CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
"Chock" Award 1999 - Le Monde de la Musique - Elegiac Cycle
New Star of 1998 - Swing Journal Disc Award (Japan)
Best Jazz Album of the Year 1998: Songs - Jazzman magazine (France)
Best Foreign Musician of the Year - D'Jango d'Or 98 (France)
#1 Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition Acoustic Jazz Piano - 1997 & 1998 Down Beat Critics Poll
# Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition Acoustic Jazz Group - 1998 Down Beat Critics Poll
The Best CD of 1997 - Academie du Jazz (France)
1997 Grammy Nominee - Best Jazz Instrumental Solo
1997 UPI Top 10 - Art of The Trio, Vol.1 - Jazz Album of the Year
Best New Artist of 1997 - Jazz Times Readers Poll
Best New Talent of 1997 - Musica Jazz Critics Poll (Italy)
Debut Artist of the Year 1997 - New York Jazz Awards

Brad Mehldau, like many of his contemporaries, began his career with heavy classical training, long before he was exposed to jazz. He started experimenting with the piano when he was just four and began taking lessons when he was six, continuing until he was fourteen. As a youngster he listened more to rock than jazz. Brad continued his education at the prestigious New School For Social Research in Manhattan as part of the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program. There he studied with such notable jazz pianists as Junior Mance, Kenny Werner and Fred Hersch. Brad's first major international exposure came as a member of the Joshua Redman Quartet, with which he recorded MoodSwing and toured the US and Europe for a year and a half.

In 1995 Brad released his debut album as a leader for Warner Bros. Records, appropriately titled, Introducing Brad Mehldau. Of that recording the Chicago Tribune observed that it was "...a recording that achieves its most vivid moment when Mehldau is playing original compositions. The elliptical lines, volatile rhythmic figures and unexpected bursts of color and dissonance... prove that Mehldau writes as cleverly as he plays. The originality of these compositions is startling to behold."

Brad's second Warner album, The Art of The Trio, Volume One, was released in February 1997 to almost instant critical acclaim. At his Village Vanguard debut, coinciding with the release of the album, The New York Times commented, "Mr. Mehldau, who spent most of the hour with eyes closed and head crooked into his chest like a sleeping bird, reached into the subconscious and took the songs at a run, rearranging all the accents of the melodies; his song-like improvisations took off from those jumbled rhythms."

Brad's classical training informs more than just his astonishing technique. Speaking of "Young Werther", a composition on Introducing, he observed: "That came about as a result of studying a lot of the contrapuntal aspects of classical music. I tried to get away from just a one-note melody and a chord under it, and tried to explore the relationships between several notes moving independently. The whole tune is based on four notes in different configurations. The idea of generating a whole composition from a small amount of thematic material is very alluring to me, and resulted from studying the compositions of great classical composers like Beethoven and Brahms. After completing the composition, I realized that I had unconsciously taken the four-note motif from a Brahms Piano Capriccio."

In addition to Brahms, Mehldau also cites the influence of Schubert, Beethoven and Schumann; on the jazz side, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett round out the list with Miles Davis and John Coltrane getting more than a nod for their contribution to his musical philosophy.

With the release in early 1998 of his third Warner Bros. album (as a leader), Live At The Village Vanguard: The Art of The Trio, Volume Two, Brad Mehldau spent most of the year touring extensively throughout the US and Europe with his trio of Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy, while finding time to record with Willie Nelson and record and tour briefly once again with Joshua Redman.

His next trio instalment, released in September of '98 to great critical acclaim, was Songs: The Art of The Trio, Volume Three. As the New Statesman of London cogently observed, "From moment to moment his playing suggests nearly every part of the jazz tradition, as well as unsettling corners of twentieth century compositions, even rock - his new record, Songs: the Art of the Trio, Volume Three, includes surprisingly genuine covers of Nick Drake's 'River Man' and Radiohead's 'Exit Music (for a Film)', which comes out sounding like Beethoven." Stereophile said of this recording, "Brad Mehldau doesn't merely conceptualize - he emotes with yearning melancholy and rapturous ecstasy. When he plays, embers glow, then burst into flame."

Elegiac Cycle, Brad's exploration of solo piano released in the spring of '99 inspired Time Magazine to write, "Mehldau achieves an almost spiritual resonance, chords echoing like ames." The atmospheric and classically-infused jazz of Elegiac Cycle comprises nine beautifully mysterious and emotionally complex Mehldau-composed elegies.

Now with Art Of the Trio 4: Back At The Vanguard, Brad revisits the trio configuration with his cohorts Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy. The album includes three Mehldau originals, "Nice Pass", "London Blues" and a live version of "Sehnsucht" previously recorded in-studio on Songs: The Art Of The Trio, Volume Three. Another reprise from Songs, the both brooding and lively, "Exit Music (For A Film)" by Radiohead, is even more intesely enjoyable than it was the first time around. Three delightfully disquieting classics complete the albums seven compositions: "All The Things You Are" (Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II), "I'll Be Seeing You" (Irving Kahal/Sammy Fain), and Miles Davis' "Solar".

Brad is also the subject of a just-released French documentary entitled Jazz Collection: Brad Mehldau, and his performance of the lead track from Art Of The Trio, Vol. 1, "Blame It On My Youth" (Oscra Levant/Edward Hayman), is featured in the film "Eyes Wide Shut" and its companion soundtrack on Warner Sunset.

DISCOGRAPHY

As Leader
Elegiac Cycle (Warner Bros. 47357)
Art of the Trio Volume 3 - Songs (Warner Bros. 47051)
Art of the Trio: Volume 2 - Live at the Village Vanguard (Warner Bros. 46848)
Art of the Trio: Volume 1 (Warner Bros. 46260)
Introducing Brad Mehldau (Warner Bros. 45997)

As Sideman
Timeless Tales - Joshua Redman Quartet (Warner Bros. 47052)
In This World - Mark Turner (Warner Bros. 47074)
Teatro - Williw Nelson (Island 314524548)
12 Bar Blues - Scott Weiland (Atlantic)
Moodswing - Joshua Redman Quartet (Warner Bros. 45643)
Alone Together - Lee Konitz/Charlie Haden (Blue Note 57150)
Warner Jams, Volume One (Warner Bros. 45919)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Soundtrack (Warner Bros. 46829)
Warner Bros. Jazz Christmas Party (Warner Bros. 46793)

February 2000

Biography courtesy of Warner Bros. Records