Word: bache
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Like Evans, Mehldau prefers the trio format, performing last week at Scullers with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy. A so-called piano intellectual, Mehldau lived up to his reputation, often quoting Bach-not only Johannes Sebastian, but Carl Philip Emanuel, whose "Solfeggio in C minor" was heard in skeletal form during one improvisation...
...that there is something inherently preferable about melody over improvisation, or ballad tempo over fugue. But Mehldau, like Bach, is at his best slowed down. Like Glenn Gould playing 32nd trills as eighth notes, Mehldau proves that virtuosity is not dependent on quick pace alone. Yet even at a more leisurely speed, Mehldau's improvisational line exhibits an overall concern with counterpoint, which at once indicates his post-bop tendencies and classical training. But here they tend to be more appropriate, as Mehldau's impromptus have a tendency to fall into the trap of classical meter at brisker tempos...
...benefit began with Bach's "Chaconne," a solo violin piece...
...just about midday on a busy street in Hanoi last week, a three-car convoy pulled up to the sidewalk that runs along Truc Bach Lake and disgorged a small group of Americans. Leading the pack was a tour guide with a head of white hair, a stiff gait and enormous Ray-Ban sunglasses. "Here it is, ladies and gentlemen!" John McCain announced as he paced over to the modest concrete monument that commemorates the day in October 1967 when a Vietnamese missile shot down his plane and he was pulled from the lake by an irate mob. And unless...
...could go to synagogue and sing a Bach cantata then I'd be there every week," he says...