School studying with drummer Jimmy Cobb and pianist Junior Mance; spots on the bill with Redman, Christopher Holliday, Christian McBride -- and endured endless comparisons to Bill Evans (both pianists are white and have been chased by heroin addiction), but Mehldau has long been hinting at this more expansive inclination. His albums have always provided tasteful settings for Porter or Rodgers & Hart tunes, but Radiohead and Nick Drake have been comfortable there as well.

Going the way of his instincts, Mehldau demonstrates that one sound can dovetail into the next, that borders and labels, if not superfluous, are arbitrary.

A life-altering excursion

A WEEK or so after his Knitting Factory Hollywood gig, Mehldau’s back in Manhattan. He’s installed in a hip hotel, Le Parker Meridien and seems slightly weary, with a post-bronchitis cough. That doesn’t stop him from sneaking a cigarette, then cranking up the AC to clear the lingering smoke.

He’s been putting the finishing touches on a new album with just the trio. Fresh off a week at the Village Vanguard, playing with Grenadier and Rossy, he’ll be heading off to Europe for a month or so of dates. But first he’ll duck upstate to spend a few days at home with his wife, Fleurine, and his baby daughter, Eden.

The showcases at Knitting Factory were experimental forays to see just how “Largo’s” on-disc setup might play out live. Playing with that revolving lineup in the city that incubated many of the compositions had plenty of resonance for Mehldau. Those sketches marked the end of years of hard living.

“To tell you the truth, I actually went out there [in 1996] and wound up in drug rehab,” he says, settling into the suite’s stiff-backed love seat. “Before that, everything was in kind of shambles in my life. I stayed in a place for three months in Pasadena and then I figured, ‘I’ll just stay out here for a while and see how it goes.’ ”

He played dates with the late Billy Higgins and got to know bassist Darek Oles. He also fell into a regular session with the guys who played “The Tonight Show” gig. But what arrested his attention was a weekly “happening” at a Fairfax district cabaret called Largo, where he met producer Brion.

Brion’s Friday-night show became Mehldau’s new habit.

He says he was struck as much by Brion’s daring as his intuitiveness. “I think the first time I heard him he was playing electric guitar, with a real sort of rock sound. Just all alone [with] all these real sort of sonic things going on. And then he launched into a Cole Porter song, I think it was ‘I Love You.’ ... And it was startling the way he was sort of reconfiguring it.... Then [he did] some of his own original music too. These beautiful songs that just drew me in on an emotional level. It was kind of an experience that happens less and less as you get older because you get jaded. Where you really feel blown away.” Encountering Brion reawakened something old and familiar about his connection to music. Not his classical training or his tour of New York’s jazz clubs, but what was beaming out of the radio during his formative years -- Steely Dan; Fleetwood Mac; Earth, Wind & Fire; Frank Zappa; Rush. Album-oriented rock was difficult not to absorb.

He was curious about Brion -- who had produced Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann and Rufus Wainwright -- and where he might go next. But Brion admits he wasn’t, at first, so curious about Mehldau.

When Largo’s owner-booker, Mark Flanagan, attempted a bit of matchmaking, Brion was more than skeptical. “I think I literally groaned!” he recalls. “ ‘Oh great, this year’s Great Young Jazz Musician.’ ” But Flanagan slipped him “Art of the Trio, Vol. 2,” and Brion floated down Mehldau’s interpretation of “Moon River.” “It comes to a section where the band drops out and a gear gets shifted. And [Brad’s] hand-idea coordination is completely in sync. Here’s the sound I’ve heard in my head but can’t play with my hands! I told Flanny, ‘You just point me in his direction.’ ”

Indeed, “Largo” isn’t a jazz album in a purist’s sense. Like a classic jazz side, it was recorded live with everyone in one room and without overdubs. But, says Brion, “it’s got the scope of an artsy-fartsy art-pop record, where each song has its own sound. So it’s like, this instrument we’re going to mike like they did ‘50s jazz instruments and this one, well, we’re going to give a really cockamamie, modern sound.”

Brion’s mark is embroidered throughout. “Largo” has a feeling of risk, of lightness, that shouldn’t be confused with triteness. It’s pretty basic, Brion says. “I despise what has happened to jazz since the late ‘60s with ... all sorts of stupid strictures on it. For me, jazz is defined by improvisation. Now, if you are always playing the things basically the same way every time except for the shapes you play over the chord changes, then you’re not awake, you’re not aware, you’re not really improvising.”

It should, as Monk said, “just happen.”

“Originality is a delicate and ethereal thing,” says Mehldau. “And usually no one is going to call it when it happens.” You just have to be open. “I don’t know if I would call Jon Brion a jazz musician or if that really matters. There is something jazz in the spirit of him.” In the sense of the unexpected.

“People consider me a wacky, arty rock guy,” Brion says. “What people don’t realize is the way that I work is based entirely on improvisation. And that I’m beholden to improvisation as a life force. Whether it’s a record that people like or not, I can tell you for a fact that it is human beings improvising head and shoulders above what passes for jazz. I don’t care what people call it. “

Neither does Mehldau.

He’d rather just play it.

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Mehldau on disc

A select guide to the pianist’s CDs:

“Largo” (Warner Bros., 2002): Mehldau and his “big” band rely on point of view and serendipity as improvisatory tools.

“Places” (Warner Bros., 2000): An exploration of external and “internal” place for solo piano and trio.

“Elegiac Cycle” (Warner Bros., 1999): Conceived in Berlin, this was Mehldau’s attempt to “step out of my scene” physically and intellectually. Reflective and impressionistic, it’s solo piano work that showcases Mehldau’s ease and fluency in both jazz and classical idioms.

“The Art of the Trio, Vol. 3: Songs” (Warner Bros., 1998): A striking bouquet of standards (“Young at Heart”), originals (“Song-Song”) and covers (Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For A Film)” that hints at Mehldau’s future wanderings.

“The Art of the Trio, Vol. 2: Live at the Village Vanguard” (Warner Bros., 1997): Sample Mehldau’s free-flowing “Moon River.”