Once again, try listening to the song as you read this…
Once in a while I come across an artist that seems to whisper directly to me, there is a kind of shared-space, a communion wherein I seem to merge with something the artist knows. Brad Mehldau is such an artist. When this happens it’s easy to slip into a meditative frame of mind… like witnessing an unspeakable sunset, an awakened opening subsiding.
For me, this old standard is a study in time and space, Mehldau plays like a sensual lover, as if kissing the notes, at times behind the heart beat, and ahead of the next… A warm-breathing slow rhythm, up close… couldn’t be more personal. A dance and melody of love, a study of restraint, and allowing.
More than the space of sound, the gentle flow offers, it gives permission to the listener – the Lover — to go deeper, and I do. A luminous listening field widens and includes more than sound… a heart flutters among steady beats as Space opens and life is displayed before me… field after rolling field of history… Pockets of time, space for the unexpected… Hills and valleys of childhood memories and impressions… decades of decisions, and those flashes flesh-out an unfinished sense of myself, leaving the unsaid and unknown. A discordant note flowing with the smooth and silky, an edge of the future feel, anticipating… A not-quite, halting-hesitant kiss between lovers, the intimate feel of warm breath…
Other senses join in, a kind of synesthetic symphony of touch, scent, and taste waft over and through the branches of my being. Lift and lilt float my thoughts in a melodic stream of sweet and tart, discord and harmonic, over and undertones, marking and embarking on a rhythm of time.
I am nearly overwhelmed by the sense of…. The nearness of ‘me’… The not-here of Now.
David, this is beautiful, both the music and your appreciation of it. –Michael