Rabble Without A Cause
Wednesday January 27th, 2010 with Bernard Stepien
two pianists: Mehldau vs Carrothers

A few weeks ago, Ottawa Citizen arts editor Peter Hum wrote an article on Matthew Shipp's blasting of the Jazz medias. Shipp stated that medias always talk about the same artists (http://jazzblog.ca) like Keith Jarrett that have been around for 40 years and thus neglect the younger generation or musicians that merely decided to play outside the so-called established main stream. Tonight, I will try to help understand what the problem exactly is by comparing two CDs by artists that precisely seem to attract very different media attention: - the well documented, reviewed and acclaimed pianist Brad Mehldau. - the quasi totally ignored pianist Bill Carrothers. They are roughly the same age, both in their early thirties and they both made their debut CD in the mid-nineties. They both belong to main-stream Jazz but are not afraid to deviate from it and have both a passion for esoteric material. Brad Mehldau relates his work to philosopher Nietsche. Bill Carrothers did some intensive research on music from war times. What differentiates them? Brad Mehldau's is well known for his left/right hands independence and he gets into incredible cross-rythm frenzies. Bill Carrothers developed a rare melodic and harmonic independence. His technique is stealth though. The new melody may be inserted at the least expected moment and thus most of the time getting unnoticed. This unnoticesness is unfortunately very bad, marketing wise. Brad Mehldau is classically trained while Bill Carrothers never really took any serious nor extensive music lessons. Both are known to create unusual athmospheres. We will explore this characteristic using Brad Mehldau's Places that I think is a good match to Carrothers 1918 and Swing Sing Song.