Brad Mehldau makes the interior universal live at the Barbican

In his memoir Mehldau reflects,"the very fine line between loneliness and solitude, reflection; being alone, always appealed to me when I was a kid." That tension, between retreat and communion, still defines his presence onstage. At the Barbican as part of the summer jazz series, flanked by longtime collaborator Jorge Rossy on drums and Danish bassist Felix Moseholm, the trio fully realise the music. Mehldau’s head bowed, eyes closed, the concert hall receded. He listened closely, empathetic to the audience and his fellow musicians.

In Mehldau's 2023 memoir, Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part I, he traces his early life with unsparing candour, from a suburban Connecticut childhood marked by adoption's dislocations to the turbulence of addiction. He writes of being abused by a teacher, of the ache of unbelonging, and of how music became both refuge and reckoning. More than an autobiography, the book is a map of artistic salvation, his influences spanning Billy Joel, Supertramp, German Romantic composers like Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. He draws inspiration from literary figures like James Joyce and Thomas Mann, as well as critics like Harold Bloom and Terry Eagleton. Onstage at the Barbican, none of this history is named but it pulses through every phrase of his music.

Mehldau’s current trio magnifies his interior world. Rossy, Mehldau's drummer during the seminal Art of the Trio years, plays with a gossamer touch, his brushwork tracing Mehldau’s harmonies. Their shared history is clear, there’s an easy familiarity to watching them play together. Beside him, Moseholm, a rising star barely into his thirties, brings a supple, singing quality to the bass, his lines both grounding and airborne.

The trio open the set with some of Mehldau’s original music. Longtime fans will recognise A Walk In The Park and At A Loss from Mehldau’s early albums. That shouldn’t suggest predictability, only that the trio’s collective explorations are set against familiar roadmap. Their performance has all the hallmarks of Mehldau’s signature style, a keen sense of grace and patience arrive in tandem with his improvisations.

The first encore delivered a luminous rendition of Elliott Smith's "Between the Bars", a song Mehldau has carried for years, and one that will appear on his forthcoming album, Ride into the Sun (Nonesuch, August 2025). His connection to Smith runs deeper than repertoire; During his Los Angeles years, Mehldau played alongside Smith and Jon Brion at Largo. At the Barbican, Mehldau's fingers trace Smith's bittersweet harmonies with tenderness. Always hovering slightly above the music, meeting the melody with restraint. When Rossy and Moseholm joined, they deepened its intimacy, their interplay a delicate counterpoint to Mehldau's aching phrasing. The arrangement honoured Smith's genius for marrying light and shadow, but it was unmistakably Mehldau's, a testament to how deeply he metabolises the music.

What lingers, long after the final notes, is the sense of having witnessed something rare: not a performance, but an act of shared solitude. In Mehldau's hands, the piano becomes both confessional and sanctuary; an instrument for meeting the unmet parts of the self. His gift lies in making his interior feel universal, turning inwardness into a kind of communion.