Jazz Articles about Elan Mehler

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Elan Mehler: Trouble In Mind

by John Chacona
February 12, 2024

There's a scene in Michael Cimino's 1978 film The Deer Hunter where five friends celebrate a successful hunt at the bar owned by their older companion. The mood is celebratory, but as John (George Dzundza), the bar's owner, sits down at the piano to play Chopin's G-Minor Nocturne, the room grows quiet. Three of the younger men are shipping out to Vietnam, and while they don't know what the future holds, the music hints at the cataclysm to come.

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Elan Mehler: There Is A Dance

by Patrick Burnette
September 17, 2022

David Bowie's album The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (RCA, 1972) includes instructions on the back: “To Be Played At Maximum Volume." Had pianist Elan Mehler's new trio effort, There is a Dance, followed suit, the slogan would be something like “To Be Played Only on Rainy Afternoons." There is a Dance, which celebrates memories of Mehler's mother, is a quiet, meditative album, one more drawn to rubato than momentum. There are moments of ...

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Becca Stevens and Elan Mehler: Pallet On Your Floor

by Karl Ackermann
January 20, 2021

Elan Mehler is well known as a producer and as co-founder of the all-vinyl Newvelle Records label, which he co-founded in 2016. Mehler's pianist-composer bona fides are long-established. His eight recordings to date have reflected a wide variety of approaches. The experimental remixes of Scheme For Thought (Brownswood Recordings, 2007), classical influences on Early Sunday Morning (Challenge Records, 2014), and the carnival raucousness of TJ and the Revenge (Little Lost Records, 2019) are in the mix. But, early on in ...

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Little Freddie King: The New Orleans Collection: Going Upstairs

by Pierre Giroux
January 13, 2021

Newvelle Records, which was established in 2015, believes that in this digital age there is an opportunity to build a new model for creating and distributing music. Each year, Newvelle releases a series of six albums, exclusively on vinyl, that pairs musicians with celebrated artists, writers and poets. The New Orleans Collection contains four single sleeve 180 gram clear vinyl albums, each of which was recorded in New Orleans between January and March 2020 at Esplanade Studios, a former church ...

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Becca Stevens, Elan Mehler: Pallet On Your Floor

by Angelo Leonardi
January 4, 2021

Tra le più sensibili e originali cantanti contemporanee, la trentacinquenne Becca Stevens sa esprimersi egregiamente in ogni contesto (come testimonia anche il recente Wonderbloom d'impronta synth-pop) ma quando affronta le ballad mette in luce le sue massime qualità espressive, risultando insuperabile. Non esiste vocalist della sua generazione capace di esprimersi con analoga purezza espressiva e intensa partecipazione nel classico songbook statunitense. L'intimo contesto strumentale (il pianista Elan Mehler è un raffinato partner di lunga data) esalta le ...

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Elan Mehler: The After Suite

by Chris May
March 16, 2009

This achingly beautiful, elegant album is only the second from Brooklyn-based pianist and composer Elan Mehler, being the follow-up to his debut, Scheme For Thought (Brownswood, 2007), another quietly sensational disc. If it might have seemed rather too breathless to have hailed a debut as a masterpiece, the temptation cannot be resisted second time out. The After Suite is a masterpiece with a capital “M."

A dreamy, spacious, alternating current of poignancy and joy, Mehler's writing and playing ...

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Elan Mehler Quartet: Scheme For Thought

by Frederick Bernas
September 23, 2007

Scheme For Thought was released on Gilles Peterson's Brownswood Recordings in September 2007, accompanied by a series of gigs around London, England by pianist Elan Mehler and his quartet. This group has completely abandoned standard notions of jazz: the absence of a drummer and repeated use of arco playing on the double bass give an almost classical and very ambient feeling to this ten-track set.

There is a great deal of subtle harmonic interaction between Mehler and the sometimes ghostly ...