2018 release. On Seymour Reads the Constitution!, Brad Mehldau Trio performs 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 moved to New York City and first came to prominence as a member of current label mate Joshua Redman's quartet in the 1990s before becoming a bandleader himself. His trio, which tours the world extensively, made eight acclaimed recordings for Warner Bros. The pianist's time with Nonesuch has been equally productive.

In 1999, for the 2nd year in a row, Brad Mehldau's piano trio topped the Down Beat Critic's Poll for Best Acoustic Jazz Group in the Talent Deserving Wider Recognition category. Art Of The Trio 4: Back At The Vanguard further justifies those accolades. This live set, the newest installment of his trio releases, will continue to build Mehldau's growing public recognition (marked by a recent article in Time Magazine) and his stellar profile in the jazz world. Features "Solar," "London Blues" and "Exit Music (For A Film)."

Double vinyl LP pressing. Nonesuch Records releases pianist and composer Brad Mehldau's Ride into the Sun-a songbook recordof music by the late singer, songwriter, and guitarist Elliott Smith. Featured musicians include singer/guitarist Daniel Rossen (Grizzly Bear); singer/mandolinist Chris Thile (Punch Brothers, NickelCreek); bassists Felix Moseholm (Brad Mehldau Trio) and John Davis; drummer Matt Chamberlain (FionaApple, Tori Amos, Randy Newman, etc.); and a chamber orchestra led by Dan Coleman. Ride into the Sun's ten Elliott Smith songs are complemented by four Mehldau compositions that he says are "inspired by, and reflect, Smith's oeuvre." Also included are interpretations of Big Star's "Thirteen," which Smith also covered, and "Sunday" by Nick Drake, who Mehldau says, "I look at in some ways assort of Smith's visionary godfather." Recalling how he first got to know Smith and his music, which has been a regular part of his repertoire for years, Mehldau said that after years living in New York, he moved to Los Angeles "and there was this wonderful scene of singer-songwriters that was congregating at a club called Largo. That included Elliott but it also included artists like Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple. And then other musicians who had been around for a while would come down every Friday night to sit in on a gig that was led by Jon Brion. I played behind Elliott on his own tunes with Jon. It felt to me like a kind of renaissance in songwriting that flourished for a number of years."

Innovative and enthralling mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter already has a successful discography, including her critically acclaimed album with Brad Mehldau Love Songs, and her Grammy award-winning Douce France. For this release, Anne has joined with Brooklyn Rider, a trailblazing and frequently favorited string quartet. The project which ensued presents music from iconic artists in both the classical and pop music worlds. Brooklyn Rider is violinists Colin Jacobsen and Johnny Gandelsman, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Eric Jacobsen. Based in New York City, the ensemble is known for playing contemporary and unusual repertoire. The group founded the Stillwater Music Festival in 2006. New works written just for Anne Sofie and Brooklyn Rider come from composers Nico Muhly, Brooklyn Rider’s own Colin Jacobsen, and Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw. Works from Brooklyn Rider’s ‘Almanac’ project are also included, which The Boston Globe called “an all-over-the-map stylistic tour and a treatise on present-day quartet writing.”

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REVIEW:

What is so remarkable about Anne Sofie von Otter is her ability to assimilate so many different styles and make them her own. Nowhere on this album is there a sense of a classically schooled singer who tries to incorporate music from another world in her traditional way of singing. She adjusts her way of singing to the material in question—and it sounds natural.

– MusicWeb International

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.

Grammy®Award winning jazz pianist Brad Mehldau has recorded and performed extensively since the early 1990s, and makes his Pentatone debut with The Folly of Desire. His performances and compositions convey a wide range of expression. Ian Bostridge is one of the most celebrated tenors and lied interpreters of his generation. His Pentatone recording of Schubert’s Winterreise (2019) was crowned with the ICMA Vocal Music Award 2020. Bostridge has also released Die schöne Müllerin (2020), Schwanengesang (2022) and Respighi Songs (2021) with the label.

Brad Mehldau / JACOB'S LADDER - The album features new music that reflects on scripture and the search for God through music inspired by the prog rock Mehldau loved as a young adolescent, which was his gateway to the fusion that eventually led to his discovery of jazz. Jacob's Ladder is made up of original compositions by Mehldau alongside interpolations and covers of songs by Rush, Gentle Giant and Yes. Featured musicians on the album include Mehldau's label mates Chris Thile and Cecile McLorin Salvant, as well as Mark Guiliana, Becca Stevens, Joel Frahm, and others.

Mehldau performs four preludes, from a thirty-seven-year span of Gabriel Faure's career, as well as a reduction of an excerpt from the Adagio movement of his Piano Quartet in G Minor. Here Mehldau's four compositions that Faure inspired are presented in a group, sandwiched between two sections featuring the French composer's works. Discussing the Apres Faure album in his note, Mehldau says: "If the sublime foreshadows our mortality, this music might communicate the austerity of death-Faure's as it approached him, but also the apprehension of our own. We find a kinship with the composer finally, in the form of a question that he tossed off into the future, to us. I have composed four pieces to accompany Faure's music here, to share the way I have engaged with Faure's question, with you, the listener."This format is similar to my After Bach project," he continues. "The connections are less overt, but Faure's harmonic imprint is on all four. There is also a textural influence, in terms of how he presented his musical material pianistically-he exploited the instrument's sonority masterfully, as an expressive means. So, for example, in my first 'Prelude,' melody is welded to a continuous arpeggiation, both part of it and hovering above it; in my 'Nocturne,' it is possible to hear the harkening chordal approach in the opening of Faure's No. 12."

