Brad Mehldau and Christian McBride. Photo: Steve Roby

Listening became the real instrument onstage, a single invisible string stretched between Christian McBride and Brad Mehldau and humming all night. At the Presidio Theatre, they approached repertoire as conversation and memory as form, leafing through familiar tunes like a well-loved book, reading passages aloud, underlining new meanings, and showing how a lifetime of music speaks through them.

The set opened in a wash of orange and purple light with “Aquaman,” Mehldau’s salute to a low-profile superhero who lives beneath the surface. The choice felt fitting: both musicians favor depth over showiness. McBride held his stance like a lighthouse, anchoring the flow with a steady center of gravity; Mehldau leaned into the keys, a detective following the line’s next clue. The melody moved with tidal patience, and early applause after Mehldau’s first solo signaled the crowd understood the premise: notice the detail, then the overall design.

Their “Straight Street” honored Coltrane’s architecture while opening new corridors. McBride’s bass lines—clear, muscular, and songful—drew the harmony forward; Mehldau responded with reharmonizations that bent the tune’s angles without breaking them. At one point, Mehldau smiled and called it “a great little workout tune,” a modest phrase that matched the duo’s ethos: serious play, never empty exertion. The performance clarified what this duo values: pulse, proportion, and the courage to leave space.

“Uncle James,” McBride’s composition from Live at the Village Vanguard, brought grit to the carpet. The bassist established a deep groove and let it breathe; Mehldau responded with lines that hovered between gospel phrasing and chromatic exploration. The piece became a portrait of compatible differences—McBride’s grease and glow paired with Mehldau’s prismatic counterpoint—creating a groove that felt sturdy enough to build on and flexible enough to surprise.

Then came the night’s first extended exchange with the audience. Mehldau recalled their first jam session in late‑80s New York and praised his partner’s influence: “As a virtuoso bass player, he’s truly changed the instrument and expanded what’s possible.” The line landed less as praise than as testimony, the way peers acknowledge a fact of the musical landscape. McBride later returned the favor with a lively monologue about decades of shared work, the Joshua Redman years, and the simple mark of iconic status: “When you become identified by one name, you have made it… You speak to young pianists and they say, ‘Monk, Herbie, Brad.’” The room responded with cheers; the duo replied with Wayne Shorter’s “Mahjong,” turning structure and freedom into a respectful debate that never lost its center.

Shorter’s tune revealed their most noticeable trait: they focus more on the music than on each other. Mehldau shaped the melody’s flow, pushing a phrase past the bar line so it could find a deeper pull a measure later. McBride mirrored that movement with commentary—sometimes giving a gentle push, sometimes refusing to respond, which reset the conversation—always keeping the groove in view. Near the end, they locked eyes to finish together, a small gesture that conveyed a larger story.

The mid‑set solos served as character studies. McBride took Thelonious Monk’s “Work” and concentrated on intention: a big tone, a lively backbeat, funk woven into hard‑bop language with no seams showing. He understands Monk’s discipline as dance, and his bow later that evening confirmed how fully he hears the bass as both drum and voice. Mehldau followed with Neil Young’s “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” beginning with wry civic timing—“Maybe I’ll play something that feels right for the current state of our troubled Republic… This one is by Neil Young,”—then sculpting the song into a nocturne that carried Young’s melody like a lantern. He kept the tune intact even as the harmony darkened around it, a classic Mehldau move: protect the song, expand the frame.

McBride’s solo rendition of “Movin’ On Up (Theme from The Jeffersons)” energized the room. He started with a guitar-like strum and a preacher’s pacing, letting the lyrics linger in the mind—“Fish don’t fry in the kitchen…”—before transforming the theme into a lively, syncopated rhythm. Heads nodded. A few listeners clapped along. A TV jingle turned civic music: a reminder that shared culture can be fun and meaningful at the same time. The duo then joked about their generation and the greatness of TV themes, offering an easy glimpse into their offstage camaraderie that only strengthened the trust on stage.

Trust is the hidden core of this partnership. In “Love Is Fragile,” Mehldau’s lyricism tugged at harmony while McBride added new color with each cadence. They make risk feel calm. Even when a modulation tilted the floor, the timing never wavered. That steadiness set up the encore: Monk’s “Think of One.” McBride said it was requested by audience member Richard Seidel, who signed him to Verve thirty years ago. The nod framed the tune as a line of tradition made present—Monk’s complex wit expressed through McBride’s modern style and Mehldau’s clever inversions. When McBride drew the bow in the second half, the sound rose like a cathedral column, and the piano responded with windows of light.

The evening’s narrative was simple and rich: two artists using a duo form to show how listening guides choices. McBride communicates with archetypal clarity—time that sings, tone that carries, humor that disarms. Mehldau thinks aloud with melody, an improviser who considers every color for the sentence it suggests. Together they traced a path from Coltrane to Monk to Shorter to Neil Young to a sitcom theme without losing any voice along the way. The Presidio Theatre setting added to the sense of intimacy; the hall’s size made their decisions clear and their silences meaningful.

What remains is how these musicians honor the past by energizing it. They show tradition as a living vocabulary, suitable for jokes, elegies, and new ideas. Their friendship is evident in the timing: small pushes, patient responses, no panic. The set felt less like a series of tunes and more like chapters in a book they’ve been writing since that late-'80s jam session—pages still blank, margins filled with notes.

A firm close feels right for a night like this. McBride and Mehldau practice a craft that blends warmth with inquiry, grace with grit. They establish their place in the lineage through the most convincing method available: sustained evidence onstage. As they waved and left, one last idea seemed to linger—a forward motion that doesn’t rush, a shared language that continues to find new words. The next time they open that book, listeners will want to hear how the sentences evolve.

Setlist and Band

Venue: Presidio Theatre

Location: San Francisco, California

Date/Showtime: October 16, 2025 – 7:30 p.m.

Personnel

Brad Mehldau - Piano

Christian McBride - Acoustic Bass

Setlist: “Aquaman,” “Straight Street,” “Uncle James,” “Mahjong,” “Work,” “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” “Movin’ On Up (Theme from The Jeffersons)”, “Love Is Fragile.”
Encore: “Think of One.”

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