Record club - Elegiac Cycle

my transcendental experience of listening to Brad Mehldau play solo

Today I would love to recommend a piano solo album that I particularly love:

Elegiac Cycle by Brad Mehldau.
Warner Bros. 1999

This record represents for me the perfect balance between classical music and jazz and it is an album that has influenced my piano playing and composing greatly.

from Brad’s website:

Elegiac Cycle, recorded in 1999, is a group of nine originals conceived for solo piano that form a cycle. The opening ‘Bard’ theme crops up throughout the record in different guises, and returns at the end. This idea of a theme reappearing at the end, transfigured, is an integral part of romantic song cycles like Schubert’s Winterreise and cyclical music like Schumann’s Fantasy in C, and Mehldau takes his cue from those kinds of models. Some songs are direct elegies to people – ‘Goodbye Storyteller,’ or ‘Elegy for William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg’.

Others are ‘meta-elegies’ that deal with the idea of elegy itself in all its aspects, like ‘Memory’s Tricks’ and ‘Resignation.’ A starting point theme-wise and conceptually was ‘Lament for Linus,’ an earlier composition that appeared on ‘Art of the Trio, Vol. I.’ The title refers to Rilke’s first poem in the set of ‘Duino Elegies.’ Mehldau explains: “Rilke’s insight in those poems is that elegy is an acknowledgment of our mortality, but it’s a healing, cathartic, process. Instead of merely resigning ourselves to the inevitability of death and loss, we can understand those things as exalted and uniquely mortal, worthy of celebration, and pay tribute to them in an elegy.”

Here is a short video where I tell you the story of how I came to discover this music for the first time at a concert at the North Sea Jazz festival and how that influenced me in a very deep way
I also add links to the album and to further readings: