2006 · Album
Mon chien Stupide (Bande originale du film)
Recorded 2006 · Nonesuch Records · Produced by Brad Mehldau
Piano and Poodles: Mehldau's French Experiment
Mehldau brings his restless intelligence to a film score that refuses easy answers.
Brad Mehldau's approach to film scoring is exactly what you'd expect from someone who treats the piano like a thinking instrument rather than a pretty one. Mon chien Stupide finds him working in a lighter, more playful register than his standard jazz output, but that doesn't mean he's checking out. The soundtrack mirrors the film's own tone—part comedy, part melancholy—and Mehldau navigates those shifts with a pianist's sensitivity to color and space. What makes this work is that he's not trying to write memorable "themes" in the traditional sense. Instead, he's creating atmosphere and emotional texture, letting chord voicings and small melodic gestures do the talking. The music feels conversational, like someone thinking out loud at the keyboard.
This is a departure from his usual trio and ensemble settings. Without the drummer and bassist providing structural scaffolding, Mehldau has to generate his own momentum, which means the piano often sits in a gentler, more introspective place. That constraint actually suits him—you hear how deliberately he's placing notes, how much space matters. There's humor in these pieces too, a kind of winking sophistication that matches the film's French sensibility. Some listeners will find it less essential than his concert recordings; it's definitely more intimate and occasional.
If you're already familiar with Mehldau's work, this is a worthwhile detour that shows another side of how he thinks. If you're new to him, this isn't where you start—go for his trio records first. But as a portrait of a working artist solving specific creative problems, it's genuinely interesting. It proves that Mehldau takes every project seriously, even a modest film score about a dog.
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