Brad Mehldau

Brad Mehldau – Variations on a Melancholy Theme (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 34:07 minutes | 659 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nonesuch

Brad Mehldau’s Variations on a Melancholy Theme will be released June 11, 2021, on Nonesuch Records. The recording features the pianist/composer and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which 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.’” You can watch a video with excerpts from the piece below. (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.”
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Brad Mehldau – Suite: April 2020 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 40:21 minutes | 744 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nonesuch

While sheltering at home with his family in the Netherlands during the COVID-19 pandemic, Brad Mehldau wrote 12 new songs about what he was experiencing; he was able to record them safely in an Amsterdam studio, along with tunes by Neil Young, Billy Joel, and Jerome Kern, for the album ‘Suite: April 2020.
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Brad Mehldau – Finding Gabriel (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 55:37 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Nonesuch

Brad Mehldau’s new album, Finding Gabriel, is out next Friday, May 17, but you don’t need to wait till then to hear it: the album is streaming in full all week as an NPR First Listen at npr.org/firstlisten. The album includes 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.
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Brad Mehldau – After Bach (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:21 minutes | 1,31 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Nonesuch

Without being a mandatory baptism of fire, Jean-Sébastien Bach has always been a captivating magnet for many jazz musicians. So much so that people like Jacques Loussier, Keith Jarrett, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dan Tepfer or Edouard Ferlet to name but a handful, all tackled head on, and for good reason, the work of the Cantor of Leipzig . The choice made by Brad Mehldau is a hybrid. The American pianist does not create here a jazz album strictly speaking – fans of “Jazzy Bach” can go home straight away – but he mixes themes of Bach – four preludes and a fugue – to personal and contemporary pieces; as intriguing answers or mirror games to original works.
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Brad Mehldau – 10 Years Solo Live (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 05:05:22 minutes | 2,78 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Nonesuch

Exquisite 32-track live collection from the US jazz pianist, recorded over a decade! Includes original compositions, as well as material from John Coltrane, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens, Thelonious Monk, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Nirvana & more.
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Brad Mehldau – Jacob’s Ladder (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:13 minutes | 1,53 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nonesuch

He never snubbed the music of his time, quite the contrary, and often shed the clothes of a worthy heir to Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett that he was put on in his early days. But with Jacob’s Ladder, Brad Mehldau signs perhaps one of his most … atypical projects? A kind of trip to the land of progressive rock, mixed with a divine quest, this album is first of all a peek into retro. During those years when the young Mehldau was gorging on prog’ listening to Rush and other Emerson, Lake and Palmer records on a loop. “Progressive rock is the music of my childhood, before I discovered jazz. It matched the fantasy and SF books I had read by C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle and many others, when I was 10, 12 years old. It was my gateway to the fusion of Miles Davis, Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra which, in turn, was the gateway to more jazz… Here, the prog’ of Rush, Gentle Giant and Emerson, Lake and Palmer only hints at the conceptual, compositional and emotional range of the genre. These and many other bands have continued to influence new bands that bring progressive impulses in hard rock and math metal, such as Periphery, whose music is included here, and who also inspired the angry voice on the track Herr und Knecht. »
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