Brad Carlton's Solology

Three years passed between the release of the Brad Mehldau's Day Is Done and this live outing. What's so significant about this is simply that the former record marked the debut of drummer Jeff Ballard, who had replaced longtime kitman Jorge Rossy. Ballard is a more physical, busier, and more energetic drummer, allowing for Mehldau and bassist Larry Grenadier to up the ante in terms of dynamic and rhythmic options. Day Is Done offered a number of wonderfully contrasting moments where Mehldau, a big pop music fan from all eras, wove a tapestry from Burt Bacharach and John Lennon to Nick Drake and Colin Greenwood, from Paul Simon to Chris Cheek, as well as inserting a few of his own compositions.

Composer and pianist Brad Mehldau is admired by jazz aficionados for his work with his eponymous trio, and soprano Renée Fleming is internationally renowned for her operatic performances and recitals of classical art songs. Knowing this, one might think that Love Sublime, Mehldau's and Fleming's 2006 release on Nonesuch, is a crossover album; yet while they are meant to appeal to a broad audience, Mehldau's original settings of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Louise Bogan, and Fleurine are serious modern art songs, and not the easy hybrids of jazz and classical they may appear to be.

Brad Mehldau’s Finding Gabriel includes nine thematically related songs by Mehldau and features performances by him on piano, synthesizers, percussion, and Fender Rhodes, as well as vocals. Guest musicians include Ambrose Akinmusire, Sara Caswell, Kurt Elling, Joel Frahm, Mark Guiliana, Gabriel Kahane, and Becca Stevens, among others.

On Après Fauré, Brad Mehldau performs four nocturnes, from a thirty-seven-year span of Gabriel Fauré’s career, as well as a reduction of an excerpt from the Adagio movement of his Piano Quartet in G Minor, along with four of Mehldau’s compositions that Fauré inspired presented in a group, bookended by two sections featuring the French composer’s works.

If Brad Paisley signaled a tentative stylistic retreat via the title of 2011's This Is Country Music, the name of its 2013 sequel, Wheelhouse, is a fake-out. By no means is he returning to familiar territory here; he's stepping far outside his "Southern Comfort Zone," as Paisley puts it on the record's first single. There, he admits how he misses his Tennessee home but he's seen the ways he's grown and never would have seen the world without leaving what he already knew, a kind of self-evident truth that passes for a major revelation in the polarized world of 2013, where residents of both red and blue states are very happy within the confines of their county.

House on Hill may be a new recording, but the material is not. Virtually everything here was written, according to his liner notes like Keith Jarrett, Brad Mehldau writes about himself best in a session done in 2004 which yielded 18 songs with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy. The decision was made to split the sets into originals and covers. The covers became 2004's Anything Goes.

Brad Mehldau did an exceptional job of keeping his stellar trio together for seven years, as proven by his fine Art of the Trio dates and 2004's Anything Goes. But Jorge Rossy, the group's drummer, began spending more and more time away from music and at his home in Spain. Mehldau, who is almost prolific in his recording process, recruited drummer Jeff Ballard to replace Rossy on Day Is Done.

Pianist Brad Mehldau has regularly performed with his trio, which has included bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard since 2004, when the latter replaced Jorge Rossy. As a trio, they've spent relatively little time in the studio together exclusively - it's been seven years since Day Is Done. On 2010's Highway Rider, Mehldau augmented the group with Matt Chamberlain, Joshua Redman, and an orchestra. Ode marks the very first album comprised of all Mehldau material cut by this trio. While the title may reflect a a certain ponderousness, these 11 tunes are anything but. Specifically written for this group, they show off an increasingly muscular sense of interplay and stylistic athleticism that wasn't nearly as present on Day Is Done. "M.B." (written in memory of Michael Brecker) states a bluesy theme and moves off into several directions, seemingly at once…