On the obsession of the me – Brad Mehldau

I remembered a pianist belonging to the galaxy of the ’90s: Brad Mehldau. The tracks Resignation and Goodbye Storyteller from his album Elegiac Cycle are to be found in the “appreciation” section of a list I have labelled “best for me”. I used to listen to them at times when I knew I was going through a period in which I was extremely sensitive-sensitivised (translucent, I could say) and during which I was making an effort “not to let my thoughts show”. Don’t we all do that most of the time in such circumstances?

After the death of my friend Sergiu, as I thought about the acquaintances I still had in the immediate vicinity – or somewhere further away, but still recoverable as personal space – I reached the conclusion that it was enough for me to know well the people I am close to and who I will meet up with when they feel the need of me. Since only then can I be strongly charged with their energy which can put a distance between me and painful feelings. Otherwise, every morning I encounter the me who is not “me” and who pursues me relentlessly, reminding me every second when it comes up against the supposed emotional autism of the surrounding world that it is only a defensive weapon. But I long ago stopped believing in this alibi.

These thoughts prompt me to put on Places and to reread the names of the tracks while from the adjoining office comes the sound of a computer keyboard and a door opening and closing, a bell briefly going hysterical and someone who is apparently about to come in but who luckily is looking for someone else and leaves me in Mehldau’s care.

Brad Mehldau is considered a relatively solitary pianist, tapping out delicately with the ends of his fingers what in German is a Ruckblick – a superb “retrospective look” which very few of us have the power, strength and willingness to bear: touching time past with one’s fingertips, which is much more a subtle nostalgic tingle than a wish to recover and rearrange and re-evaluate something that, seen through the prism of existence as the flowing-away of time, can no longer mean anything but a touch of, let us say, Chopin, a distant relation of the introspective manner and yet close to it. Personal, deaf dialogue from which only sounds manage to survive.]

Listening to his sublime lyrical tumultuous dramatically and abruptly calibrated Paranoid Android (the version on the Largo album) I realise that I am living in a primordial primal state (detached from any coherent whole organism) like a soft vulnerable cell which passes alongside other soft vulnerable cells, enclosed in its soft vulnerable carapace, becoming more and more afraid, as time grows shorter, of its translucent nature which might allow its thoughts to escape.

And this process makes me believe that something equally detailed, precise is somehow going on in the other cells which move through space in order to find shelter and functionality in an organism that is coherent and complete, only that they have to do with a self-control which wisely ignores deep and troubling perceptions.

And the “me” that I have to wear like an intruder, because it is totally different from how it would be reasonable for it to be, will forever walk in front of me wrapping me in a soft vulnerable carapace, will always walk in front of me dragging me after it at a speed that becomes more and more evident, towards that moment that I have always feared, though that moment will be precisely my separation from “it”, the moment that will be, perhaps, together with my release from “it”, the moment of my diving into and blending with that coherent and whole being which has been waiting for me right from the beginning, which has always been there, full of the affection that I have always yearned for, the supreme act of touching all the thoughts that I have kept hidden and which, in essence, have meant nothing but just the essence of some big words, so big that I have always been afraid to speak them. And since I have had the instinctive feeling that they would not have had the same significance away from that with which I had charged them. Or in other words, once touched by “earth” they would have discharged their power to shine their light within, and that light it is impossible to describe...

This is what usually happens. And even in the case of Brad Mehldau (a pupil of Bill Evans), who succeeded, among other things, in bringing about a great meeting-duet with Pat Metheny in something “that must have been written in the stars”, as one jazz commentator says, and even in the five The Art of the Trio albums, it happens no differently. “What you receive must happen at a profound level in you yourself, just as only you can reveal yourself and as you will never be able to make yourself known”, my friend Ioachim tells me – someone whom, in the end, even I have never known in his material appearance.

But even How Long Has This Been Going On? is more than a piece of music.