Brad Mehldau Trio's Seymour Reads the Constitution! is due May 18, 2018, on Nonesuch Records. The pianist and his longtime trio, which includes drummer Jeff Ballard and bassist Larry Grenadier, perform three Mehldau originals combined with interpretations of pop songs (Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson), jazz tunes (Elmo Hope, Sam Rivers), and one work from the American songbook (Frederick Loewe's "Almost Like Being in Love").
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.
A straightforward acoustic jazz trio album, 2018's Seymour Reads the Constitution! nonetheless holds surprises for longtime Brad Mehldau fans. Moving away from his genre-bending collaboration with Chris Thile and his equally cross-pollinated exploration of J.S. Bach's classical pieces, After Bach, Mehldau settles into this warmly rendered set of originals and covers that fits nicely into his overall discography. Joining the pianist are his longtime associates bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard. Together, they've recorded often since the early 2000s, with Grenadier having worked regularly with Mehldau since the mid-'90s.
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 presents The Folly of Desire, a song cycle inquiring the limits of sexual freedom in a post-#MeToo political age, together with tenor Ian Bostridge, one of the greatest song interpreters of our times. Setting poetry by Blake, Yeats, Shakespeare, Brecht, Goethe, Auden and Cummings, Mehldau’s music shifts seamlessly between a jazz idiom and Classical art song, and the work explores a theme as timeless as it is topical. The stylistic diversity of this project is underlined by adding a selection of jazz standards, as well as a Schubert lied.