Page 65 - Jazz

On the obsession of the ME – Brad Mehldau

(In memory of my friend Sergiu Ştirbu)

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 Rückblick – 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

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