Our big EU Jazz Blues Festival has started in Brussels, the administrative capital of the EU, Belgium, and will spread across most of the 27 EU member states. It is one of the largest and most prestigious festivals in the European Union. Look forward to seeing us at concerts in your capitals and the daily reports published on our website.
Brad Mehldau looked like a calm man as he walked to the piano, first turning around, bowing politely to the audience. The Brussels concert hall is undoubtedly a familiar place; he has played here many times since his solo concert in 2004.
In his memoir Mehldau reflects,”the very fine line between loneliness and solitude, reflection; being alone, always appealed to me when I was a kid.”
That tension, between retreat and communion, still defines his presence onstage. At the Barbican as part of the summer jazz series, flanked by longtime collaborator Jorge Rossy on drums and Danish bassist Felix Moseholm, the trio fully realise the music.
Mehldau’s head bowed, eyes closed, the concert hall receded. He listened closely, empathetic to the audience and his fellow musicians.
In the end, however, it is probably just another well-appointed venue among the many other places the pianist has visited on his travels around the world. One might suspect that he was comforted not so much by the audience’s reception as by the simple fact that he was in his most natural environment: on stage, under the spotlights.
Growing up in New Hampshire, Mehldau found it difficult to feel comfortable, both personally and musically. In his autobiography, “Brad Mehldau: Composition: Building a Personal Canon, Part One” (Equinox Publishing, 2023), he candidly reveals the insecurities that plagued him during his formative years.
The musical insecurities were born from a sense of need to honor the jazz tradition, many of whose historical followers were still alive when Mehldau began seeking gigs in New York in the late 1980s, while also burning to say something new.
Over the years, Mehldau has managed his musical dichotomy by dividing his wide-ranging musical interests: he has studied classical music as a solo pianist and performed song series. he revealed his prog-rock and electronic influences on the album “Taming the Dragon” (Nonesuch Records, 2014); and he delved into Americana with mandolinist Chris Till.
The journey has never been dull. More often than not, it has been exhilarating and instructive.
As this performance attested, Mehldau’s sincere pursuit of such diverse musical directions has significantly influenced and refined the music of his jazz trio. His repertoire spans a century, from Cole Porter to Radiohead. His language spans several more. Everything is grist for his mill.
From the first few bars of “End of August,” with its relentless rhythmic gyrations in the left hand that provide the basis for the stream-of-consciousness in the right hand, it was clear that Mehldau relishes the yin and yang of structure as opposed to free expression. However, the bravura of the Art Tatum-style solos, which had previously been part of the young Mehldau’s repertoire, was now delivered in doses that were powerfully effective. The lyricism, sometimes tightly wrapped, sometimes loose and aching, is now more prevalent.
To this end, Mehldau had excellent partners: bassist Felix Moseholm and drummer Jorge Rossi. Moseholm’s few solo parts reflected his leisurely singing approach to his instrument, but it was his deep awareness of his role in the trio as a powerful presenter and sharp-eared provocateur that was consistently impressive.
You could see how he listened; his attention swung from the pianist to the drummer and back like the pendulum of a clock.
Returning to the band after Rossi’s 20-year absence, Mehldau has a deep musical knowledge: at the time was the Mehldau-Ross trio. In the aforementioned book, Mehldau describes him as “a musician who happens to be a drummer…” The Spaniard’s painterly freedom, a mix of pastel elegance and earthy tones, felt subdued but undoubtedly played a central role in the action.
He embraced the task with a cheerful version of Sam Rivers’s “Beatrice,” and Mehldau’s waltz, the then-current “Anxiety,” with elegant calm and breathless enthusiasm.
It was probably no coincidence that, having reunited with Rossi, Mehldau decided to revisit some old repertoire. “Young Werther,” illustrated like “The Restlessness” from “Introducing Brad Mehldau” (Warner Bros., 1995), may have been born of Mehldau’s love of German romanticism, but tonight Mehldau was equally inspired by the blues as the trio began their groove.
Mehldau’s current trio magnifies his interior world. Rossy, Mehldau’s drummer during the seminal Art of the Trio years, plays with a gossamer touch, his brushwork tracing Mehldau’s harmonies.
Their shared history is clear, there’s an easy familiarity to watching them play together. Beside him, Moseholm, a rising star barely into his thirties, brings a supple, singing quality to the bass, his lines both grounding and airborne.
The trio open the set with some of Mehldau’s original music. Longtime fans will recognise A Walk In The Park and At A Loss from Mehldau’s early albums.
That shouldn’t suggest predictability, only that the trio’s collective explorations are set against familiar roadmap. Their performance has all the hallmarks of Mehldau’s signature style, a keen sense of grace and patience arrive in tandem with his improvisations.
About halfway through, Moseholm and Rossi began to work, leaving Mehldau to lead the undulating baroque and blues path. When the trio reunited, the three musicians fanned the flames even further, creating a seamless path to a free-form reworking of Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On.”
For all the excitement of the trio’s straightforward, post-bop adventure, the real magic lay in the slower tunes, where Mehldau extracted a deep lyricism. A captivating Latin reading of Leslie Bricusse’s “When I Look In Your Eyes” was one such highlight, and Mehldau’s gentle, bluesy ballad “Love is Fragile” was another.
With his keyboards on, his head cocked like an antenna waiting for signals, the pianist seemed both hypnotized and inspired, a conduit and a motor.
Elliott Smith’s “Between The Bars” served as the first encore. After a wonderful solo from Moseholm, Mehldau steered the singer-songwriter’s brittle lyricism into more dynamic, blues-flecked terrain.
The crowd’s enthusiasm brought the trio back from the wings to deliver “Annabelle”—a gentle swinger that ended a memorable set on a bright, uplifting note.
Mehldau seems to have come to terms with the fact that there is indeed nothing new under the sun, only different ways—even brilliant ways—to say the same thing.
In Mehldau’s 2023 memoir, Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part I, he traces his early life with unsparing candour, from a suburban Connecticut childhood marked by adoption’s dislocations to the turbulence of addiction. He writes of being abused by a teacher, of the ache of unbelonging, and of how music became both refuge and reckoning. More than an autobiography, the book is a map of artistic salvation, his influences spanning Billy Joel, Supertramp, German Romantic composers like Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. He draws inspiration from literary figures like James Joyce and Thomas Mann, as well as critics like Harold Bloom and Terry Eagleton. Onstage at the Barbican, none of this history is named but it pulses through every phrase of his music.
The first encore delivered a luminous rendition of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars”, a song Mehldau has carried for years, and one that will appear on his forthcoming album, Ride into the Sun (Nonesuch, August 2025). His connection to Smith runs deeper than repertoire; During his Los Angeles years, Mehldau played alongside Smith and Jon Brion at Largo. At the Barbican, Mehldau’s fingers trace Smith’s bittersweet harmonies with tenderness. Always hovering slightly above the music, meeting the melody with restraint. When Rossy and Moseholm joined, they deepened its intimacy, their interplay a delicate counterpoint to Mehldau’s aching phrasing. The arrangement honoured Smith’s genius for marrying light and shadow, but it was unmistakably Mehldau’s, a testament to how deeply he metabolises the music.
What lingers, long after the final notes, is the sense of having witnessed something rare: not a performance, but an act of shared solitude. In Mehldau’s hands, the piano becomes both confessional and sanctuary; an instrument for meeting the unmet parts of the self. His gift lies in making his interior feel universal, turning inwardness into a kind of communion.
