COMPOSERS: Brad Mehldau
LABELS: Nonesuch
ALBUM TITLE: Brad Mehldau: 10 Years Solo Live
WORKS: 10 Years Solo Live
PERFORMER: Brad Mehldau (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: 0075597950755
Twenty years on from the release of Introducing Brad Mehldau, the pianist’s first as leader, comes an account of a decade’s worth of extraordinary solo live performance. Eight LPs (or four CDs) capture Mehldau playing concert halls across Europe, the selections made by the man himself. Divided into themes – Dark/Light, The Concert, Intermezzo/Rückblick, and E Minor/E Major – the pieces are sequenced as they might arrive in a single concert. But it’s a condensation of 19 shows that produces a powerful picture of a renaissance artist at the height of his powers, with influences from Brahms to Nirvana feeding into frequently torrential improvisation. Where Keith Jarrett, another divine player steeped in jazz and classical music, achieves and transmits a creative ecstasy in his blank sheet solo playing, Mehldau is focused on exploring, even celebrating, the human condition in its most troubled forms, including regret, loss and loneliness – and it has a strangely purging effect. Garry Booth