A night of jazz giants with Brad Mehldau and Christian McBride

Brad Mehldau Photo by Elena Olivo La Jolla Music Society Thanks to the La Jolla Music Society jazz heavyweights Brad Mehldau piano and Christian McBride bass paid their first visits to San Diego since and respectively Each is a giant indeed a legend in his own right on Oct telepathically feeding off the other s mastery they transcended their individual virtuosities As their stage patter verified the two first met in New York s Augie s Jazz Bar in and later partnered in the innovative Joshua Redman quartet that produced s iconic Mood Swing album and two later reunion releases RoundAgain and LongGone In the past meager years they ve reunited for trio tours and now are performing as a duo If your image of piano-bass duos is mellow lounge-y standards then Mehldau and McBride s La Jolla outing offered certain sharp schooling The eight-song -minute venture ranged from jazz standards Charlie Parker s Cheryl Jimmy Van Heusen s Here s That Rainy Day to modern jazz monuments Coltrane s Satellite to self-penned originals McBride s Shade of the Cedar Tree written for pianist Cedar Walton Mehldau s Love Is Fragile Christian McBride Photo by Ebru Yildiz La Jolla Music Society Special place was given to cross- genre gems Bruno Martino s Estate Summer Blind Faith s Can t Find My Way Home where Mehldau took a solo turn and JaNet DuBois and Jeff Barry s TV theme song Jeffersons Movin on Up which served as McBride s solo conveyance Their encore was a lovely rendering of Stevie Wonder s Golden Lady Dressed in black Mehldau sat low and far from his Steinway grand his backside on his bench s front half knees angled degrees under the keyboard Playing as if by feel eyes often closed he grimaced or rocked as the music dictated Clarity and beauty of tone impeccable swing improvisatory surety and grace tasteful restraint Mehldau has all these to burn Only in his long solo closing the set finale Love Is Fragile did he seem to briefly overstay his welcome A big man with a big instrument McBride pawed his Mother Earth upright with easy efficiency and idiosyncratic intuitive touch In Movin on Up McBride simultaneously voiced the bass vocal and choral parts and his vibrato note-bending percussive string-slapping and tasteful bowing in Love Is Fragile manifested just how much texture color and range a master bassist can deliver Playing of such skill musicality and personality obliterates images of the bass as mere time-keeper or groove-setter But the magic lay in Mehldau and McBride s uncanny interplay Listening empathetically they completed each other s phrases or traded roles Mehldau sometimes setting the foundational rhythm McBride sometimes fronting the melody anticipated each other with counter-lines or intertwined rhythmic and harmonic strands or only dropped out to give the other space This master class in jazz duo technique made a event for their inclusion among legendary duos like Ellington Blanton Evans Gomez and Kenny Barron or Herbie Hancock Ron Carter The choice of Bruno Martino Blind Faith Stevie Wonder and the Jeffersons theme nicely captured Mehldau and McBride s omnivorous careers as genre-melding ambassadors of mostly American music not jazz alone For his part Mehldau has written more than a dozen pieces for non-jazz instrumentation partnered with classical stars Joshua Bell and Renee Fleming and interpreted the music of the Beatles Radiohead and Paul Simon but also Bach and Faur McBride has played with everyone from James Brown Paul McCartney and Sting to the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York Philharmonic on top of his funk RB projects film TV work and artistic leadership of the Newport Jazz Festival and the LA Philharmonic s Jazz Series This was no question a night of great jazz But as Mehldau s on-stage reference to our tour here in our troubled republic hinted it was also something more ambitious and ultimately more healing