Brad Mehldau
‘Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles’
Nonesuch Records

An outstanding contemporary songwriter, Jimmy Webb, once told me about a trick he used whenever he was trying to sell a song to one of the heavyweight star singers — especially Sinatra. Rather than work hard to make the song sound as good as possible, he would deliberately underperform. Mr. Webb knows that this would touch off a tingle in Sinatra’s interpretative skills and his competitive nature. The singer would hear that Jimmy wasn’t getting everything he could out of the song, and he would start to think of ways he could improve upon the composer’s performance.

This is the main reason why nearly all of the so-called covers of the classic songs of the Beatles seem entirely beside the point. Unlike their colleague, Bob Dylan, who possesses what even his fans would describe as an idiosyncratic voice, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and even Starr all had remarkable vocal chops, and the original driving force behind the group was the miraculous harmony of Lennon and McCartney, which everyone seemed to recognize even when they were teenagers. The Beatles did more than just write their songs for themselves: For them, the composing, arranging, recording, and performing were all essentially the same process.  

There are a million things one could do with “Blue Skies,” but “A Day in the Life” is so perfect as it stands as part of the “Sgt. Pepper” album that there’s really nothing else to be done with it. The notion of “improving” on it, even as Sinatra did with Jimmy Webb’s songs, is not only out of the question, but it’s hard to imagine that there could be something new that could be done with any of the great Beatles numbers that would be even a fraction as good as the originals.  

Born in 1970, Brad Mehldau is easily the biggest jazz piano headliner of his generation — what Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock and the late Chick Corea were and are to slightly older jazz fans. Still, the odds were against him when he recorded this album, released a few months ago, as a live solo piano concert in September 2020. 

This was still the pre-vaccinated height of the pandemic, and he had decided to record the 11 solo piano tracks live in concert at the Philharmonie de Paris. Even though each number ends with the sound of a loud, enthusiastic crowd, the situation still must have been somewhat dicey, performing this music before a house of cautious, masked Frenchmen. 

Regardless, “Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles” is an unqualified success. Mr. Mehladau begins in an unusual place, with one of John Lennon’s strangest, most psychedelic texts, “I am the Walrus”; in 1967, the random, abstract imagery of the lyrics must have seemed especially baffling to anyone over age 30. 

Mr. Mehldau surprises us by dwelling on what might have seemed the most conventional part of the song: Lennon deliberately emphasized his weirder moments by contrasting them with the conventional picturesque thought of a proper “English garden.” Mr. Mehldau dwells on those parts of the melody and as a result makes me think more about sitting in that old-fashioned garden than it does about comparing oneself to a walrus or an “eggman.” 

“Your Mother Should Know,” conversely, was Mr. McCartney’s hymn to intergenerational respect and understanding, and as such, was embraced at the time by a very popular, old-guard “trad jazz” trumpeter-singer, Kenny Ball. Mr. Mehldau sets in a solid two-beat and phrases it with a nod to older piano styles; in fact, at different points it sounds like it could have been written by Scott Joplin. Likewise, “I Saw Her Standing There” reflects upon the Beatles’ fondness for early rock superstar pianist-singers like Jerry Lee Lewis and especially Little Richard, and on their own influences, like boogie-woogie keyboard superstars Maurice Rocco and even Meade Lux Lewis.

Reviewing the album, my colleague Martin Johnson observed that Mr. Mehldau “aims for smaller changes rather than full-blown reinvention.” Indeed, that’s the whole idea: Why reduce the songs down to their essential chord changes, the way the early beboppers did with Gershwin?  What’s the point of playing Beatles songs if you’re not going to play the melodies? “He Said, She Said” and “For No One” are more or less the same tunes as heard on “Revolver” (1966). Both are rather delicate and full of melancholy, the first describing a rather fragile relationship that sounds like it’s just about to fall apart, and the second sounding like that has already happened. 

One might expect  Mr. Mehldau to recast the 1964 “Baby’s in Black” as a jazz waltz, but he surprised me by slowing it down and treating it more like a Gospel number, reminding me of the halting, soulful fashion in which Ray Charles reinterprets the French song “The Three Bells.” “If I Needed Someone” is tentative and ambiguous, alert to the possibility of love.  Likewise, “Here, There and Everywhere” is more optimistic still, though Mr. Mehldau plays it so slowly, he gives it a deliberately tentative quality, essentially joyous but somewhat guarded.

“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” the happiest song ever about a murderous rampage, begins rubato and stretches out the melody to the point where it briefly becomes a dead ringer for the 1966 popular song “For Once in My Life.” When he gets to the familiar refrain, which carries the words of the title, the number becomes rather like a slow vaudeville dance. Somehow I picture Bert Williams or, more recently, Ben Vereen, strutting to it with measured, deliberate steps, like “Nobody” or “Mr. Cellophane” in the musical “Chicago.” 

The two final tracks are exceptional. “Golden Slumbers” has always been one of my personal favorite Beatles items — both on its own and in its familiar place as part of the amazing medley on the 1969 album “Abbey Road.”  The original version is barely 90 seconds, which is far too short, and thus Mr. Mehldau’s interpretation, which is more than eight minutes long, is highly welcome. 

“Golden Slumbers” is both a song of nostalgia and one warning us to be wary of pure nostalgia; it’s about going back home and, at the same time, not going home. Although famously inspired by an Elizabethan playwright, Thomas Dekker, I first heard it around the same time I was reading “Alice in Wonderland” — more archaic English lit — and somehow it remains linked in my mind to Lewis Carroll’s “All in a Golden Afternoon.” Mr. Mehldau’s extended, elegiac reading is entirely golden and not at all slumber-inducing. 

He winds up, with a slight perverseness that Lennon would have appreciated, with a non-Beatles song, David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” Is Mr. Mehldau making it a point to show us that there are other British rock songwriters whose work is worthy of this level of scrutiny and attention? If so, he succeeds.