Mandolinist / singer #ChrisThile

Mandolinist/singer @ChrisThile & pianist @BradMehldau's debut duo album is out now! Get it today: https://t.co/OObRoCbeOA pic.twitter.com/EFzvTeqITS

— Nonesuch Records (@NonesuchRecords) 27 de janeiro de 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

Brad Mehldau Trio: Blues and Ballads

Brad Mehldau Trio: Blues and Ballads https://t.co/9Ff6G2p97g #BradMehldau pic.twitter.com/z4YblU75nb

— Jazz Music News (@mhq_jazz) 13 de agosto de 2016

Jazz icons #JoshuaRedman and #BradMehldau

Jazz icons Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau essay Nearness on new live duo recordings from @NonesuchRecords https://t.co/F1m6XevaxF pic.twitter.com/vNUmaQs8JW

— Culture on RTÉ (@RTE_Culture) 6 de novembro de 2016

@DownBeatMag reviews #BradMehldau

.@DownBeatMag reviews @BradMehldau's performances of his album #HighwayRider—"a towering achievement"—at @SFJAZZ https://t.co/dCdmz2liRK pic.twitter.com/UrK8JsOzv8

— Nonesuch Records (@NonesuchRecords) October 13, 2016

Brad Mehldau

The first cut on side 5. How do you follow that?!

Brad Mehldau. Solo https://t.co/ZmcGIptevb

— Jazzaholic (@Jazzaholic1) June 18, 2016

Brad Mehldau and Chris Thile team up for elegant, beautiful music

By Michael J. West, Published: April 13
Brad Mehldau and Chris Thile both play music in which technical virtuosity is front and center. The former is a jazz pianist, easily the most influential of his generation; the latter, an innovator of the bluegrass mandolin who won a MacArthur “genius” award last year. So their duo performance Friday night at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center was an achievement in itself. Their complex work translated to plain-faced beauty: simple, direct and exquisite.

(Michael Wilson) - Brad Mehldau

That’s not to diminish either man’s abilities or expression thereof. Nothing could diminish the delicate grace of Thile’s mandolin solo on Joni Mitchell’s “Marcie” or the two-handed classically steeped chords with which Mehldau followed it. And what’s to undercut the glory of a bebop duet? Specifically, a duet on Charlie Parker’s “Dexterity,” whose name says it all; Mehldau gave it one of the most soulful readings he’s ever been known to play — everyone who’s accused him of lacking soul should hear this — and Thile threw every trick he had into his improvisation. And that’s without getting into the intricacies of the Celtic and Appalachian pastiches they worked through.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/brad-mehldau-and-chris-thile-team-up-for-elegant-beautiful-music/2013/04/13/4f2a5e76-a3e8-11e2-bd52-614156372695_story.html?wprss=rss_music

Brad Mehldau Trio - O Que Será?

Jazz Festival Vitoria-Gasteiz 2006
Brad Mehldau - piano
Larry Grenadier - bass
Jeff Ballard - drums

Brad Mehldau: Beyond The Boundaries Of Jazz

by Jeff Lunden
Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau likes crossing borders. He's improvised to Beatles songs and Joni Mitchell tunes, he's written art songs for operatic soprano Renee Fleming, and now, with his new double album Highway Rider, he's created a large-scale work for chamber orchestra and jazz ensemble.

You could say that all jazz is theme and variations — you take a tune like George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me," and then the musicians improvise variations based on the chord progression. For Highway Rider, Mehldau says he wanted to tackle theme and variations in a really big way, by starting with something really small: a short musical idea.

"That's sort of a two-part theme," Mehldau says, demonstrating by playing on a piano. "It's got one thing and then a reply to it. And that generates a lot of the melodic material on the record — and also, in a different way, it generates tonal relationships on the record."

An Extra-Musical Effect
All of the 15 songs on the double album come, to a greater or lesser degree, from that one tiny musical motif.
"Sometimes it's more overt," Mehldau says. In the song "Capriccio," he adds, the simple opening melody is put in a different rhythmic context. It turns into a wistful jazz waltz or morphs into a gnarly urban soundscape. Mehldau says that, for him, all of this musical transformation has a kind of extra-musical effect.
"There is this narrative that I feel and that I was thinking about the more I wrote it, of traveling and leaving and coming back," he says. Pop musician Jon Brion, who produced the album, says he admires Mehldau's creative wanderings.

"I just like the fact that he keeps changing it up, and I think that this is just another example of that," Brion says. "Some people may not be a fan of tense harmony and go, 'What is he doing?' Some people may go, 'Wait, I wanted a bunch of piano solos. What's this, you know, 20th-century classical-influenced jazz-merging craziness?' And some people may just hear it as sublime and go, 'Why doesn't he do that all the time?' "

A Broader Sonic Palette
Mehldau has stretched his sonic palette on Highway Rider to include a chamber orchestra with strings, horns and contrabassoon. He says this unorthodox group of instruments gave him interesting colors with which to play. "So it's kind of a dark sound," Mehldau says, "which I think I just love in a lot of music I listen to: this dark, reedy, rich bass."

In a higher register, playing the role of musical protagonist, is Joshua Redman on sax. He and Mehldau have been friends and musical colleagues since the early 1990s. Redman says that, as ambitious as Highway Rider is, there's one thing that always strikes him about Mehldau's compositions.

"His music just grooves," Redman says. "I mean, for all the complexity and all the harmonic rigor and all the technical prowess and all the lyricism, beneath it all is this incredible groove. His feel is unassailable. He has the best groove on the planet."

Carnegie Hall just announced that Brad Mehldau will be its composer-in-residence next season, and that Highway Rider will be performed live in its Zankel Hall.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124542231&sc=nl&cc=jn-20100321