BRAD MEHLDAU TRIO
Day Is Done
Nonesuch
· Nearly psychic trio goes where the songs are.
Since the demise of Tin Pan Alley, jazz musicians have searched for successors to Ellington and Gershwin who have durable songbooks that reward improvisation. Candidates such as Elvis Costello and Tom Waits have been investigated with middling success, suggesting the songs themselves don’t have enough melodic heft, or revealing such choices as creative slumming. On the other hand, the Brad Mehldau Trio’s catalogue suggests that Mehldau, bassist Larry Grenadier, and new drummer Jeff Ballard truly consider Nick Drake, latter-day Lennon & McCartney (favouring Paul McCartney), and the collective members of Radiohead to be the finest composers of their generation.
After Mehldau stretched the definition of a contemporary jazz album on 2002’s Largo with producer Jon Brion (predating Brion’s odd coupling with Kanye West), followup Anything Goes appeared to be a retreat to (mostly) standards, but all three contemporary sources are explored here. "Martha My Dear" gets a cubist makeover and Drake’s title song extrapolates Drake’s jazzy delivery, while the trio’s muscular take on "Knives Out" relocates the melody Radiohead threatened to bury on Amnesiac. Like the ’60s John Coltrane quartets Mehldau hold in high regard, the Brad Mehldau Trio inhabit a song only to transform it.
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