The 2008 JVC Jazz Festival New York got under way earlier this week and continues through June 28 at venues throughout the City, including Carnegie Hall, where the Brad Mehldau Trio will play this Sunday in Zankel Hall in a program titled "A Taste of Genius," and the Greenwich Village club Le Poisson Rouge, where Bill Frisell's new trio will make its New York debut this Thursday. For tickets and information on all JVC Jazz Festival events, visit festivalnetwork.com.

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Nonesuch Records released the Brad Mehldau Trio's Live two-disc set earlier this year. All About Jazz's Andrew Velez writes in his review of Mehldau's latest effort: "Music seems to just pour out of Mehldau, as is buoyantly evident here ... Somehow the music manages to be both dense and jaunty."

Velez points to Coltrane's "Countdown," on which Mehldau

accomplishes a neat balancing act with low, thunderous chords that seem to tiptoe piquantly through the melody to tasty effect, as satisfying as herbes de Provence liberally tossed over a good steak. The result is happy exploration, a distinctive feature of Mehldau's performances in general.

The reviewer calls the collection a "classic Mehldau—music that wears well and deeply." To read the review, visit allaboutjazz.com.

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Bill Frisell's latest Nonesuch album, the double-disc History, Mystery, was released last month. In its All About Jazz review, John Kelman finds the guitarist "relaxed, laconic and as occasionally quirkily witty as ever."

Kelman points in particular to the album's take on Thelonious Monk's "Jackie-ing," calling it "three minutes of elegant swing and further proof that Frisell's flipped-on-its-side approach is the closest any guitarist has come to truly capturing the spirit of the late, great, quirky piano icon."

It's Frisell's own writing that remains a focus on the new recording, and one that gets the record off to a great start, where "Frisell deftly combines oblique yet attractive writing with rhythm-centric passages that tread a fine line between detailed structure and collective spontaneity."

The new album contains "some of his best scored writing since" his landmark 1994 album This Land, says Kelman, "a high water mark for Frisell the composer." By pairing that writing "with looser groove-centricity and a top-notch octet capable of a myriad of soundscapes," the reviewer concludes,

it's a masterpiece of consolidation that also demonstrates Frisell's penchant for roots music has done nothing to compromise the idiosyncrasies that have been so definitive of his voice since he emerged almost thirty years ago.

That review can also be found at allaboutjazz.com.