Formation
Brad Mehldau
★★★★
EQUINOX. £30
Sexual abuse and drug hell in the jazz pianist’s often shocking memoir.
There are some passages you’d expect to read in a coming-of-age biog from a much-admired American jazz pianist, whose orbit also takes in Radiohead and Bach. He’s entertaining on the listening journey that led him from Rush to Coltrane and Miles; there are vivid depictions of the jazz scene in 1990s New York. Formative literary influences – James Joyce, Thomas Mann – are discussed in dense, head-scratchy essays. So far, so cerebral. But what readers, who vaguely knew that Mehldau once had a drug problem, won’t expect is the harrowing descriptions of a desperate heroin addict who contemplated suicide. He blames his habit on the trauma caused by early fumbled homosexual encounters and sexual abuse by his school principal – and he’s in no mood to forgive. On page 90 he describes a revenge sexual fantasy that will have left the proofreader gasping. In all, an eloquent, sometimes jarring, often riveting, mix of erudition and self-revelation.