Description: As an innovative and constantly inventive jazz pianist, Brad Mehldau has attracted a sizable following that has grown to expect a singular, intense experience from his performances. With Formation, Brad seeks to extend that experience to the page, by sharing some of the deeply personal elements of his life, and how these came togethe
Brief description: Brad Mehldau is an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger.
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Reviews
This is incredible writing. It's loose, specific and sharp as a knife. Brad writes words like he plays piano - with delicate strength and a gift for accessing memories and turning them into thick emotions.
I feel lucky to be around while Brad is here with us. He seems to have access to wells of memories and emotions that few people do. I love his writing as much as I love his music.
It's hard to go backwards and access memories like Brad does here. They are dark, funny, inspiring and moving. It's details are what makes it special - the kind of things that only happen when you open yourself.
Paul Thomas Anderson
Brad Mehldau's elegant clarity and lyrical interiority, hallmarks of his artistry as a jazz pianist, also stamp every page of this brilliant and affecting memoir - rooted in a fearless, radical candor. Rarely has an artist revealed themselves so fully as a prism onto the meaning of their art, and a chronicle of a dynamic moment in time.
Nate Chinen, author of Playing Changes: Jazz For the New Century
Brad Mehldau is our jazz generation's Conjurer-In-Chief. His music is nothing short of magic - an impossible wonder of ecstatic and empathic creative communion, to which I myself have borne witness, time and time again. Now, in this probing and provocative memoir, Brad finally shares with us some of the secrets (or at least the stories) behind the casting of his innumerable spells. A worthy read for anyone intrigued by the genesis of genius.
Joshua Redman
Few jazz biographies are this personal, and this raw, but then few are so good.
Jazz Journal
Mehldau's writing style reflects both his musical character and his persona; juxtaposing deep philosophical insight with intensely personal experiences described in straight-talking, graphic detail. He is equally eloquent writing about Harold Bloom's and Terry Eagleton's views on ideology in art as he is writing about shooting up heroin in a run-down building, needing to call an ambulance, and getting arrested.
Throughout the book, Mehldau keeps the reader engaged in a compelling account of a twisted life which threatened to derail the music and the musician but in which, thankfully, the music prevailed.