Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau on reinterpreting the Beatles

Q23:37Brad Mehldau on The Beatles

Grammy-winning pianist Brad Mehldau is a huge figure in the world of jazz, but he's not adverse to throwing in the odd Nirvana, Radiohead or Neil Young cover into his repertoire.

He recently released a new solo piano album, Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles, which features his interpretations of nine songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, plus one by George Harrison. The album ends with a David Bowie classic that draws a connection between the Beatles and pop songwriters who followed.

In an interview with Q's Tom Power, which has been edited for length and clarity, Mehldau spoke about the record. Here are some highlights from their conversation.

Congratulations on the record. I really loved it. Why did you want to do a Beatles record?

Oh, thanks. It came about, honestly, from an invitation I got from the Paris Philharmonie to do a full program of a Beatles concert. So in fact, it wasn't completely my idea and I was a bit hesitant to do that, maybe because it sort of puts a frame around the music that you might not naturally put yourself. You know, when I've done Beatles songs, and when I do them in a performance, they're usually in the context of a lot of other stuff and then they kind of find their way in there organically.

Anyways, having said all that, once I started into this assignment and I had the invitation to do a full Beatles program, I actually was really excited about it and found that, actually, it was kind of cool to have that frame. Because then it allowed me to really think about, well, what do I love about the Beatles so much? And how can I kind of hone in on that and accentuate that within a program?

A lot of these songs are really well-known and really well-loved — and I think whenever you're talking about the Beatles, you're talking about well-loved and well-known songs. Is that a challenge for you when it comes to interpreting this music?

Definitely. Absolutely. And it's probably why I shied away from the anthems, let's call them: Hey Jude, Let It Be or Yesterday. I wouldn't know what to add to something that's already so complete.

You know, in the case of I Am the Walrus, I kind of opted for that and a few other tunes that had a strangeness, which to me is also a feature of their oeuvre. A strange quality in the harmony, in the production, in the lyrical content, in the whole package.

I can't imagine what it must have been like for the listener to hear this record, you know, and to hear this on Magical Mystery Tour for the first time. But putting it in a piano solo version has its own challenge, you know, to sort of, "OK, how can I take all these components and reduce it onto the piano?"

Well, there's a lot of noise happening in that. Like there's a lot of instruments in the original recording of I Am the Walrus. There's a lot of conflicting melody lines. I can't imagine that's easy to interpret for the solo piano.

Yeah, certainly, certainly. So you kind of have to pick and choose. In one sense, that's why this was a really fun project for me. I got the assignment right in the middle of lockdown and knew it was going to be lockdown for a while. So I knew I had the space to hunker down and take the time to really get into the nuts and bolts of what you're talking about. You know, all the architecture of a tune like this and you make a reduction of it, which is something that classical pianists get to do in this kind of virtuoso piano tradition.

John Lennon used to call Paul McCartney songs like Your Mother Should Know, Maxwell's Silver Hammer and When I'm Sixty-Four his "granny songs." What do you like about them?

Nice, I've never heard that. That's funny because those are the three that I would relate to as well. And they have this winsome quality about them that's very endearing and a little frumpy in the best possible sense, you know.

So here's what I love about them. One thing is that they swing. Well, let's not call it swing like we're talking about the incredible swing of, you know, the Miles Davis band on Kind of Blue or something like that. But it's more a kind of lilt that swings a bit.

Again, this is one of those features — we hear it in the Beatles — but it's almost normal now, but something they started, I think, and brought into pop music. And a couple other bands that started doing that around the same time are the Beach Boys, like on a tune like God Only Knows. It also has this kind of thing.

I was a bit taken aback — in a good way — that the last track on this Beatles concert is Life on Mars, a David Bowie song. Why is that the last track on the record?

This was sort of a concert presentation. So let's say you're a classical musician and you do a program of Chopin, and you do a bunch of really virtuosic Chopin stuff. Huge applause, called back to the stage, you're going to do an encore. You might do more Chopin, but a move might be — what the classical musicians would do — is something that Chopin informed, that came after Chopin. So for instance, you might do a Rachmaninoff étude.

And then everybody can see, "Oh, wow, this is so great. Look at the legacy of Chopin." And also sort of give the nudge to the audience to think about these connections and make them curious. "What was that? That was Rachmaninoff. Oh, see how there's a connection there — kind of sounds like Chopin."

So David Bowie, Beatles, same kind of thing. You know, you've got the Beatles that come along and they put the piano in the middle of the music in a different kind of way. The piano had been in rock and roll, you know, something that wasn't blues-based all the time, something that was a different kind of harmony, let's say. And so then David Bowie comes along and makes Hunky Dory.

And there's the piano in the middle of it and it's very melodramatic, and it's almost kind of virtuosic. It's a great piano performance on its own terms. It's actually Rick Wakeman who went on to play with Yes. And I think that the predecessor for that in terms of the piano is a track like A Day in the Life, which closes Sgt. Pepper's.

The piano is so instrumental in the whole thing, and it's the centre of the music. And there's a weightiness and almost a melodrama to it that's very romantic and appealing. So that tune on the record is sort of an encore, you know, an afterthought to maybe see what came after the Beatles.

The full interview with Brad Mehldau is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Brad Mehldau produced by Ben Edwards.