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Artist: Brad Mehldau
Genre: Jazz
Latest Album: Day is Done
Background:
Brad Mehldau is among the most compelling, eccentric, daring and innovative young pianists in today’s jazz.. He was another of the plethora of young jazz pianists in the '90s to adopt Bill Evans as the role model. He is best known as leader of the Brad Mehldau Trio, with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummers Jorge Rossy and Jeff Ballard. He has also played and recorded solo and with co-leaders Peter Bernstein, Mark Turner, Charlie Haden, and others. His classical training shows, and he often plays a separate melody with each hand in unusual rhythmic meters such as 5/4 and 7/4. Mehldau plays original compositions, jazz standards and popular music, having a particular liking for the music of Radiohead and The Beatles.
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About Brad Mehldau
While the influence of Evans still dominates Mehldau's introspective manner, harmonic constructions, and preferred format, he is one of the more absorbing and thoughtful practitioners within that idiom. He is receptive to the idea of using material from the rock era . Though Mehldau's training is primarily classical, his interest in jazz began early. He played in the Hall High School jazz band of Hartford, CT, winning Berklee College's Best All-Around Musician award while still in his junior year of high school. Jimmy Cobb soon hired him to play in his band, Cobb's Mob, and Mehldau also played and recorded with the Joshua Redman Quartet before forming his own trio in 1994 and recording his first Warner Bros. album “Introducing Brad Mehdau” in 1995.
His follow-up album "Art of the Trio, Vol. I", released in 1997, received great critical acclaim and a 4 1/2 star review in Down Beat Magazine. In the same year he won the Down Beat Critics Poll, received a Grammy Nomination in the category "Best Jazz Instrumental Solo" and won the category "Best New Artist of 1997" in the Jazz Times Readers Poll. Pat Metheny says about Mehldau: "The most exciting pianist to come along since Herbie Hancock. Art of the Trio, Vol. 1 followed in 1997, with the next two volumes in the series appearing over the following months. Two years later, Mehldau returned with Elegiac Cycle, as well as Art of the Trio 4: Back at the Vanguard. Places followed in 2000, consisting of all original compositions that focussed on a certain city. The title of the album. Another "Art of the Trio" album came in 2001, but the most significant release was Largo, which recorded Mehldau performing with other groups outside of his usual trio format.
The most significant release was “Largo”, which recorded Mehldau performing with other groups outside of his usual trio format. This was a big change from his previous work, and offered new challenges as he adapted to several interesting lineup situations. Mehldau followed the genre-bending album with the standards-based Anything Goes and Live in Tokyo in 2004, with Day is Done arriving the following year. The i Tunes release of “Day is Done” includes two extra tracks: Mehldau’s arrangement of Brazillian guitarist and songwriter Tonhino Horta’s “Viver de Amor,” and an up-tempo arrangement of Cole Porter’s “You Do Something To Me.”
