Brad Mehldau When I Fall In Love

I feel a little bit frustrated when I try to listen with revisionist ears to the Mehldau & Rossy Trio’s When I Fall In Love. And that is because Brad Mehldau, at 23, before many people knew who he was, is not unrecognizable. Pianistically, he’s pretty much there—all that remains are refinements and extremes. I think that I’m going to get the unfamiliar jolt of his averageness; instead I get the familiar jolt of his excellence. The drummer Jorge Rossy would evolve in a more thorough and categorical way, toward a kind of off-handed, casual complexity. The mechanics of the connection between Mehldau and Rossy would evolve as well. The trio on this album, recorded at La Cova del Drac in Barcelona in October, 1993, includes the bassist Mario Rossy—the drummer’s brother—who can also be heard on Fresh Sound’s two volumes of New York-Barcelona Crossing, the quartet recordings from Barcelona made earlier that year. By the time of When I Fall In Love, Mehldau was playing in fast, flowing, articulated strokes in the standard “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” arranged in five-four; Charlie Parker’s “Anthropology,” his own “At A Loss,” and “Countdown,” the John Coltrane étude, in which you hear him developing the the idea of two hands in separate rhythms: three in one, four in another. (He would do much more with that idea, and he would keep “Countdown” in his repertoire, revisiting it three more times on record.) In “Convalescent,” another early Mehldau original, a threnody with a pedalpoint bass, he seems to gesture beyond jazz’s conventions. He hadn’t written much of his own yet, but he is already articulating a way slightly apart from the emotion and design of the jazz tradition as played by most of his peers—a kind of careful, counterintuitive, semi-baroque romanticism. It is in the two ballads here—“I Fall In Love Too Easily” and the title track, both with unaccompanied introductions and codas—where Mehldau really lets you take the measure of him, and makes you consider his context. I hear a little grandiosity in it, but of a much lesser kind than you would come to hear among his orbit in New York at that time. But Mehldau is doing something a little different on this album, and particularly on “When I Fall In Love.” He isn’t playing for the scream. He’s using most of the instrument, but with a strict sense of pacing and design—notice his two quotations of “Never Let Me Go” at the end of the opening and closing themes with the trio—and with a generous amount of space. (Young players tend not to be comfortable playing at tempos this slow. ) He abandons and then resumes his relationship to the pulse, and he keeps calm. He’s grounded; he’s staying where he is. He isn’t chasing after the song. He’s making it come to him. —Ben Ratliff, 2018