"JAZZ has to have that thing" said the late, great Miles Davis once. He meant the elusive quality that sets the music and its real, to the mannerborn practitioners apart. It's a feeling for the idiom that can't be faked - Davis, typically caustic, added that if it could be bottled and sold "they'd have it at the next Newport Jazz Festival". And Brad Mehldau has it in abundance.
Last year, the rapidly rising, young, jazz pianist proved it with some stellar performances at the Cork Jazz Festival. He also raised quite a flutter in the dovecotes of the Dublin cognoscenti when he spent a few days afterwards playing informally in the capital. The circumstances in Dublin weren't ideal then but they should be when he returns next Wednesday. This time he'll play in TCD's Edmund Burke Hall with his current trio, completed by bassist Javier Collina and drummer Stephen Keogh. Such is his reputation now that expectations will inevitably be high.
It's a lot to ask of a 24 year old jazz musician, especially of a pianist. In terms of bright young piano players, there's an awesomely gifted generation around now; Bheki Mseleku, Eric Reed, Stephen Scott, Benny Green, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, David Kikoski, Peter Delano, child prodigy Sergio Salvatore, Jacky Terrasson - and that's just for starters - are as varied and talented a group as ever graced a single instrument in jazz. So why should Mehldau stand out as a focal point of future hopes?
That's a something which, ultimately, is probably beyond the tyranny of fact. The basics are that he began playing at four, took lessons until he was 14 and then joined Hall High School in Hartford, Connecticut, which has a perennially award winning jazz band. In his junior year there he won the prestigious Berklee High School award for "Best All Round Musician". Moving to Manhattan, he studied at the highly regarded - if ponderously named - New School For Social Research's jazz and contemporary music programme. There his teachers included pianists Junior Mance, Kenny Werner and Fred Hersch, and Miles Davis's old drummer, Jimmy Cobb - a list as impressive as it is stylistically varied.
Even in the hugely competitive New York scene, his gifts were rapidly recognised. Before he was 20 he and fellow pupil, guitarist Peter Bernstein (who also impressed in Cork last year) were playing with Jimmy Cobb. Since the early 1990s he has recorded several times as a sideman for Bernstein, altoist Jesse Davis and tenor saxophonists Joshua Redman and Grant Stewart.
It was probably the high profile Redman's MoodSwing album on a major label, Warner Brothers, that began to get him wider notice. Certainly, it led to Warners Introducing Brad Mehldau trio release, recorded last March, which confirmed that the exciting new talent evident on other leaders' sessions was no flash in the pan. Mehldau was different - he could swing superbly, yet his use of time was daring, adventurous and coherent. Harmonically, he could go wherever his rich imagination took him - and respond just as quickly to the promptings of others. His lines were refreshingly unconventional within a relatively conventional context. And there was a feeling of order about what he died that hardly admitted self indulgence.
Perhaps that comes in part from his acknowledged influences, chief among whom are pianists Wynton Kelly (who had a similar sense of indefinable presence and structure about his playing), Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett and Oscar Peterson, along with trumpeter Miles Davis and tenor John Coltrane. It's an eclectic list but, as an indication of his innate jazz instincts, a reliable one. And Mehldau also acknowledges Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven and Schumann as important influences - he plays chamber music each summer in the US - which may also contribute to the sense of order he projects at his best, as well as his willingness to stretch the jazz mould without breaking it completely.
BUT the fact that none of the classical influences is reflected in any pretentious attempt to dress up jazz in borrowed clothes has, finally, to be down to Mehldau's indisputable feel for the idiom. To hear him, as a sideman or a leader, is to hear someone who knows the language and speaks it fluently because it is where his roots are. Just listen to the deliriously swinging groove he establishes with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade in London Blues on Introducing Brad Mehldau. Miles was right. Next Wednesday could be a night to remember.