Word: mehldau
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...Brad Mehldau Trio...
Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau seems to be pulling off a similar feat with much less fanfare and indignant old ladies in the similarly stuffy realm of classic jazz. Mehldau packages his music like a popular rock artist and has the quirky, rumpled good looks of an indie frontman. But it is the music that makes the man. For his latest album, Anything Goes, Mehldau tackles a collection of standards with his accomplished trio. Mehldau ably reinterprets songs by Thelonius Monk and Henry Mancini, his lithe playing superbly set off by the popping rhythm section...
Places is the opposite of a travel guide. It offers no impressionistic details of far-off venues, and the songs are not flavored with the spices of indigenous world-music forms. Instead, each of the pieces--Paris, Madrid, West Hartford and so on--is named after the location where Mehldau was when he began to compose it. He was out to capture not the region in question but the feelings of nostalgia he invariably had upon his departure. Writes Mehldau: "It seems like the grandeur of a place only reveals itself after I've left...
...album comprises both solo piano tracks and performances by the Mehldau trio, with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy. Both of Mehldau's sidemen provide solid supporting work, enriching his ideas without distracting from them, grounding his virtuosic playing without slowing him up too much. Mehldau has startling command of both hands, offering up melody and countermelody simultaneously, forcefully and thoughtfully. When he's playing, you can be sure he has a firm grasp of the song. On this album themes introduce themselves, wash away and then return, like waves against a beach. Los Angeles arrives first...
...Mehldau, who was born in Jacksonville, Fla., and raised in Hartford, Conn., has on past albums shown a felicity for finding jazzy new complexities in the music of left-of-center rock bands like Radiohead; his rendition of the group's Exit Music (for a Film) is one of his best performances. Places reveals Mehldau's growing strength as a composer. He can be emotional (as on Airport Sadness), but he is never weepy. He can be jaunty (West Hartford), but he never descends into trifling silliness. And while his work tends to be courageously complex (the dizzyingly cerebral Amsterdam...