Brad Mehldau
Live In Tokyo

LA RECENSIONE

Brad Mehldau and his lovely chubby cheeks were in Tokyo on February 15, 2003, playing and playing in front of thousands of Japanese people - who, as Satsuki Morimoto told me a few years ago, listing Nippo-Italian similarities: "they can sometimes be a bit sloppy, but generally very demanding" - he played some great songs, each a classic in its own small, or grand, way.

Songs by others, chosen by Mehldau - an internationally renowned pianist - with the passion of a fan, cradled between his fingers just long enough to make them sound his own way, "a bastardization of what I love" he says.
Among these: opening and closing with Nick Drake illuminated only by the light of the white keys in Things Behind The Sun and River Man, a loooong sumptuous 19-minute version of Paranoid Android by Radiohead, a semi-suite beauty. From This Moment On by Cole Porter, Monk's Dream by Thelonious Monk spiced up with the Peanuts theme and a narcotized version of the romantic Someone to Watch Over Me by George Gershwin.

An easy setlist by an American for an easy Japanese audience? Bah. There are beautiful things, period, like the sound of a piano played with skill and heart (and finally amplified as it should be...) where the notes you know so well are found liquefied and layered, and occasionally the melody intact, with a small twinge of pleasure. It's raining.

"Romanticism implies nostalgia for damaged goods. Music is heightened nostalgia" B.Mehldau.