Words can't begin to convey . . . well, they can, actually. Cascades of notes tumble from the piano; arpeggios, winding in sinuous triplet rhythms, twist in and out of each other like stalactites and stalagmites in some weird, warm underground cavern of music. Repeated notes are impaled in the centre of the keyboard, pinning down a melody which keeps threatening to escape and eventually does, floating off into infinity for a blissful moment before the repetition returns, fearsome yet familiar. What is this, anyway? Jazz? Improvisation? Contemporary composition? Music, its creator would doubtless answer. Just music. It doesn't help that the great Brad Mehldau strolls onto the stage wearing a short-sleeved shirt and carrying a towel and looking like a cross between Frank Skinner and Chandler out of Friends. Or that in his spare, sparing vocalisations he appears to be genuinely modest, describing what he is doing as "just kind of stretching the material out a bit - I hope not too much".
The material concerned may disappoint jazz purists, but it is a revelation to the rest of us: Brian Wilson's The Warmth of the Sun, Radiohead's Paranoid Android, several helpings of Nick Drake and an inspired take (which sounds, come to think of it, pretty jazzy) on Lennon/McCartney's Mother Nature's Son.
When he does turn his attention to jazz standards such as Rodgers and Hart's My Heart Stood Still and a bit of Thelonius Monk, he is revealed not just as a musician of awesome invention, but as a pianist of awesome technical abilities, pushing the piano to its limit both as a percussion instrument and as the bearer of a magical vocal line. He can pummel away like Beethoven and melt into silence like Scriabin, yet his complex meanderings are always coherent, driven by his intuitive sense of rhythm. It was appropriate that, of his own compositions from the heart-stoppingly beautiful album Elegiac Cycle, Mehldau chose to play Goodbye Storyteller. Let's hope, in fact, that it's just Au Revoir.
