Brad Mehldau After Bach II & Après Fauré

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.

Brad Mehldau is becoming a more interesting, more thought-provoking, more individualistic musician with each release – breaking away from the same old models, finding new ones to integrate into his own personality. The 11 compositions on this CD were conceived on the road, and only midway through did Mehldau realize that they developed similar ideas. Which indeed they do, seizing upon repeated riffing and vamps that Keith Jarrett has explored and sending them in cogent directions.

Charlie Haden & Brad Mehldau - Long Ago and Far Away (2018) {Impulse! 6789500} (Complete Artwork)
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© 2018 Impulse Records / Universal Music | 678 950 0
Jazz / Post Bop / Modern Creative / Piano / Bass

Long Ago and Far Away captures pianist Brad Mehldau and bassist Charlie Haden in a live duo performance recorded during the 2007 Enjoy Jazz Festival in Mannheim, Germany. One can hardly think of a more compatible pairing, with both Mehldau and Haden embodying an introverted, harmonically rich, and endlessly inventive jazz paradigm.

Brad Mehldau - Suite: April 2020 (2020) {Nonesuch Records 075597919387}
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© 2020 Nonesuch Records | 075597919387
Jazz / Modern Creative / Post Bop / Piano

While sheltering at home with his family in the Netherlands during the COVID-19 pandemic, Brad Mehldau wrote 12 new songs about what he was experiencing; he was able to record them safely in an Amsterdam studio, along with tunes by Neil Young, Billy Joel, and Jerome Kern, for the album 'Suite: April 2020.'

Nonesuch Records releases Brad Mehldau's 10 Years Solo Live eight-LP vinyl box set October 16, 2015, and this four-CD and digital version of the same on November 13. The set is culled from 19 live recordings made over a decade of the pianist's European solo concerts and is divided into four thematic subsets: Dark/Light, The Concert, Intermezzo/Rückblick, and E Minor/E Major. 10 Years Solo Live will be released digitally and on CD the following month.

In the most enigmatic project up to this point in his career, Brad Mehldau explores conflicting aesthetics, sometimes in tracks positioned next to each other, and occasionally within the confines of a single performance. A spare simplicity governs much of the album, emphasized by almost puritanical horn arrangements - long notes, mournful triadic chords. After acknowledging these episodes with childlike figurations on the piano, Mehldau then builds his solos along more dissonant lines, which invariably end up enhancing the mood. But then there are tracks like "Dropjes," whose electronic effects gnash angrily at the piano, or "Free Willy," on which putty attached to the instrument's low strings allows Mehldau to unleash a feral improvisation, with lines that suggest scurrying rodents more than bebop blowing…

Nonesuch Records labelmates mandolinist/singer Chris Thile and pianist Brad Mehldau, longtime admirers of each other's work, first toured as a duo in 2013. At the end of 2015, they played a two-night stand at New York City's Bowery Ballroom before going into the studio to record Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau, a mix of covers and original songs that Nonesuch releases on January 27, 2017, on two CDs / LPs. The vinyl edition includes a bonus performance of Fiona Apple's "Fast As You Can." You can watch a live performances of the former above and the latter below.