Brad Mehldau's Highway Rider has made the Jazzwise list of the Top 10 Albums of the Year for 2010. "Brad Mehldau doesn’t do things by halves," says Jazzwise, which sees the new album as notable both for reuniting Mehldau with producer Jon Brion and for "showing another side to the increasingly influential Mehldau." Mehldau and the featured artists on Highway Rider recently performed the piece in the US and Europe and will do so again at LA's Walt Disney Concert Hall in January.
Brad Mehldau's Highway Rider has made Jazzwise magazine's list of the Top 10 Albums of the Year for 2010. The double CD of original work by Mehldau, released on Nonesuch in March, was produced by Jon Brion and features performances by Mehldau’s trio, drummer Matt Chamberlain, saxophonist Joshua Redman, and a chamber orchestra, with orchestrations by Mehldau. It comes in at No. 9 on the Jazzwise list, published in the latest issue of the magazine.
"Brad Mehldau doesn’t do things by halves," writes Jazzwise's Stephen Graham, who sees the new album as notable both for reuniting Mehldau and Brion for the first time since 2002's highly successful Largo album and for "showing another side to the increasingly influential Mehldau."
As Graham describes it, "Highway Rider shows the Brahmsian side of Mehldau leavened with a grasp of the folklore of The Road in American literature and music." The album, he explains, "is an intriguing and even sentimental take on his notion of America."
There's much more at jazzwisemagazine.com and in the complete Top 10 list published in the magazine's December/January issue.
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Brad Mehldau and all of the featured artists on Highway Rider recently premiered the piece live in concert in the United States and Europe and will reunite to perform it once more at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on January 21.
One noteworthy date that has just been added to Mehldau's tour schedule comes next summer, when he offers a solo piano performance at Ozawa Hall in Lenox, Massachusetts, as a guest artist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 2011 Tanglewood season.
For more information on these events and all of Mehldau's upcoming performances, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.
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To pick up a copy of Highway Rider, Largo, or any of the albums in Mehldau's Nonesuch catalog, head to the Nonesuch Store, where all CDs, LPs, and DVDs—including pre-orders of Mehldau's forthcoming 2CD+DVD Live in Marciac—are now 33% off.
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