What the heck is Mehliana?

The short, factual answer: Mehliana is the combination of pianist Brad Mehldau and drummer Mark Guiliana.

The short, opinionated answer: Mehliana is awesomesauce.

It should come as no surprise that the combination of two heavyweight artists would produce new, creative and exciting music. Brad Mehldau and Mark Guiliana are each highly acclaimed for their own variety of projects. Brad is most frequently seen with his trio, but he's also played regularly with Joshua Redman, Pat Metheny and others. Mark Guiliana was the drummer with bassist Avishai Cohen for eight years, and has played with artists ranging from Meshell Ndegeocello to Matisyahu to Bobby McFerrin. Mehliana puts on display some of the musical and technical approaches for which each musician is recognized.

A duo of piano and drums is rare, but when these two creative musicians get together any challenges which might arise from the unique instrumentation disappear. Rather than trying to force their instruments into one style or another, I feel they are capitalizing on what each instrument does best. More often than not, that means great grooves from Mark, and great melodic soloing from Brad. Here's a taste:

A couple of other points come to mind when I hear Mehliana play. First, Brad and Mark are well-equipped to tackle complex rhythmic and harmonic playing. If you want a polyrhythmic, super-imposed tuplet of one sort or another or a slash chord with all of the extensions, they could easily give you that. But Mehliana is not the outlet for that kind of playing. Instead, they seem to be concentrating on making music more reminiscent of dance music. Longer, groove based jams. They still throw in a fancy lick here and there, but audiences of all kinds should be able to listen and bop along. Of course, it takes two master musicians to sustain interest in tunes which tend to be longer than standard radio play - but there are no worries on that front with these two. Through multiple listenings of the album I continue to be intrigued. And, as we'll see with the track below, you never know where a longer tune might take you…

Mehliana's recently-released CD, Taming the Dragon, features twelve compositions - six by the duo, and six by Brad Mehldau. And in this case, composition means many things: melody and harmony, as usual; but as we've seen in the video samples above, they have also thought about how to expand the sonic landscape available to them. By incorporating synthesizers, pedals, effects, drum machines and other electronics, they have a huge palette from which to choose. And they use it to great effect. One more example:

With Mehliana we're sure to get a mix of composed music and improvisation; a great mix of styles, from street beat to drum and bass to funk and jazz-rock; and a driving, synth-laden, melodic musical treat.

Mehliana performs on the Toronto Star Stage at Nathan Phillips Square on Saturday, June 28 at 8 pm, on a double-bill with the Stanley Clarke Trio. Buy tickets now or, for more information, visit their concert page.

Josh