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Jazz Articles about Brad Mehldau
Chris Potter: Eagle's Point
by Chris May
The question that comes to mind after listening to Eagle's Point is this: why have the four musicians, who have known each other since the 1990s, never recorded together before? For the combination of Chris Potter, Brad Mehldau, John Patitucci and Brian Blade is a real meeting of minds; the stars are in perfect alignment. Potter's previous release, Got The Keys To The Kingdom (Edition, 2023), was a live set, recorded at New York's Village Vanguard, and ...
read moreBrad Mehldau: Maybe As His Skies Are Wide
by Mike Jacobs
Long known for his absolute adventurousness, there isn't much that Brad Mehldau hasn't stylistically encompassed. Still, when the pianist released an exploration of the progressive favorites of his youth,--Jacob's Ladder (Nonesuch, 2022)--the results were like nothing else in his catalog. Among the album's most compelling tracks is the re-envisioning of a single famous melodic line from Rush's classic Tom Sawyer." Mehldau loops it, reharmonizes it, displaces it rhythmically and improvises over all these newfound twists and turns, creating something truly ...
read moreBig Label Bangers
by Patrick Burnette
The boys love chasing after the esoteric, the brand new, the little known. But sometime, we also like to talk about the, well, big label bangers. That is, big labels in jazz terms, which really means small subsidiary branches of huge media conglomerates, but let's not get into that now. Some famous names are back this episode and we talk about their latest releases--sometimes a great deal later than their date of death.Playlist Discussion of Brandee Younger's album ...
read moreBrad Mehldau Live at The Falcon
by Mike Jurkovic
Brad Mehldau The Falcon Marlboro, NY August 28, 2023 Twenty four hours after a raucous, spirit raising performance by South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini and his trio mates, drummer Francisco Mela and bassist Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere the evening began quietly like a haiku. Brad Mehldau thanked his Hudson Valley neighbors, turned, took the bench and let the dimming light of late August shade his summer reflection. The insistent motif of John Boy" rang out ...
read moreBrad Mehldau: Formation: Building A Personal Canon, Part One
by Ian Patterson
Formation: Building A Personal Canon, Part One Brad Mehldau 312 Pages ISBN: 9781800503137 Equinox Publishing 2023 In the considerable wake of Keith Jarrett, it is hard to think of another pianist as influential or as widely imitated as Brad Mehldau. Throughout a career that began in the early '90s, taking flight with his acclaimed Art Of The Trio albums, Mehldau has built his reputation--like Jarrett before him--as a jazz improvisor par ...
read moreBrad Mehldau: Your Mother Should Know
by Brad Mehldau
In his book, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, the scholar Harold Bloom confronted the question of what makes particular books endure through the ages, long surpassing the time and place in which they were written: The answer, more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange. If we look ...
read moreRedman / Mehldau / McBride / Blade: Long Gone
by Scott Gudell
The mid-1990s saw the first recorded and officially preserved union of four up-and-coming jazz newcomers--Joshua Redman (saxophone,) Christian McBride (bass,) Brad Mehldau (piano) and Brian Blade (drums.) All four were dedicated followers of classic jazz and came together, but soon scattered and began charting their own individual courses. There was a long delay before they reunited for a second quartet recording in 2020. By then, each and every one of them had earned the respect of their peers and risen ...
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