Note from Brad

Thank you for taking the time to read this. This is addressed not just to my fellow Americans, but perhaps more urgently, to my friends and listeners around the world, everywhere.

For those of you who viewed the meeting between the president and vice-president of the United States and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, I want to make clear the position that I, and many other Americans take. We are horrified. We are horrified because we sense that we are witnessing the leadership of our country turn away from the support of liberty and freedom. Most immediately, I mean freedom for the Ukrainian citizens to have their own sovereign state. As well, though: we value the shared legacy of this freedom with our allies in the European democracies to the west of Ukraine. Furthermore: we are in solidarity with the cause of liberty for everyone, everywhere. This has not changed, and for us, this will not change.

It is strange to feel compelled to write this, because we might take for granted that our solidarity is a given, a universal. Yet in a time like this, the question arises whether that is truly the case. I underline this solidarity thus, and say as an American: My faith is shaken, because a turn away from liberty in our present leadership is a turn towards tyranny. This present presidential administration does not speak for me, though, and many other Americans.

The universals still hold. We can invoke them through our shared struggle with democratic allies against that tyranny; we can call on Enlightenment ideals; we can point to deeper, instinctive beliefs; we can call on scripture; we can look to the sweep of history itself. There is a reason why those universals hold. They hold because we all want the same thing. We want harmony with our fellows, and we do not want to suffer. We wish, likewise, that our fellows will not suffer, so that harmony may hold among all of us. Again, this kind of categorical imperative may seem too obvious to have to read, and I apologize if I am compelled to this kind of platitude.

I must bear witness, though, for myself and likeminded Americans. Suffering is not only at the hands of tyranny and repression. It is also through neglect and abandonment. We are dismayed by this administration’s unethical abandonment of USAID, and its surreal and disgusting fantasizing propaganda in the face of the humanitarian tragedy in war-torn Gaza.

The words and actions of the current administration, in short, do not speak for myself and like-minded Americans, and we condemn them strongly and unequivocally.

Please allow me to affirm briefly who and what does speak for me, at this fractious time, and at any time to come.

I am a musician, and many of my heroes are American musicians: improvisers, composers and virtuosos like Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and many more. If we look for a political analogue in their music, we might invoke democracy, and we’d be right to a degree, but we could also invoke anarchy in the best sense. The music is a safe space where self-expression is maximalized, and where an exchange of seemingly disparate ideas can result in a greater whole. The endgame in that kind of exchange can be many things: healing, redeeming, illuminating, and even ecstatic.

Not just the music though, but the lives of these American men and women also speak to me and speak for me: the way they carried themselves with quiet intelligence, grace and hipness, with class and dignity – everything lacking in the current American leadership. The reason why I invoke these models is to remind myself, as much as you the reader, of a better America than the one we witness now. It is still there. I am inspired by those Black American musicians I mention above because they themselves overcame oppression: they flourished in spite of the racism that surrounded them, a wound from which our country still must heal.

These are also the great artists who shape me as a musician. Their music, and the examples of the lives they led, are universal, just like other musicians and artists of all stripes from other parts of the world. America has never been anywhere close to perfect in its dream, and neither have other democracies. My heroes, though, are manifold, spread across time and place: Beethoven, Dostoevsky, Camus, Thomas Mann, Orwell, Shostakovich…the list would be too long. The universal holds.

Or, there is James Baldwin, the American writer who also lived in Europe for part of his life, as I do now. In closing, here are two observations from his posthumously published Nothing Personal. The first could be a forthright assessment of the current administration. There is nothing new under the sun, one might say. Over America, Baldwin notes:

The relevant truth is that the country was settled by a desperate, divided, and rapacious horde of people who were determined to forget their pasts and determined to make money.

The second is an expression of hope, which we always need, especially now. Baldwin was one of our most uncompromisingly trenchant realists, but one who never lost hope.

I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time. 

Brad Mehldau, March 1, 2025