2023 release. This live solo album features the pianist and composer's interpretations of nine songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and one by George Harrison. Although other Beatles songs have long been staples of Mehldau's solo and trio shows, he had not previously recorded any of the tunes on Your Mother Should Know. The album ends with a David Bowie classic that draws a connection between The Beatles and pop songwriters who followed. Your Mother Should Know was recorded in September 2020 at Philharmonie de Paris.

Nonesuch Records releases pianist and composer Brad Mehldau's Ride into the Sun-a songbook recordof music by the late singer, songwriter, and guitarist Elliott Smith. Featured musicians include singer/guitarist Daniel Rossen (Grizzly Bear); singer/mandolinist Chris Thile (Punch Brothers, NickelCreek); bassists Felix Moseholm (Brad Mehldau Trio) and John Davis; drummer Matt Chamberlain (FionaApple, Tori Amos, Randy Newman, etc.); and a chamber orchestra led by Dan Coleman. Ride into the Sun's ten Elliott Smith songs are complemented by four Mehldau compositions that he says are "inspired by, and reflect, Smith's oeuvre." Also included are interpretations of Big Star's "Thirteen," which Smith also covered, and "Sunday" by Nick Drake, who Mehldau says, "I look at in some ways assort of Smith's visionary godfather." Recalling how he first got to know Smith and his music, which has been a regular part of his repertoire for years, Mehldau said that after years living in New York, he moved to Los Angeles "and there was this wonderful scene of singer-songwriters that was congregating at a club called Largo. That included Elliott but it also included artists like Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple. And then other musicians who had been around for a while would come down every Friday night to sit in on a gig that was led by Jon Brion. I played behind Elliott on his own tunes with Jon. It felt to me like a kind of renaissance in songwriting that flourished for a number of years."

Brad Mehldau / AFTER BACH II - The album comprises four preludes and one fugue from J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, as well as the Allemande from Partita for Keyboard No. 4 in D Major, interspersed with seven compositions or improvisations by Mehldau inspired by the complementary works of the Baroque master-including his Variations on Bach's Goldberg Theme. Mehldau, speaking of the "universality" of Bach's music, says in his liner note: "The more you try to engage with him, the more your own personality becomes visible, unavoidably. You are not playing Bach-Bach is playing you, in the sense that he lays you bare... The greatest choice you make at all times is not out of an absence, but from what is there, in it's totality. Specifically, it is the constant choice you make in how to negotiate between harmony and melody."He continues, "This is why Bach is a model for me as a jazz musician. In my improvised solos, I want to make melodic phrases that carry harmonic implication, and create harmony that moves in a melodic fashion. This is a crucial component in the storytelling." After Bach II follows 2018's After Bach album, which originated in a work Mehldau first performed in 2015-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, The Royal Conservatory of Music, The National Concert Hall, and Wigmore Hall-called Three Pieces After Bach.

2020 release. The members of the original Joshua Redman Quartet-Redman (saxophone), Brad Mehldau (piano), Christian McBride (bass), and Brian Blade (drums)-reunite with the release of RoundAgain, the group's first recording since 1994's MoodSwing. The album features seven newly composed songs: three from Redman, two from Mehldau, and one each from McBride and Blade.

Brad Mehldau / JACOB'S LADDER - The album features new music that reflects on scripture and the search for God through music inspired by the prog rock Mehldau loved as a young adolescent, which was his gateway to the fusion that eventually led to his discovery of jazz. Jacob's Ladder is made up of original compositions by Mehldau alongside interpolations and covers of songs by Rush, Gentle Giant and Yes. Featured musicians on the album include Mehldau's label mates Chris Thile and Cecile McLorin Salvant, as well as Mark Guiliana, Becca Stevens, Joel Frahm, and others.

The album comprises 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.

2021 release. The recording features the pianist/composer and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, who commissioned this orchestral version of the work, which comprises a theme and eleven variations plus a cadenza and postlude; the album also includes an encore, "Variations 'X' and 'Y.'" (Mehldau originally composed Variations on a Melancholy Theme for pianist Kirill Gerstein.) Mehldau and Orpheus toured Europe, Russia, and the US with the piece, including a 2013 performance at Carnegie Hall. Speaking to the combination of classical form with jazz harmonies in the work's musical language, Mehldau wrote, "I imagine it as if Brahms woke up one day and had the blues."Mehldau continues, "The theme itself has a wistful character, perhaps a feeling of resignation. There is some sense of finality and ending to it when heard for the first time already. So as I composed, a narrative challenge emerged; namely, how to embark on a story that begins with a conclusion. While the theme evokes melancholy, I let it be used as a springboard for other happy, wild, violent, and reckless emotions as the variations progress."