Brad Mehldau’s album After Bach is out this month on Nonesuch Records. I had the pleasure of listen­ing to it many times and writing the liner note, as follows.

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When we think of Bach, we tend to think of him as the schol­arly artist, a consum­mate crafts­man turning out work after work of immutable bril­liance. But we can’t know the half of it; as a profes­sional organist, much of Bach’s work took the form of impro­vi­sa­tion, and during his lifetime it was the virtu­os­ity and complex­ity of these impro­vi­sa­tions for which he was most admired. As the disci­plines of composer and performer became increas­ingly special­ized, they became separate jobs; impro­vi­sa­tion left the tradi­tion over time, as written scores became more complex and virtuosic.

Some three centuries after the fact, Brad Mehldau takes up this tradi­tion and applies it to a frus­trat­ingly unknow­able aspect of Bach’s art. In the process, he makes a case for a third stream of Bach inter­pre­ta­tion, sitting comfort­ably along­side the indi­vid­u­al­ist (think Glenn Gould) and the histor­i­cally-faithful (John Eliot Gardiner’s cantata cycle). There have always been elements of Mehldau’s style that recall Bach, espe­cially his densely-woven voicing—but he’s not striving to imitate or play dress-up. Rather, After Bach surveys their shared ground as keyboardists, impro­vis­ers, and composers, making implicit paral­lels explicit. 

The album’s prologue, Before Bach: Bene­dic­tion, begins indeli­bly, its falling fifth calling to mind the same interval which opens Bach’s Art of the Fugue. But right off the bat, Mehldau’s subject wanders through brazenly distant harmonies—one quickly realizes that this fugue will not abide by Bach’s rules. Devel­op­ment begins imme­di­ately, rolling triplets pushing inex­orably higher, that falling fifth ringing out from all regis­ters of the piano. Rhythms increase in speed and complex­ity, the triplets turning into 16^th-notes and finally vertig­i­nous 16^th-note triplets, ascend­ing the keyboard until they liter­ally run out of space. The piece ends in the pensive mode it began, its harmonies still restless, finally sticking the landing with a last-minute swerve into D major.

The simplic­ity of the C# major prelude allows us to parse some of what makes Mehldau’s Bach playing unique. It’s an under­stated perpetuum mobile, tumbling noncha­lantly in mirrored phrases. That phrasing, in fact, is what offers a clue. Pianists are usually taught to follow the contour of a phrase by under­scor­ing it dynamically—increasing or decreas­ing the volume in imita­tion of an ideal­ized “vocal” inter­pre­ta­tion. This is all the more impor­tant with a percus­sion instru­ment like the piano, which cannot sustain a note like a string or wind instru­ment; the player must create the illusion of phrasing by stretch­ing the dynamic fabric across each indi­vid­ual note, connect­ing them like the frames of a movie. Mehldau’s playing of Bach does this in a unique way; he’s all relaxed synco­pa­tion, even in this adamantly regular prelude. Unex­pected notes pop out here and there from the texture, spurring the music on, not quite a swing, but a lilting dance—one wonders if he could he possibly be impro­vis­ing this, too. (Inter­est­ingly, Mehldau’s frequent partner in impro­vi­sa­tion Chris Thile brings a similar easy­go­ing­ness to his Bach on the mandolin.)

It is just this synco­pa­tion that gives rise to After Bach: Rondo. Mehldau’s fondness for recast­ing familiar tunes in odd meters is well known. He’ll add or subtract beats and frac­tions of beats from some­thing that had been regular, familiar. It’s not so much to make it “his own” as it is to insert a small impro­vi­sa­tional hook—a piece of grit around which the piece’s devel­op­ment takes form. Here, Bach’s regular ³⁄₈ turns into a bouncy ²⁰⁄₁₆ (though it doesn’t stay there for long, either). Which means that it’s obvious from the very first bar that, despite the imme­di­ate famil­iar­ity of the material, we’re no longer in Bach’s terri­tory. Mehldau also throws in a harmonic twist, taking the sixth scale degree down a half step, throwing a melan­cholic minor shade over the major proceedings.

The term “rondo,” much like “sonata,” has referred to musical forms of varying complex­ity over the centuries. All essen­tially combine a recur­ring theme or phrase inter­spersed with varied depar­tures from it. Bach contributed only two short rondeaux in the French style—slight, graceful move­ments in the context of dance suites. Mehldau’s “Rondo” is clearly of the bigger-boned Clas­si­cal-period mold, though he inverts the form’s order; the recur­ring theme is not the one we hear first (the odd-meter Bach) but the original one that follows—a playful act of deference.

