“… the most influential jazz pianist of the last 20 years.” (The New York Times) Grammy Award-winning jazz pianist Brad Mehldau has been called “a renaissance artist at the height of his powers” (BBC) and “the greatest working jazz pianist” (The New Yorker). He is first and foremost an improviser but also has a deep fascination for the formal architecture of music, with the structure of his musical thought serving as an expressive device.

He has worked alongside several great jazz artists, including Joshua Redman, Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden, Michael Brecker, Wayne Shorter, John Scofield, and Charles Lloyd, among others. For more than a decade, he has collaborated with numerous musicians and peers such as the guitarists Peter Bernstein and Kurt Rosenwinkel, and tenor saxophonist Mark Turner. Mehldau also has played on a number of recordings outside of the jazz idiom, like Willie Nelson’s Teatro and singer-songwriter Joe Henry’s Scar. His music has appeared in several movies, including Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Wim Wender’s Million Dollar Hotel. 

For his return to Koerner Hall, Mehldau performs an evening of solo piano, including a new work which was commissioned by The Royal Conservatory,  Wigmore Hall (London), Cal Performances (UC Berkeley), and Carnegie Hall. In this newly commissioned work, Fourteen Reveries, Mehldau reflects on the interior experience that we create from our own consciousness, independently of others. Written from a similar impulse as his Suite: April 2020, 14 Reveries is a meditation on the space a composer leaves between specific directions that lets the beauty of the music reveal itself, while still allowing new discovery. The second half of the concert will include selections from his album Suite: April 2020 and further works to be announced from the stage.laurie

Program:

Brad Mehldau: Fourteen Reveries (Canadian premiere)

Co-commissioned by Wigmore Hall, Cal Performances at University of California, Berkeley, 21C Music Festival at The Royal Conservatory and Carnegie Hall.

Brad Mehldau: “L.A. Pastorale”

Brad Mehldau: Selections from Suite: April 2020

      I. waking up

      II. stepping outside

      III. keeping distance

      IV. stopping, listening: hearing

      V. remembering before all this

      VI. uncertainty

      VII. - the day moves by -

      IX. waiting

      X. in the kitchen

      XII. lullaby  

Songs from Elliot Smith, Radiohead, and others to be announced from stage

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