{"id":1980,"date":"2024-05-15T20:26:53","date_gmt":"2024-05-16T03:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/?p=1980"},"modified":"2024-05-15T20:26:55","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T03:26:55","slug":"music-brad-mehldau-so-smart-so-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/music-brad-mehldau-so-smart-so-good\/","title":{"rendered":"music: Brad Mehldau so smart so good"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I love Brad Mehldau&#8217;s solo &#8220;Blackbird&#8221; the most of all <a href=\"\/blog\/2022\/09\/music-a-chorus-of-blackbirds\/\">the recent jazz versions<\/a>, his album of Beatles is wonderful, his own work is all over the place (<em>Jacob&#8217;s Ladder<\/em> and <em>Finding Gabriel<\/em> are intense), and this interview is solid gold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Brad Mehldau: The Greatest Jazz Pianist of Our Generation\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4oT7O-ujYoo?start=3174&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The mystery of music<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At 52:56: &#8220;More modal over pedal points,.. but he&#8217;s going to put some <em>Giant Steps<\/em> in there\u2026 it&#8217;s the blues but it&#8217;s something mixolydian&#8221;. It&#8217;s a delight to hear Brad Mehldau talk and play great John Coltrane musical phrases, but understanding what&#8217;s going on is somehow beyond me. I hear beautiful changes and evolution as he plays; I can read music notation, I know some music theory and even enjoy the physics and math behind, for example, a perfect fifth interval, I can get lost in Wikipedia articles about <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Modal_jazz\">modal jazz<\/a> and the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mixolydian_mode\">mixolydian<\/a>, I can laboriously pick out simple melodies&#8230; but I can&#8217;t grasp it. I hear the notes of achingly beautiful chords following one another, but am almost incapable of identifying them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Instead of pitying myself, I took a basic music college course where we practiced singing simple scores and notating melodies we heard, and it was so frustrating: I could write down and sing the interval between two notes (there are cheat sheets that <a href=\"https:\/\/flypaper.soundfly.com\/tips\/interval-cheat-sheet-songs-to-help-you-remember-common-intervals\/\">give examples of intervals in famous music<\/a>), but my hearing of the third, fourth, fifth, &#8230; notes afterwards was so affected by what came before that I would get them wrong 80% of the time, and chords were impossible. I couldn&#8217;t believe I got an &#8216;A&#8217; on the course. I suspect my brain only has one neuron available for music recognition, so notes all at once (chords) and sequences over time (melody) just overflow it. Back to pity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love Brad Mehldau&#8217;s solo &#8220;Blackbird&#8221; the most of all the recent jazz versions, his album of Beatles is wonderful, his own work is all over the place (Jacob&#8217;s Ladder and Finding Gabriel are intense), and this interview is solid &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/music-brad-mehldau-so-smart-so-good\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1981,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980\/revisions\/1981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}