The Brad Mehldau Trio sets up shop tonight for a five-night residency at New York's Village Vanguard, the site of the group's most recent recordings, Live and the Nonesuch Store exclusive MP3 collection Live: The Complete Friday Night Sets. The New York Times says that Live shows that the pianist's "peerless trio ... has the glide to elevate just about anything, including Mr. Mehldau’s savvy originals." The Village Voice declares: "Hard to beat a mix of killer chops and songbook savvy." The Guardian gives four stars to Brad's recent Wigmore Hall solo performance, calling him "the doyen of contemporary jazz pianists, an improviser whose instinctive, emotional command of the instrument is complemented by a formidable intellect."
The Brad Mehldau Trio, featuring Larry Grenadier on bass and Jeff Ballard on drums, sets up shop at New York's famed Village Vanguard jazz club tonight for a five-night residency at the site of the group's most recent recording, last year's Live album and the Nonesuch Store exclusive MP3 collection Live: The Complete Friday Night Sets.
Leading to the Trio's performance at the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis on Sunday, that city's Star Tribune described the Live album as "probing, lyrical, propulsive, and funky at times," not to mention "one of the pianist's best albums." And for the previous Friday night's show at Chicago's Symphony Center, the Chicago Tribune's Howard Reich declared Mehldau "one of the most gloriously idiosyncratic pianists working today."
The New York Times's Nate Chinen, in recommending this weeks sets, remarked that on those Live recordings, Mehldau "confirms his embrace of a modern repertory, looking to Soundgarden as well as to the songbook. The bigger point is that his peerless trio ... has the glide to elevate just about anything, including Mr. Mehldau’s savvy originals." The Village Voice's Jim Macnie says Mehldau "has built a career on making sure nuances walk tall and whispers resound" and credits the Trio with perpetually bringing dynamic savvy to the next level," concluding: "Hard to beat a mix of killer chops and songbook savvy."
For information on this week's shows in New York, visit villagevanguard.com.
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Mehldau recently performed a solo set at London's Wigmore Hall, inaugurating the venue's two-season jazz series, of which he is the artistic director. The Guardian gives the performance four stars, with reviewer John L. Waters describing Mehldau as "the doyen of contemporary jazz pianists, an improviser whose instinctive, emotional command of the instrument is complemented by a formidable intellect." Waters writes of the April 14 performance: "Sitting easily at the Steinway ... he conjures several musical worlds in one recital. Without visible effort, he turns Broadway show tunes into pastoral rhapsodies and blues vamps into meditations on the meaning of life."
Waters goes on to cite rock legend Chuck Berry for his discomfort with jazz musicians' turning a song's melody into something it was not, "until it 'sounded like a symphony,'" only to assert that even Berry "would have little reason to kick against Mehldau's brilliant restatement of the music's qualities. One of the pianist's many gifts is to discover new beauty in familiar melodies."
Read the full concert review at guardian.co.uk.
The Trio is set to perform at Wigmore Hall this fall. For more on the series, read the article here in the Nonesuch Journal. For upcoming tour dates, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.
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