`Brad Mehldau?" said a friend, an excellent all-round musician. "I heard his solo concert here last year. He's the past, present and future of jazz. Tell him I'll have his babies any time."
Well, she meant at least the first bit, which was an astute comment on the young pianist. Mehldau, a doctor's son born in Florida 30 years ago, is highly intelligent, articulate and well-read, very conscious of the weight of tradition and the irony of having to ignore it in search of self-expression. He's also a thoroughly individual player whose music, refreshingly different, continues to deepen and evolve.
But he's hardly a radical, breaking violently with what has gone before. Rather, he works in a kind of musical earthquake zone where the plate tectonics of the past rub uneasily against those of an unpredictable present, constantly forcing changes of scenery and, with them, fresh perspectives. It's a notable characteristic of his celebrated trio, with drummer Jorge Rossy and bassist Larry Grenadier, which will play in Ireland for the first time next Friday.
They've been together for almost five years now and though there are precedents for such longevity in the shifting world of jazz - the Modern Jazz Quartet, Oscar Peterson's and Bill Evans's various long-lived trios, Dave Brubeck's quartet with Paul Desmond - it's still comparatively rare. And rarer still to find a group whose members, over such a length of time, are constantly pushing each other to create.
So what is it that sustains this musical relationship with Rossy and Grenadier?
"Both of them appealed to me, and still do, because of their attitude towards music in general, which is very, very open-minded and they don't get stuck into a preconceived style with whatever situation we're in," Mehldau says. "So that means when I bring in a tune, whether it's an original or a standard, it's really just this sort of road map I'm putting in front of them that's pretty open-ended.
"And from there we're going to develop something, starting from that point, with no comparison to `well, try to do something like such and such, or whatever'. And even if you don't say those things sometimes, often there's a liability of being so aware of history and everything that's come before. And those guys have the ability to really almost wilfully forget everything and really get into what's happening right now."
There's a further kind of irony here. Mehldau has often written and spoken of his love for German Romanticism, epitomised in the music of such early examples as Schubert and Beethoven, or a full-blown later Romantic such as Schumann. At the same time, he acknowledges an interest in perhaps less sanguine, 20th-century German writers such as Thomas Mann, the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. So, more than most jazz musicians, especially American ones, he's aware of the burdens of history and its implications.
"The Germans, in general, have an incredible awareness of history," he says. "In fact, that thing you were talking about, encompassing the past and the present and the future, that sort of mixed liability and asset of knowing the history so much, that's a real German thing - in someone like Hegel and then how his philosophy bled into Marx and still sort of reverberates even like in pop culture today.
"So that's a real interesting thing to look at, because there's no easy answer for how you use history," he adds. "For something like jazz it's really interesting to me, because jazz seems to have a real shaky relationship with history because of, you know, the stress on improvisation, things like that. It doesn't depend quite as much on writing."
And that, he acknowledges, is one of the core attractions of jazz for him. "It's always a novelty for me to go out and really be doing something spontaneously; so much of jazz is spontaneous. You're going out and you're improvising. And I think that's what the audience digs, too - because there does have to be an audience. Oftentimes, when we are talking about music, we get into this thing with musicians where it's almost as if the audience doesn't exist and you're just talking about why you enjoy it. But I think that sort of sublime thing is really in the audience, too.
"And they get off. When I listen to Coltrane's A Love Supreme or any classic record, any of the Miles Davis live quintet stuff, I think the rush really is involved with the fact that they're improvising. Maybe if you want an old metaphor for it, it's like people playing at being gods. It's like you're creating - I mean, that's corny, but you're creating something, but not only creating, but creating on the spot."
One of the more self-evident but nevertheless striking things he has written about music is that he finds it an experience which is both intellectual and sensual.
"I think I said something like, `you can have your cake and eat it, too', because often, you know, you have those two things conflicting each other. But there's so many different ways you can listen to a Beethoven symphony or A Love Supreme - I don't know why I always use those as examples - but you can approach them from a purely intellectual level. And I think there is a misconception. There is something aesthetic to intellect; it's fun to see how things connect. That in itself is sort of an aesthetic rush, but it only goes so far.
"Then there is another thing for me with music in general. It has a real visceral quality that I don't get from looking at an art work in a frame. It does something to my body physically, which is really, really sensual in a pretty direct way. So you can have that kind of sensuality mixed with an intellectual experience. Often it makes you want to dance and do weird shit like that," he laughs.
So what happens if, sometimes, the music doesn't quite come up to scratch. Do things come into the trio's repertoire for a while and then vanish? "For sure," he answers. "There's been a pattern with the last three or four years, really, where we always have some basic standards in circulation that we're really messing around with and doing different things, whether it's playing them really fast, or playing them in an odd metre, trying to find sort of a different way of looking at that material. And those always last because they're just vehicles.
"But a lot of my originals, maybe one out of five, just don't make it. And we'll try for a couple of months, or even six months, to find something, a way of making it feel pleasurable. And it may be interesting intellectually, but often some of the stuff I write doesn't gel to a place where it feels good. And that's definitely important for me - for the stuff to be interesting but, at least for me, it has to feel physically good in a rhythmic way. It has to be enjoyable and it has to have a feeling of flowing and forward motion.
"And sometimes that just doesn't happen, so we'll just sort of give it up and look at it as an evolutionary failure," he adds, with a rueful laugh. "But, you know, in the process, often, something else might come out of that directly - finding a new texture between the three of us, a new rhythmic approach to some other tune, maybe, that works from that, even if it didn't work on that particular tune."
As for the immediate future, he seems likely to continue as before. "I'm the type of musician or person in general that likes to stay with one thing and really delve into it and keep on going with it as much as possible. So it's been the trio and also maybe in the last two years I've started to add solo.
"But that's really more an extension of the same kind of musical exploration which just deals with certain musical obsessions of mine - you know, harmonic, melodic, a certain area of music that I'm exploring that I can really do with the trio. And the interaction with the trio continues to develop. I think the only thing that would make me want to change it is if one of us, or all of us, wasn't excited by the process any more."
The Brad Mehldau Trio plays at Vicar Street on Friday next, May 26th, with a special matinee arranged for Saturday, May 27th because the first concert is sold out