Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau

Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau album review: A meeting of masterly minds

Cormac Larkin
Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 11:00

Mandolin and piano is as unlikely an instrumental pairing as you’ll find. Putting them together in a duo really shouldn’t work, but Chris Thile and Brad Mehldau clearly didn’t get the memo. This meeting of two masters of their respective realms is a spine-tingling triumph – a honky, gutsy, jaunty, darkly witty new musical alloy that is suitably strange yet strangely familiar.

Thile has spent the past 20 years rewriting the bluegrass rule book with his groups Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers, along the way acquiring an unprecedented virtuosity on his instrument and branching out into solo performances of Bach partitas and collaborations with everyone from YoYo Ma to Edgar Meyer.


Mehldau, too, aside from being the most copied jazz pianist of his generation, has shown an admirable tendency to mix outside his comfort zone, notably with producer Jon Brion on the rock-influenced Largo (2002) and with drummer Mark Guiliana on the superb Taming the Dragon (2014).

read more: http://news360.com/digestarticle/rQBBvTvnwUe6_NRiJ9w9bA

0 Comments: