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Konitz/Mehldau/Haden/Motian: Live at Birdland
by Dan McClenaghan
Konitz/Mehldau/Haden/MotianLive at BirdlandECM Records2011 The tunes are familiar, Great American Songbook and jazz standards all. So for those unfamiliar with the names involved in this quartet outing, the old complaint of “same old same old" could surface. But with alto saxophonist Lee Konitz at the top of the listing, “same old same old" gets rolled out the door. Konitz, with over 60 years of professional experience--from the 1949 Birth ...
Continue ReadingKonitz/Mehldau/Haden/Motian: Live at Birdland
by John Kelman
Grist for what seems like an endless flow of recordings, The Great American Songbook has, ultimately, become as much a crutch as it is an inspiration. There's no denying the staying power of music that's near-Jungian in its collective familiarity, but if an artist is simply running down the tunes, à la Real Book--head, solo, head--the music too easily becomes nothing more than a tired retread, a kind of whitewashing that, rather than moving jazz forward, stops it in its ...
Continue ReadingBrad Mehldau: Live in Marciac
by John Kelman
Brad Mehldau Live in Marciac Nonesuch Records2011 If there's any (relatively) young pianist ready to take the torch from Keith Jarrett when it comes to solo performance, it's Brad Mehldau. In the space of (again, relatively) a few short years, from his mid-1990s emergence with saxophonist Joshua Redman through his early--and, some might suggest, rather precocious, were they not already so well-formed and mature--Art of the Trio series, the 40 year-old pianist has emerged ...
Continue ReadingBrad Mehldau Highway Rider Live at Carnegie Hall
by David Miller
Brad Mehldau / The St. Paul Chamber OrchestraCarnegie HallNew York, New YorkNovember 9, 2010Zankel Hall was rife with anticipation before pianist Brad Mehldau took the stage, along with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, to debut his recently released Highway Rider (Nonesuch, 2010) live in New York, and rightly so. Highway Rider is Mehldau's first formal foray into the world of orchestral jazz, and to read the self-composed notes in the playbill, it seemed the pianist ...
Continue ReadingBrad Mehldau: Highway Rider
by Karl Ackermann
As a classically trained teen, Brad Mehldau was introduced to the music of Keith Jarrett setting him on the road to jazz. He did not abandon the classical genre and those influences were powerfully present in his first solo release Elegiac Cycle (1999). He has since written pieces for the Orchestre National d'Île-de-France and Carnegie Hall commissions for Anne Sofie von Otter and Renée Fleming respectively. Highway Rider is a two disc showcase of Mehldau's growth as both a composer ...
Continue ReadingBrad Mehldau Trio: Kingston, Canada April 11, 2010
by John Kelman
Brad Mehldau TrioGrand TheatreKingston, CanadaApril 11, 2010
When a trio has been together as long as pianist Brad Mehldau's--the current incarnation, with original bassist Larry Grenadier and relative newcomer (but no stranger to either of his band mates), drummer Jeff Ballard, has been together for over five years, first heard on Day is Done (Nonesuch, 2005)--it's hard to imagine any gig being a bad gig. But time and place can still sometimes coalesce to create ...
Continue ReadingHighway Rider
by John Kelman
For a pianist who not only demonstrated remarkable promise, but actually began delivering on it at a very early stage in his career with what would ultimately become his five-part Art of the Trio (Warner Bros.) series, Brad Mehldau's side projects have--with the exception of the solo Live in Tokyo (Nonesuch, 2004)--met with mixed reactions. Perhaps it's because of his emergence as one of modern jazz's most distinctive and popular interpreters of both contemporary song and standard material in a ...
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