One of the diffi­cul­ties presented by Bach’s keyboard music is its blithe disre­gard for the primacy of either hand. In the vast majority of keyboard writing, the right hand plays the melody while the left fills out the harmonies with a simple, repet­i­tive accom­pa­ni­ment. Not so in Bach—his coun­ter­point is equal-oppor­tu­nity and all-encom­pass­ing. Just as his harmonic struc­tures arise from melodic inter­play, his keyboard tech­nique evidently evolved to suit his compo­si­tional purposes (his obituary made a point to mention that “all his fingers were equally prac­ticed”). Mehldau, simi­larly, is known for his catholic voicings. If you’ve listened to him impro­vise on Smells Like Teen Spirit or Black­bird, you’ll have noticed an effect similar to the treat­ment of a fugue subject or Lutheran chorale tune in Bach, the melodies emerging from active textures in the tenor or alto voice, plucked out by alter­nat­ing thumbs. This ability to simul­ta­ne­ously think and play in separate, inter­lock­ing layers ties his craft directly back to the Baroque tradi­tion. He approaches the piano not as a mono­lithic row of similar buttons, but as all the manuals of the organ combined. One has the sense that if the piano had a pedal keyboard, he’d make good use of that, too.

In addition to his work as a composer and performer, Bach was also an educator, and much of his music comes from this didactic (and auto-didactic) impulse. The Well-Tempered Clavier is such a work. But the cycle is no dry textbook; its inspi­ra­tion is propor­tion­ate to its compre­hen­sive­ness. Composers have often had special asso­ci­a­tions with musical keys; in his double circum­nav­i­ga­tion of them, Bach seems to have attempted some­thing like char­ac­ter studies of each. In choosing the WTC for the basis of his project, Mehldau casts himself in the role of pupil and acolyte. His compo­si­tions and impro­vi­sa­tions are studies on top of studies, extend­ing that char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, expand­ing the map in direc­tions Bach could’ve never imagined.

There’s certainly a shared love of complex­ity, of harmonic spirals leading to whiplash-quick flights of modu­la­tion. But there’s an equal, and opposite, attrac­tion to the stabil­ity of the pedal tone, a constant under­ly­ing note so-called because it was often played on the organ’s foot-pedal keyboard. A pedal tone doesn’t neces­sar­ily guar­an­tee harmonic stasis, but it provides an anchor that can both ground a passage and give rise to all sorts of devel­op­men­tal possi­bil­i­ties; it’s an aural point of refer­ence by which the listener can better perceive the changes occur­ring around it. This tech­nique is taken to an extreme in After Bach: Ostinato. The repeated-note motto which char­ac­ter­izes Bach’s somber G‑minor fugue is recast as accom­pa­ni­ment and idée fixe; it sounds through the entire piece, with the excep­tion of four heart-stopping bars at the end in which it’s raised to—an antic­i­pa­tory G sharp!—then back to a recon­cil­ia­tory G, which now feels old and new at the same time.

Mehldau seems to take the opposite approach as he launches into After Bach: Flux. He applies chro­matic permu­ta­tions to the E‑minor prelude’s left hand, turning it into some­thing spiky and irre­press­ible, all restless motion. But the music keeps getting drawn back to the magnetic pole of E major. As the piece progresses, that E takes on an increas­ingly central role—it’s been another pedal point the whole time, and the music comes to rest on it gently. Pastorale, too, is neatly divided between change and stabil­ity, its long intro­duc­tory theme wander­ing into nearly atonal terri­tory, a lone figure lost in a land­scape. But again, it’s a trick; in the second part, Mehldau manages to harmo­nize a slowed-down version of the tune with a series of repeated seventh chords. It’s not until After Bach: Dream that he completely unmoors us, letting the intensely chro­matic motion of Bach’s F‑minor fugue drift into unknown terri­tory. Arching arpeg­gios take over the range of the keyboard, churning inex­orably through harmonies as Bach’s subject carries them along.

Finally we arrive at Prayer for Healing, a well-deserved rest from the contra­pun­tal activity that animates much of the album. Gently chiming chords trace the outline of a wistful melody, direct and unem­bell­ished. It is here that we realize Mehldau’s project has gone far beyond impro­vis­ing on Bach, or even in the style of Bach; it’s “before” and “after” but it’s also why and because. To play Bach is neces­sar­ily to be able to juggle and recon­cile compet­ing thoughts, to hold simul­ta­ne­ous contra­dic­tory opinions. In an increas­ingly polar­ized, compart­men­tal­ized world, to study Bach is an attempt to view some­thing from every angle, from all possible posi­tions. Perhaps the answer to Mehldau’s prayer has been here all along.

–Timo Andres, February 2018

I’m playing a solo piano recital in New York next week, my first such concert in a little while. It’s at Barge­mu­sic on Friday, March 9 at 8.00 PM (a reliable, old-fash­ioned time for a piano recital). Here’s a little blurb I wrote about the same program for San Fran­cisco Performances.